Tag: Tony Horton

Posted on

How “in shape” do I really need to be?

Yesterday, Day 21 of The Asylum, was “Back to Core” again. Nothing exciting to report there, except that my lower right back pain is a bit more noticeable than usual today. This is a dull pain that is kinda like a bruise, in that it only hurts when I move a certain way, and it’s more annoying than actually painful. That pain has been there for about 18 months now — I first noticed it about 4 weeks into P90X — so I don’t worry too much about it, hoping someday it’ll just disappear.

Today, on Day 22, I have come to only the second (and last) “Rest” day of The Asylum. This day of rest has me thinking seriously about my relationship with this type of training program. Why do I do it? Will I continue with future volumes of The Asylum? (I assume there will be future volumes, because this one is called “Volume 1”.)

Shaun T's AsylumIt was pretty obvious to me from the first few days of The Asylum that this program is made for people who want to be in top shape. Of course, I would have thought the same thing about Insanity — in fact, I did think it, when Month 2 of that program started — but that program was primarily aerobics with a little bit of strength training. The Asylum, on the other hand, is more about sports skill development, and really — once you are already in Insanity shape — pushing the envelope of what your body can endure.

In all honesty, now that I think about it, this program would not be so difficult if there were more rest days. Pushing, pushing, pushing, every day, resting every three or four or five days — that’s rough for a desk jockey. Even an in-shape desk jockey. But, then, I think that is part of the point of The Asylum.

Whatever. That may be what professional athletes need to do. Keep pushing, even in the face of extreme fatigue. It is not, however, what I need to do.

The other side of the coin is that I had entered The Asylum, hoping that it would help melt away those last 10 pounds of gut fat. That is not happening. I am beginning to wonder if anything short of starvation would make that stuff go away. I’m eating right, exercising like a demon, but still it persists.

Having said all that … hell, yeah, I will continue with future volumes of The Asylum!

I just get too much of a sense of accomplishment from going through these programs. When I completed  P90X, I really felt as if I had done something meaningful for myself. Same with completing  Insanity.

When I complete The Asylum, I don’t think it will be the same feeling. It will be more of a sense of having survived something that few can endure, and being better for it. I mean, I’m in the best shape of my life, so I’m going to keep pushing my body to the limit.

When I complete this program, and after a well-deserved week off — actually, it’ll be about a week and a half of yoga and light aerobics — I’ll get into a hybrid of some sort, and start gearing myself up for P90X2, which should arrive in December. I already have a bit of an idea what P90X2 is about, because I subscribed to the One-On-One Volume 3 series, where Tony Horton tested out the routines that would become P90X2, so I’m pretty stoked to get around to using exercise balls, getting more balancing and core work in, and developing strength and more all-around fitness with Tony.

Yeah. This is all good.

I guess the answer to how “in shape” I need to be, is simply as good a shape as I am willing to push my body through. Not done yet!

Posted on

My P90X – One On One – Insanity hybrid

After completing Insanity about a month ago, I felt great and ready to go into a hybrid of that program and Tony Horton’s P90X. However, when I scoured the internet for such a program, they all looked pretty much alike and rather uninspired.

Plus, I knew I wanted to include some of Tony’s One-On-One routines in my hybrid.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 4 weeks, creating my own hybrid. As it happens, I ended up with no P90X routines, so really it’s an Insanity / One-On-One hybrid, but it turned out nice.

It goes like this:

  • Day 1 – Steve’s 30/15 (based on One-On-One 30/15)
  • Day 2 – Plyometric Cardio Circuit + Cardio Abs from Insanity
  • Day 3 – Steve’s Shoulders & Legs (based on One-On-One Diamond Delts & Plyo Legs)
  • Day 4 – Pure Cardio + Cardio Abs from Insanity
  • Day 5 – Base & Back from One-On-One
  • Day 6 – Fountain of Youth Yoga from One-On-One
  • Day 7 – OFF
  • Day 8 – Pure Cardio + Cardio Abs from Insanity
  • Day 9 – Steve’s 30/15 (based on One-On-One 30/15)
  • Day 10 – Plyometric Cardio Circuit from Insanity
  • Day 11 – Steve’s Shoulders & Legs (based on One-On-One Diamond Delts & Plyo Legs)
  • Day 12 – Cardio Power & Resistance + Cardio Abs from Insanity
  • Day 13 – Patience/Hummingbird Yoga from One-On-One
  • Day 14 – OFF

Days 15-28: Repeat the above.

