P90X

ImTheCaptain said:

wait, what? prime is free for people w/ an .edu address?

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Sadly, I think they've reduced it to 6 months of free Prime. I signed up with my girlfriend's .edu address on my existing account. IIRC it was a year or two at that time. I'm going to be sad when it runs out.

I just checked the terms and conditions on my account and I was able to get free Prime for 1 year when I signed up last June with a .edu email.

tsywake said:

DCDeac, what was your weight when you began/ended P90x. Were you doing it mainly to get toned up, or lose weight?

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Actually I never really worried about my weight, and I don't own a scale so I didn't track it. Just wanted to get in better shape overall. I was getting my MBA part time with a full time job and had really fallen off the wagon as far as working out was concerned so I needed something to do at home on my own schedule. I'd heard p90x was legit so I figured why not.

If I had to guess I probably started out at 200-205 (I'm 6'2") and probably ended up at 190-195. Went from a 35" waist to a 34". Nothing too drastic overall, but performance wise it was night-and-day, and I certainly looked and felt a lot better. Then I ate pizza and drank stouts every day for a year so now I'm trying p90x2.

I got the original P90x a year or so ago, but only got through a few weeks until my shoulder started acting up. I fell off the wagon and never got back started.

I've never tried P90X, but have been doing the Herschel Walker workout of 1000 pushups a day (20 sets of 50) and let me tell you- it's hard as heck everytime, much like I heard P90X is

DCDeac said:

Just finished my 2nd week of Phase 1 without missing a workout and promptly threw my back out playing basketball. Now I'm sidelined for a week. Very annoying. Might just go straight to strength once I'm back.

Completely agree that it's more of a next step than a P90X replacement. Plus in the workouts Tony assumes you've done the previous workouts because he'll mention an original move and just talk about the alteration to it. I think if you started cold with X2 it'd be a fight to keep up.

Great improvement on the Yoga side, Plyocide is solid... Pretty good all around, although I feel like they could use a Kenpo replacement to give a little more variety to the cross-fit side.

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From my understanding, they determined that the P.A.P. workouts in Phase 3 blow away any gains that would come from another Kenpo, and that the foam rolling and yoga work to replace the flexibility side of it. Have you been doing the 3-minute foam rolling in each warm-up? I seem to get a lot out of the full foam rolling workout (though the asian/hawaiian chick is already starting to bother me), but I've been skipping the 3-minute segment in the warm-ups because that doesn't seem to help me and I don't have the time to extend that portion of the warm-up for another 10 or 15 minutes.

2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:

From my understanding, they determined that the P.A.P. workouts in Phase 3 blow away any gains that would come from another Kenpo, and that the foam rolling and yoga work to replace the flexibility side of it. Have you been doing the 3-minute foam rolling in each warm-up? I seem to get a lot out of the full foam rolling workout (though the asian/hawaiian chick is already starting to bother me), but I've been skipping the 3-minute segment in the warm-ups because that doesn't seem to help me and I don't have the time to extend that portion of the warm-up for another 10 or 15 minutes.

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I have to admit, I love the foam rolling. I double it and do 6 minutes for each workout. My days off I mostly just stretch a bit and do a ton a foam rolling (plus I'm playing in two basketball leagues so they eat up my two off days).

I like the phases in X2 and how many workouts there are. I feel like a 2nd round of it will be much easier to stomach than the original. I almost had that shit memorized by the end.

Just got back from a 3 mile race pace run. I am going to grab something to eat and then do my first p90x later.

Anything I should know about starting out? Should I start mid-week, or just make Tuesday my Monday on the schedules?

It's 6/7 days, so it's really just about picking your day off. Had to be Sunday for me between sports, work, chores, classes, etc.

Just finished a bit ago. My apartment is very old and the door molding is enormous. I'm going to need to find a better way to mount my pullup bar, or get a different one.

Otherwise, I think it went well. I would much rather use weights, but the resistance bands were much cheaper and worked almost as well.

Day one called for the abs/core workout, but I couldn't do a lot of it without weights or a working pullup bar.

You can probably just get some brackets and lag bolt it into the wall studs. I think they also make some that are like tension rods that go inside the door frame and hang by their own spring-loaded pressure, but I'm not sure how much i would trust that.

I need to find a non-destructive and aesthetically pleasing way to do it. Hmm...

shitload of duct tape or Mighty Putty?

