I tried it a while ago - I was in medium shape and worked out occasionally, but not regularly. I made it about a month and a few days.
The two big things that did me in were
[ul]
[li]It was incredibly boring. To me, 6 different kinds of pushups are still just pushups. It didn’t feel like there was any variety. Just a lot of repetition of the same, very small number of exercise. Someone else might not feel that way. [/li][li]I found the guy really annoying. A month of him was more than enough. I couldn’t go one more day. Again, MMV, many many people find him motivating.[/li][/ul]
The one general piece of advice. I think that yoga is good in theory, I think the P90X yoga is awful (not well cued, questionable alignment, poor explanations). You may want to find a different (equally challenging, but better) yoga dvd for the yoga workouts.
Repeating sets of exercises is what I’m used to with past strength training, so I don’t mind that aspect very much. I do find the particular P90X DVDs that repeat whole sets of routines to be less interesting than the ones that do not, however.
Tony is very annoying. He’s an idiot, and he shows a very childish narcissism. I don’t find him motivating, but I still had a lot of success with P90X. (After three times through, you wind up having memorized all the banter. My wife and I still laugh whenever Tony talks about keeping your core muscles “taunt.”)
We never did the yoga. There are some yoga segments in some of the DVDs, and we would initially do those, but now we just skip by them. I’ve never done any other yoga, but knowing Tony’s style, I have no doubt believing that these are not well cued with poor explanations.
Form, form, form.
Use proper form…I can’t stress that enough. It *will *be uncomfortable, but it’s supposed to be. Of course, everything else matters, but you’re largely wasting your time if your form is off (add to the fact that you want to avoid injury).
Second to that, keep at it, and set goals. The vast majority of exercise efforts are mental, and if you can combine these last two and effectively meet them, it’s a huge confidence boost (which then reinforces itself).
Also, I wouldn’t stress before/after photos too much. They’re cool to look at, but people have different biology, habits, diets, etc. Over time, you will realize changes, and that will become its own motivator.
Bet you guys didn’t think that I’d update this, huh?
Status report:
I’m about two weeks into the program, and I’ve been noticing some pretty sweet results. For one thing, I’ve already lost about ten pounds (I’d been hovering between 165-170 for the past few years, and now I’m back to 155), and I’ve got some slight - and I do mean slight - definition in my abs for (basically) the first time in my entire life.
I still haven’t actually done the yoga workout; on the days that that’s popped up, I’ve swapped it out and done the cardio DVD instead. Honestly, I just have no desire to do yoga, but maybe I’ll try it next week just to see what it’s all about.
As for the diet, well, let me just say that the nutrition guide IS helpful, but I’m not exactly following it verbatim. Just out of convenience, really, I’m approaching it more from the perspective of a poster above, in that I’m doing calorie reduction with a very specific set of foods. I’ve essentially been eating a lot of oatmeal, cheerios, turkey bacon/jerky, chicken breasts, cashews, a little whole wheat bread, etc. In terms of drinks, most of the liquids I’ve been consuming has been either water or skim milk, although I have snuck in a Vitamin Water here and there. Also, after the really intensive workouts (the ones which deal with all the pull ups and curls) I’ve been downing a whey protein mixture, which, even though it tastes like shit, seems to be what I should be doing.
So what do you guys think? Should I do the yoga routine? Most of all, what’s the verdict on my dieting?
Yoga was probably the hardest DVD for me. It’s amazing how sore you can be after just standing still. That one is (IIRC) well over an hour, but I don’t think I ever made it more then 20 minutes in before a combination of fatigue and boredom kicked in. And I always felt like I got my ass kicked the next day.
It wasn’t like real yoga - it’s like push-ups wrapped in a bunch of vinyasas.
If you do it, you may find it super hard for the first bit, then they move to the balance exercises and it’s easy.
Yeah, I’m going back and forth in my mind about whether I really want to do the yoga. On the whole, it just seems kind of pointless to me.
I’m probably going to get a tub of Creatine and add that to the workout routine. I hope that’ll help speed things along.
I wish I had cared about physical fitness at 21.
What you choose to do is really all about your goals. But I would suggest looking into Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe–it’s old school powerlifting stuff (squats, bench press, overhead press, power cleans and deadlifts). It will absolutely add some muscle to your ass (literally an figuratively) and make you much stronger.
After doing that, if you want to have that “ripped” look, you can lean down doing something like P90X, but you will absolutely get weaker as well. And you may find that you just like being strong and are OK with how you look after Starting Strength–I sure am.
