Week 1 of P90X

With Amber's volleyball season starting and me not helping out this year, I thought it was a good time to find something to keep me busy for the next three months. I've been toying with the idea of doing P90x for a while, and I've finally run out of excuses.

Going into it, all I've heard about it is that it's pretty grueling for a home exercise routine. Each session is at least an hour long (6 days a week, no less), which is a fairly substantial amount of time in this lazy-man's opinion. On the other hand, I suck at working out on my own, so having someone tell me what to do would probably be the only way for me to keep honest.

The x in P90x is supposed to stand for extreme, I guess it sounded better than P90e. Its supposed to be an exercise routine for people in some sort of shape, which is surprisingly a category I fall into. There is a fitness test that you're supposed to do to see if it's the right workout for you, but of course I skipped that. How bad could it be?

The first few weeks are as follows:

• Day 1: Chest and back - Lot's of pushups and pullups. I can do pushups ok, but I've always been terrible at pullups.
• Day 2: Plyometrics - More like suckometrics, amirite? This is a cardio session with tons of jumping, squatting and lunging. An hour worth of your heart wanting to stop, basically. This was the toughest workout for me, by far.
• Day 3: Shoulders and arms - This wasn't very difficult for me, I expect I would get a lot more benefit if I were using free weights instead of resistance bands.
• Day 4: Yoga - I've always been intrigued by yoga, mostly in the train-wreck sort of way since I am extremely inflexible. I cheated really bad, I only did 30 minutes of this 90 (!!!) minute session. Partially because I was getting my ass kicked, but mostly because it was so freaking long and we were having company that night.
• Day 5: Legs and back - I don't remember this one all that much, did I black out? If this is the one with one-legged wall squats I hate it. More pullups this day as well.
• Day 6: Kenpo X - This is basically P90x tae-bo. It wasn't incredibly difficult and the hour did go pretty fast.

On the bright side I'm happy that I stuck to it and did indeed do a whole week of the program, however don't quite sing my praises yet. I found out I was supposed to be doing a separate ab routine 3 days a week after the main workouts, and I still haven't done one yet. My excuse at first was that I didn't know, and now my excuse is "Come on, I just worked out for an hour! I wanna be done!"

I've also completely ignored everything diet-wise in the program, actually you could say I've been (embarrassingly) eating even worse than before. I completely acknowledge that diet is probably the biggest part to getting and staying fit, but shit man, FOOD! I'm hoping that my diet can slowly start to match up with exercise and I can find a reasonable middle ground.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the program even though the main trainer, Tony Horton is extremely annoying after just the first week (let alone having to watch the same stupid jokes over and over for the next 11 or so weeks). I don't remember ever being so sore for so long (my lower triceps hurt for 5 or 6 days), but there is that whole no pain no gain thing (no doubt made up by someone who was already in really good shape).

Unfortunately, it goes without saying that my bicycle riding will be taking a hit thanks to this new program. Doing 1-1.5 hour worth of exercise down in the basement leaves precious little time for eating up the miles on the road. I'm going to still try and throw some rides in there, but they will probably be few and far between.