Today's workout was Arms & Shoulders. Most moves also combined some balance by doing everything on one leg or on the stability ball. I was honestly a little disappointed in this one. It may be nature of the arm exercises, but the challenge in this workout comes directly from the amount of weight, as opposed to the difficulty of the move, so more like a traditional gym workout. So while it can be a tough workout if you use enough weight, I wouldn't necessarily call it a tough P90X-2 workout as compared to the others that place so much emphasis on the athleticism of the move in addition to the weight. It was 3 cycles of the same moves; I think it would have been better as 2 cycles with a few more varied moves.

On the bright side, it was a little shorter than most (51 minutes). Also, the guy Jason Scheff from the band Chicago who Tony always talks about as writing and playing the music is one of the cast members for this one, which is kind of funny. And the woman in this one has an absolutely ridiculous body, allegedly after 3 kids.

allegedly

Well, I've completed two days so far. I'm surprised at how uncoordinated I am with some of these excercises. I can't wait until I'm used to some of these workouts. I feel like I am wasting a lot of energy and effort trying to mimic the workouts.

I did get my pullup bar mounted, though. I wish I could get it higher, but it's good for now.

Bumping this thread since I just started Phase 3 of the P90X and am starting to think about what I should do after I'm done. I'm thinking of going with Insanity or P90X-2, but also maybe want to tinker with P90X by incorporating Phase 1 and 2 workouts into the same week and mixing it up that way for maybe a month. Has anybody here tried to customize their workout schedule within the P90X framework?

The results I've noticed so far consist mostly of toning, particularly with the legs which are usually the most ignored part of a dude's workout. Plyometrics rendered me a cripple for 3 days the first time I did it, but it's my favorite workout of all of them now. Yoga is too damn long, but man I feel great afterwards. Kenpo is the perfect workout for a weekend since it is the easiest.

A couple things they goofed on... Throwing one-handed pushups midway into their chest workout. Most people can't do these, and most people who can can't do them at that point in the workout when doing a regular pushup is a challenge. Also, I can do about one full set of pullups before I get the same problem with diminishing returns and they don't become worth it to do, which results in a switch to the bands. The corn cob and towel pull-ups are just ridiculous in the middle of a workout, just like one-handed pushups are. For yoga, 40 minutes of all the leg lifting crap is a bit redundant and fuck you Tony Horton for the half moon poses. Gimme a break, man. We aren't all superheroes like you are.

Other than that, a very worthwhile workout regimen. I have not sacrificed any of my beer intake for this, but am still shedding fat (though not as much fat as I would had I given up beer).

For those of you who are interested ELC will give you free daily updates on his routine to include instances of sharding and any other abnormal bodily movement if you friend him on facebook.

The one-handed pushups, the corn cobs, the towel pullups, and the one-legged wall sits were probably my favorite parts of those workouts. It's pretty awesome in P90 when you get to month 3 and knock out 20 pullups in the last round or a few legit one-handed pushups since the first time you did it either were probably a laughable attempt.

Yoga is shorter (and better) in P90X2. Plyo is different, not really better or worse. My problem with P90X2 is that many of the exercises were just plain tough to get into and execute without a lot of practice. They are all about the core in X2, so instead of pushups you're doing pushups with your feet on a stability ball and your hands on medicine balls, or you're doing chest presses while balancing backwards on a ball, standing on one foot, etc. I didn't get as much out of it because half the time you're trying not to fall on your ass instead of really working hard. If you think corn cobs are hard, wait till you see the pullup variations in X2... Ridiculously difficult.

If you have great balance and stick with it I'm sure X2 has a higher ceiling, but it's tough to beat the original.

I preferred the original to p90x2.

2 was a little easier, only 5 days a week and the workouts in general were less strenuous. I did prefer yoga in 2 as they shortened it. My biggest problem with 2 was they were trying to make more $ and have new equipment requirements. All I have is a pull up bar and dumbbells. I modified 2 but it wasnt the same. Insanity is tough but is much more cardio oriented.

Ok. So my 2013 resolution is to lose 80 lbs, preferably by August. I'm going to go back and start P90x probably the 1st of February, which will give me the opportunity to do it twice before August 1st. I'm meeting with a nutritionist on Tuesday to set out a plan. Lets go!