All in all, I am very happy with the program. I’m going to take a week off to recover, doing yoga and Core Cardio & Balance from Insanity, then I’ll do another 4 weeks of the above.

If you want to try it out, you’ll need some of the Insanity and One-On-One DVDs, and you can download my Excel worksheets (in PDF format) for the non-cardio / non-yoga days here: Worksheets For One-On-One-Insanity Hybrid (PDF).

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Posted on

P90X: A Lifetime Commitment?

A friend of mine told me the other day that she was interested in Tony Horton’s P90X, but didn’t want to be stuck doing it for the rest of her life.

I laughed, because those are almost the exact words I said to my brother when he was trying to get me into P90X. I wanted to be in better shape, but I didn’t want to commit my life to it, ya know? I have other things to do besides spending all my time working out.

Having been through the program a couple times, and now nearing the end of Insanity, I was able to tell my friend in all sincerity, “You won’t be stuck doing it for the rest of your life. But you will be so impressed with the results, you will want to do it for the rest of your life.”

And that is a fact, or, at least, that’s how it worked for me.

P90X is a very well thought-out program. As I was going through it the first time, I noted that the exercises flowed well together, the routines were well-placed, the recovery days came at just the right time.

In addition to the exercises, though, along with P90X you get:

1. A Nutrition Guide. This is very important, because you truly are what you eat. Exercise is great for toning and building muscle and other parts of your body, like your brain and skeleton, but when it comes to losing fat, you will have a hard time doing that without watching what you eat.

This is not as restrictive as it seems. I went on a 50% protein, 30% carb, 20% fat diet the day I started P90X, and in order to consume all the calories I needed, I had to add protein shakes!

Here is a calorie calculator that is pretty cool, if you want to see how many calories you’ll need to consume: http://bit.ly/l41F21. Select “5 times/week (intense)” for exercise your level.

You’ll see this is no 1200-calorie/day diet. You need the extra calories to allow you to “bring it” during the workouts.

2. A life-after-P90X plan. This the part that really impressed me as I read it before I started the program. I knew I didn’t want to be Mr. Gym Rat. I wanted to get fit, then maintain what I had, not necessarily keep growing muscle and getting fitter.

The Life-After-P90X plan includes a workout schedule that is very much toned down, but still allows you to keep 80% of what you’ve gained from P90X. Should you do another iteration of the full program from time to time? Sure.

But here’s the key: You will want to.

My body was in so much better shape after just 4 weeks of P90X, I had no doubt that I would keep doing this, or something like this, for the rest of my life.

So, is P90X a lifetime commitment? It doesn’t have to be … but, if your experience is the same as mine, you’ll want it to be.

Posted on

How many reps should you do in P90X?

When I started Tony Horton’s P90X, one of the first decisions to make was whether to go for larger muscles or simply toned muscles. Tony would repeat over and over: 8-10 reps for mass or 12-15 reps for lean.

I have no desire to look like Tony Horton. He’s very muscular, has a bodybuilder’s body, and that’s just not me. But, hell, I could stand for my muscles to be a bit larger, so I decided to go the route most men take through P90X and shoot for 8 to 10 reps of each move.

To explain a bit more, the idea is to adjust the weight you use to work properly for the number of reps. That is, regardless of how many reps you do, the last two or three should be difficult. So if you’re shooting for 8-10 reps, you should be struggling on reps 7, 8, and 9. If you are not, you need to increase the weight.

Tony never gets into the lower rep side of things, probably because he is a bodybuilder, not a powerlifter, but you should know that HEAVY WEIGHT + LOW REPS = STRENGTH! You won’t necessarily get the muscle size, but your strength will increase dramatically with this approach.

Here, then, is a quick rundown on the whole number of reps concept. Tom Venuto includes this information in his article on his website.

