Exhausted...Why Not?

Wow. I got my butt kicked today and loved it! I wanted to take a moment to give some feedback on a custom home fitness program I've been tailoring to challenge myself even more than I had over the past year, which is somewhat difficult. Since last year, I've completed the P90X extreme home fitness program twice and the INSANITY program once. I want to emphasize EXTREME because both of these programs are comprehensive and can challenge even the most fit professional athletes and trainers, and that's why I love them so much and have gotten the results that I, like many, have gotten.

P90X, if you are not familiar with it, is the most complete athletic training program. Period. It combines intense strength training workouts which are about an hour or so, plyometrics, or jump training, advanced yoga, a kenpo workout, and much more. The program helps you in all areas including strength, cardio endurance, breathing, flexibility, balance, and even strengthens your mind. The program also eliminates the plateau effect by integrating a schedule with recovery and changes your workout program up to get you consistent and progressive results, and is very physically demanding.

In contrast, the INSANITY program is basically cardio on crack! It uses MAX interval training, an extreme form of interval circuit training to help you burn unprecedented amounts of calories while also enhancing your muscular endurance, strength, and teaches you how to push past what your mind tells you is your physical limit. This is a 60 day program which helped me reduce my body fat from approximately 8.5% to around 5.5%!! 60 days!!

After a recovery week, I began my own customized, hybrid, program, if you will. The first 3 weeks I used a pre-exhaustion method where I used an INSANITY workout to burn calories and get the sweat flowing, then went straight to a P90X strength routine, 3 days a week. On one of the days in between I did extreme versions of P90X plyometrics or kenpo, followed by Ab Ripper X, the 15 min ab routine. On the other day I used INSANITY's MAX Cardio Conditioning, which is basically 45 minutes straight thru with no set breaks (except the stretch), and I followed this with INSANE Abs, a 33-minute INSANITY ab workout. Saturdays were my wild-card days where generally I used a different 1-0n-1 with Tony Horton routine and/or I conducted fit tests on new trainees, and took Sunday off or did Yoga X. I used week 4, last week, as a recovery week and did some intense stuff, but really it was more laid back in comparison. I just started week 5 and am basically doing the same as weeks 1-3 for weeks 5-8, but I have changed 2 strength training workouts, one cardio workout, and the major difference is I am using post-exhaustion this time. Wow what a difference! Today I did "Chest, shoulders, and triceps" from P90X which really killed my upper body, then I made sure by finishing with "Cardio Circuit" from INSANITY and by the end I was completely out of gas from the pushups and plank work, not to mention the bonus after 3x thru which consisted of jabs, uppercuts, and open-handed vertical punches from the plie position. Holy crap! Aren't you glad I shared? If you have any idea what I am describing then you are probably already sweating! I guess I am a masechist cause I love this stuff! Anyways, thanks for reading everyone, and please contact me if you think you're Johnny Extreme and you're ready for a great challenge!