Just finished week 3; gonna start week 4 on Thursday.
I still haven’t done the yoga, and at this point I don’t think I’m actually going to do it. Given that next week is the week where everything gets switched up - with two or three days of yoga - I think what I’m going to do now is just do the Plyometrics workout on yoga days. For the past three weeks I’ve been substituting the Cardio X workout for yoga - and don’t get me wrong, the former DVD is fine as a mid-level routine - but Cardio X doesn’t give me nearly as much of a burn as the Plyometrics workout, which always knocks me on my ass. Hell, I’m almost tempted to swap the Kenpo X DVD for Plyo as well, given that I’ve found the kenpo routine to just be really, really silly in a lot of ways.
Insofar as progress goes, the one thing in which I’ve noticed quite a bit of practical improvement is the ab workout, which, when I first started this thing, I really struggled to keep up with; now, I’m really starting to own the ab workout, and even though it’s not really showing visually yet, I’m certainly noticing it in the actual routine.
Same diet as before, really, only now I’m taking some Creatine everyday. I know that phase 2 calls for the diet to be altered a bit, so we’ll see if I make any adjustments down the line.
I did my last exercise of P90X round one today. I’m going to begin another round in a few days, though it’ll be slightly more complicated now that I’m back at school. I didn’t take any before/after shots, unfortunately, but I can give you the cliff-notes version of my physical improvements. In short:
-My chest/pecs are pretty well developed. Not bad for a program that consists entirely of pushups.
-My back muscles are ripped. I went from only being able to manage 6-8 pullups to now doing 15-17.
-Triceps are more defined and biceps are bigger. I’ve always had big biceps, but this program got 'em into even better shape.
-Shoulder muscles are HUGE now. I’d say the biggest physical difference came from my ballooning shoulder muscles.
-And oh yeah, I’ve got six pack abs now. Awesome feeling having those.
The results I’ve taken from P90X weren’t quite as extraordinary as the infomercial or the booklet would have you believe, but I can honestly say that they have been very real and very noticeable.
So all in all, amazing program.
I’m kind of interested in starting with Power 90 and working my way to P90X.
I live in an apartment - am I going to make a ton of noise jumping up and down? My neighbors are kind of old and like it quiet (which is usually great for me because I like it quiet as well).
Didn’t think I would update this again, but…
Alright, well, I stopped doing P90x back in September, not because I wanted to but because I had absolutely no time in my days (between my school & work schedules) to continue doing it. Since then, I’ve lost a lot (but not all) of the gains that I made via the original program. I mean, my six pack is effectively gone, though in the right light you can still kinda see an outline of it; moreover, I’ve put on additional 15 lbs. and am now hovering at ~155 lbs. after hitting 140 lbs. during P90x. Keep in mind, though, that given my height (5 ft. 8 in.) I’m still a comparatively slender guy in spite of all these losses.
Still, I’m desperate to get back into the swing of things. Ideally, I would just do another round of P90x, but given that I know I will have absolutely no time to invest into that program as soon as my next semester starts, I realized that I would need a routine that was far shorter if I want to continue everything past my winter break from school.
I almost went ahead and got T25, but that program in general seemed less than ideal to me because it’s essentially 100% cardio based (and I really prefer to have resistance training in any kind of routine that I do). So with that in mind, I just went ahead and got P90x3. All of the workouts are cut down to 30 minutes, so that should be far more manageable to me going forward.
Not only that, but I got such amazing results out of P90x that I’m reticent to try anything else that isn’t under the same banner. Plus, I like Tony Horton more than the Insanity dude who leads the T25 routines.
P90x3 is such a new program (that just released in mid-December, apparently) that there aren’t any independent reviews of it aside from the official Beachbody material. I’ll probably end up getting it in the mail mid-week so I’ll start by next weekend, and I’ll keep this thread updated once again as I progress through the program.
As far as the dieting is concerned, I can say up front that I’ll be doing it slightly modified. Basically, I’ll stick to the all chicken cutlets and shit, but I’m gonna allow myself to fucking drink coffee and the occasional beer. It absolutely SUCKED having to remove those things from my diet the first time around.
You really shouldn’t. One of your goals is to make your landings as soft as possible. If the people downstairs can hear you, you’re going to wear out your knees in a hurry.
Im just curious, why no coffee on the P-90X diet? That seems counterintuitive as caffeine can have several benefits for the training athlete