Insanity DVD – Core Cardio and Balance

Posted on May 18, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

It’s no wonder that the people in the Insanity DVD commercials look ripped. If they actually did the workout program (and weren’t just models) then they burned a ridiculous amount of calories every day for 60 days. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about the workouts in terms of complexity, but they are indeed action-packed with plyometrics at every turn so you’re bound to shed weight and improve your agility and your muscle:fat ratio. You do max reps for each workout so the intensity is very high for a prolonged period of time with minimal rest.

Here’s a promotional video from youtube, definitely corny but I’m sure that if I went all-out for 60 days I’d see some results, it’d be hard not to:

I borrowed the DVD set from a coworker who just finished it. She’s an ex-college athlete, mother of two, engineer and she said she definitely noticed an increase in athleticism from doing the 60 day program. However, she also said that she had to slow down her program to three days/week because the plyometrics were getting to her knees. My knees also bother me sometimes so I could see this as a barrier to sticking to the program.

I looked through the DVDs she gave me and chose Core, Balance, and Cardio because I had just done a few days of upper body workouts and needed a day off from those muscles so throwing in some cardio would be great. I brought my laptop outside during lunch and did the workout in fresh air. I certainly got a few weird looks from coworkers passing by but oh well, those are likely the same people who make excuses about why they don’t exercise. Personally, I’d rather look silly and be fit than the other alternative of normal and out of shape.

The workout was certainly tough because every movement was dynamic, something my body is getting used to. Most of the training I do is for endurance sports like running, biking, and hiking. Unlike back in high school, I do very little agility-based sports these days so whenever I do, I feel it the next day for sure. My min/max/average heart rates were 86/158/134 over the course of the 35 minute workout. At the end of the workout I found out that this particular segment was considered a recovery workout. Soaked in sweat after a good workout, I tried to imagine what a full blown workout felt like, I guess I’ll have to try it out at some point.

P90X Plyometric Workout in my Living Room

Posted on May 11, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

I did another P90X workout earlier this week but todays workout was much different than weight training so I decided to go for it. Wikipedia defines plyometrics as “a type of exercise designed to produce fast and powerful movements. It is generally used by athletes to improve performance in sports, especially those that involve speed, quickness and power.” It’s also often referred to as “jump training” because the workouts typically involve jumping in one way or another. I’ve done various forms of plyometric workouts throughout my life as a high school athlete and then for one year playing baseball in college but since then I haven’t had much of a reason to train for explosiveness. Most of my favorite athletic events are running, hiking, biking, and climbing. I haven’t really played team sports in a long time so the need for agility isn’t as high as it used to be. I’ve done both P90X and P90X Plus and both involve this type of exercise and I found them to be total arse-kickers. I admit that working out in front of your TV or laptop is a bit corny but the reality is that I sweat like crazy and I can’t walk right the next day so you can’t argue with results.

The video itself is about 60 minutes long but with warmup and cooldown exercises the actual plyometric section is about 45 minutes, still not an insignificant amount of time to be jumping around. I originally started the workout barefoot because I left my running shoes at work but I was sweating buckets which made my floor pretty slippery so I had to switch to my hiking boots. I don’t recommend wearing boots during a plyo workout, it’s pretty similar to trying to jump while wearing bricks on your feet.

A view of my living room where I did my plyometric workout. I'm sure my neighbors down below weren't too pleased with me jumping up and down for 45 minutes straight, oh well. Also in view are only about half of the bikes that exist in our apartment as well as a pretty sweet wolf poster (Thank you New Hampshire).

In addition to leaving my running shoes at work, I also left my heart rate monitor at work so I took my heart rate at the beginning of each of the six 30 second breaks. My heart rates were as follows:

Break 1 (after warmup) – 104bpm

Break 2 – 120bpm

Break 3 – 144bpm

Break 4 – 162bpm

Break 5 – 150bpm

Break 6 – 156 bpm

So this lead to my minimum/maximum/average being 104/162/139 over 45 minutes. I was drenched with sweat and my legs were pretty wobbly, even two days later (as I’m writing this post) my arse is still sore. It probably wasn’t the best idea to do this workout two days before running the Ragnar Relay in Cape Cod; a 24 hour, 12 person, 200 mile relay road race. I’m sure it’ll be fine (famous last words).

