Skip to main content

Introducing P90X

Having done some dumbell curls and seeing no results at all, I decided to try some professional workouts. One sunday as I was flipping channels I came across a P90X infomercial. I know to be very wary of any infomercial but I decided to try that out anyway. The main reason for trying it out was because I did not know of any exercises that I should be doing. I did not know what a set or rep meant. So I thought this will be like a personal trainer for me.

Although P90X was supposed to be done by people who are already kind of fit, I decided to give it a try.  I brought a bunch of dumbells and got down to business. The first few weeks were brutal. I was barely able to finish all the exercises. The workouts are usually 60 mins but I took long breaks and in the end it took more like 90 mins and I was barely able to do any exercises towards the end. I went on like this for a few days and they proved to be very tiring and I was always weak to do any other activity. I continued with the pain for the 1st phase which is 1 month long, but after that I could not take it anymore.

So I decided to break the workouts into two 30 minute sessions. I would do the first 30 minute session of each workout in week 1 and next 30 minute session in week 2. This would mean that I will take double the amount of time, but at least I will have some energy to do something else. I always did all my workouts in the evening after coming back from work so I was already tired by the time and could not do all that well. Initially I used o skip some exercises like chin-ups from "back and biceps" routine. But I kept a very good record of every single exercise I performed and how much weight I used and how many reps I did.

Later I got myself a chin-up bar and started doing the chins-ups too. Although the exercises were very difficult especially towards the end (even though it is 30 mins workout I used to take 1 hr), I did see some physical improvements and some strength gains too. But the gain were very slow to come by. I am not sure if that is normal or if P90X was not for me. I will share some before and after stats for my pull-ups, push-ups etc in my next blog.


One mistake I did not was not taking pictures. So I have to go by my memory or with any photos of me when attenting parties or meeting people. Anway I felt P90X was not too bad and decided to continue until the end of 2008.

Coming to food, I still did not pay much attention to what I ate. I got the P90X protien shake and used to drink that post workout but other than that I ate all kind of junk food at other times and never ate at regular intervals. I would have a huge meal, then wait 6 hours and then another huge meal. The gap is usually filled with coffee or mountain dews. So I don't know if that was effecting my strength gains. Another big problem with me is that I feel full very easily. Which is the main reason I think I was always skinny no matter what I ate, just because I was not eating enough.

In my next blog I will give more details of my stats and how things unfurled as the year was coming to a close.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke

Strong Lifts 5x5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted. All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5x5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3x5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for m

End of an Era

Image via Wikipedia It has been a long time since I gave any updates on my progress. Actually it is almost 3 months! There have been a lot of developments on my personal front which was the main cause of this much delayed update. My progress has slowed down considerably too. I was hoping to be at 140 lbs by the end of this year with 7% body fat. That seems like a dream that will not be fulfilled this year. I will not even be able to meet the 140 lb goal let alone the body fat %. So what happened to me over the last 3 months? I have been in the US for more than 8 years now! I loved every moment that I was here, starting from the early struggling days of my MS to my current stable job state of today. However even before coming to US, I promised to myself that I will be back in India after gaining 5 years of work experience in US. Now that the goal has been realized, it is time to move back to India. So in the last 3 months I have been working towards the goal of moving back to India. M