  • If you are trying to improve strength, then most of your weight training will be in the 3 to 5 rep range. You may even do some 1 and 2 rep moves. This will make you stronger and faster without bulking you up.
  • Bodybuilders work on muscle mass, so most of your training will be in the 8 to 10 rep range. Doing some heavier weight training at lower reps makes sense, too, because you may not want to simply look strong.
  • To tone up, you should work in the 12-15 rep range. This is also useful for bodybuilders, to smooth things out.

I spend most of my time doing 8-10 reps. When doing body weight exercises, like pushups, I do as many as possible, so I have the high-rep end covered.

I have not, however, done anything in the lower rep range, and it seems to me I need to do that, so I’m going to try to work that into my workouts starting after this current recovery week.

Remember that fitness is not just finding one thing and doing that. That’s a good start, but fitness is really a lifelong commitment that involves reading and learning and implementing new techniques to stay as fit as possible.

So be sure to determine your fitness goals and then make an informed decision about how many reps to do based on those goals.

Posted on

Cardio — how much do we need?

How much cardio is enough to get your heart and lungs functioning as efficiently as possible? Hmmmm…. There are only two cardio days per week in Tony Horton’s P90X — Plyo and Kenpo, with the option to throw Cardio X into the mix if you like — but I had always heard that three times a week is the minimum to achieve at least minimal fitness. So is two times a week enough to build my heart and lungs?

I have, in my quest for fitness, read various things about cardio, and, while I can’t remember where I saw this, the following rings truest.

You are born with your heart a certain size. You are born with your lungs a certain size. They grow with your body, but you cannot manipulate them to be larger, i.e. working out does not make your heart and lungs grow, thereby making you more fit.

This makes sense to me. The heart and lungs are situated in your chest, behind ribs, so how can they get larger without banging into ribs. That can’t be right. This also helps me understand the phenomenon that I hear about every so often where an athlete is suffering from an “enlarged heart.” I had often wondered, “Isn’t that good? Wouldn’t we expect athletes to have enlarged hearts?”

If that is true, if your heart and lungs are what they are, how do we make them more efficient? I mean, they are getting more efficient as we work on our fitness, right? It is obvious without even formal measurement that, if we do P90X, we get better at Plyo and can go harder in Kenpo. If our heart and lungs are not growing, what’s going on?

You’ve probably guessed it: The muscles we use to do Plyo and Kenpo are getting better at doing those moves. This puts less stress on our heart and lungs, because with more efficient muscles, the heart and lungs can work less to feed them. This results in what we perceive to be improved functioning of our cardiovascular system. Sure, those activities are enhanced by our fitness, but what’s really happening is that our muscles are really the pieces of the system that are improved, so everything else that works to make them function works more efficiently, too.

And that is why the muscle confusion that Tony Horton stresses in P90X and One-On-One is so important. We have to do a variety of moves to achieve overall fitness. People who run all the time get really good at running, because their muscles are accustomed to the moves that occur when running, but when they are asked to do other things ….

I have personal anecdotal evidence of just this phenomenon.

When I was in the Air Force, we used to have to run 1.5 miles in a certain amount of time to pass our annual fitness test. Many of us, then, would run to stay in shape. Well, one year, someone higher up the chain of command came up with the idea to use bicycle fitness tests instead of making everyone run. They’d hook us up with a heart rate monitor and measure our pulse as we pedaled and the tester increased the tension on the stationary bike.

Many of us still passed the test, but there were a few runners who, for some reason, just could not. One guy — not the top runner among us, but up there — was a stand out. Everyone knew he was in shape. Just look at him! And he was still running, competing in half-marathons. Competing, mind you, not just completing. But he couldn’t pass the bike test.

He was really good at running. His muscles were used to those movements. But the bike test, not so much.

So you know what he did? He added some bicycling into his fitness routine. And you know what happened? After three months he passed his fitness test.

So, back to the original question: How much cardio we need to increase the efficiency of our hearts and lungs. Hmmmm…. Isn’t it obvious? If all this is true, and it seems to make sense, we don’t need any cardio to do that. We just need to build the muscles that we’ll be working, increase their efficiency, and the heart and lungs will work more efficiently, too.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t need cardio at all, because cardio does seem to, at the very least, improve brain function and lower stress levels, so gotta have that cardio. And if your goal is to be great at running, then, yeah run, run, run. But if you are shooting for general fitness, don’t forget to mix it up.