I looked around YouTube to try and find some examples of a plyometric workout and this video actually made me laugh out loud: two bros just doin P90X together, super serious, and videotaping it for the world, no big deal haha, enjoy:

P90X Shoulders, Biceps, and Triceps

Posted on May 9, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Despite climbing all day yesterday, I decided it would be a great idea to do an hour of P90X in the gym. Today (the next day) I am certainly sore as hell, but I do these workouts frequently so it wasn’t too much worse that normal. Back in 2008 I did the full 90 days of P90X and I followed it pretty strictly. I did it mostly because I had seen so many of the infomercials on late night television. It wasn’t marketed as an everyman’s workout, they said it wouldn’t take Joe-Shmo off the couch and make him shredded, they advertised it was taking someone who’s in great shape, and putting them in unbelievable shape. I thought to myself, “I’m in pretty good shape and yes I’d love to be in ridiculous shape, count me in.” I bought into it despite the corny-ness and hype associated with workout DVDs and it worked out great for me and I was sore every day for 90 days, #win.

After doing P90X and P90X+, I still mix the workouts into my weekly routine. I’ll do one or two of my favorite workouts each week on top of running, hiking, climbing and my other outdoor activities. Today I did a workout called Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps which has 24 different exercises that rotated between chest, shoulders, triceps for eight sets.

Workout sheet for Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps

After watching the videos a few dozen times and inadvertently memorizing every phrase that comes out of Tony Horton’s mouth, I now go straight off the workout sheets. There are a few exercises that I don’t like so I replace with ones that I find to be better for me. For example, who knows why they decided to put a set of one-armed pushups near the end of a 24 exercise Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps program, NFW, not going to happen Horton. So I substitute the one arm pushup for a staggered arm pushup where the hands are offset, one in front of the other but still a shoulder’s width apart.

All in all it was a great workout. My heart rate didn’t get too high but I was certainly pumped and my arms were totally useless by the end of it which I see as a general success of this workout. My min/max/average heart rates for this workout were 95/156/131 respectively. I highly recommend giving P90X a try, the structure helps keep you on track with your fitness goals and it’ll certainly challenge you every day.

P90X Fail Turns into Erg Rowing in the Gym

Posted on May 4, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

I had meant to do a P90X workout today but I as I was leaving work at the end of the day I realized that I locked the workout sheets in the office that I don’t yet have a key to. I also have the videos on my iPod Touch which is now broken due to an exploded pear in my backpack, ugh. As a last resort, I also have the videos on my laptop so I just pulled that out when I got to the gym. However, it only had 3% battery and promptly shut off, bummer. Not quite sure what to do, I consulted my master list of cool workouts that I came up with for this month and decided that I would do an erg rowing workout. I had wanted to wait to do it with a few friends who rowed in college so that I could get my form right because I’ve only rowed a total of 5 minutes in my whole life. However in the spirit of this 30 day fitness experiment I decided to jump right in and hope for the best.

As far as form goes, I spent a few minutes trying it out and figured that as I came forward I would need to get on my toes and keep my arms and back straight, core tight as always. On the way out I drove with my legs through my heels then used a combination of my arms and back to finish the stroke. As I found out later, this is pretty much correct in terms of form. However, what I think I looked like and what I actually looked like where probably very different. I just hope I didn’t look as bad as this guy:

Afterward I watched a few videos on YouTube to try and learn about form. I found this video by Concept 2 to be pretty helpful, boring, but seemingly helpful:

One thing I found interesting about this workout was that it was pretty hard to get my heart rate up to a high level. My min/max/average heart rates were 72/139/123 respectively. My rowing rate stayed somewhere around 25-27 strokes/minute and I did 7000m total, 2000m for a warmup and 5000m. I definitely could have pushed myself harder but I didn’t want to hurt myself having never done this exercise before. I found my form went to hell when I really tried to push it up to 30 strokes/minute. I was told that race pace was somewhere around 34-37 strokes per minute but I would have definitely hurt myself by pulling a back muscle or something if I had gone for that level of intensity.

The erg in the gym at work. I suppose I'm pretty lucky to have a small gym at work, although, I hardly use it because 99 times out of 100 I'd rather be outside exercising.

As expected, I found rowing inside to be SUPER boring, I only kept going because of my fitness goal for this month, otherwise I would have stopped and gone for a run outside. I don’t typically workout while listening to music because I find iPods and headphone wires to be really irritating. Having something bouncing around or strapped to my bicep is something I’d rather avoid. Plus, I like hearing the sounds around me whether it’s nature, cars, bikers, other runners, etc. There’s nothing I hate more than seeing bikers in the city with their headphones in, let alone the people I’ve seen texting while biking, yikes. Case and point, the picture below shows what happens when God doesn’t want you to listen to music during your workout:

The headphone cord dangled down near the seat and eventually, the seat clipped my headphone wires right in half, bummer. It just reinforced how much I dislike using headphones while I work out.