Over the summer, I was talking with a coworker about strength workouts, and I mentioned that I was planning on doing P90X over the winter. He agreed that P90X is an effective routine (you look at him and know he's a fit guy), but his main problem with it was that it was an every day thing. While I obviously haven't been doing P90X every day - I have been finding that with the mild winter and the acquisition of the trainer, my desire to do the P90X stuff has been lacking. However, I've seen huge improvements in upper body strength, and I feel that the leg workouts are absolutely worthwhile. So one of the things in the back of my mind has been how to maintain when full training time hits - I simply wont have enough time to be training for running, biking and swimming as well as yoga and strength training, with strength training being 3x per week.
Anyhow, this coworker mentioned a thing called the Spartacus workout, and the nice thing about it is that you do it 3x per week and it's a more full-body workout than any of the P90X sessions. So I was thinking that once P90X is done (or, at least, when I'm done with it) - it might be an option for maintenance.
I decided that today would be a good day to give it a shot and test its viability - I needed to get a leg workout in this week, and in looking at some of the portions of the routine, there are some squats and lunges and such.
The entire workout calls for going through each of the 10 stations three times. However, in going from one station to the next, it gets quite exhausting - I was definitely sweating more than during any P90X workout. After two rounds, I decided that it wasn't ultimately going to work for me. There were certainly some stations that I think are beneficial, but some of them I'm not so sure about.
The major issue I had was on some of the ones where you do a pushup with the dumbbells in your hands - I found that having all my weight on my hands like that was tweaky. Also, for at least one of them, I don't have a heavy enough dumbbell in hex shape - and it has to be hex shape to keep it from rolling.
I'm thinking that what I'm ultimately going to aim for is listing out each of the exercises that P90X does for each section - chest, shoulders, triceps, back, biceps and legs - and then mix and match them to hit every portion in a single workout. With so much variety in the exercises for P90X - I think I should be able to get at least two fairly unique workout routines from it - and then each week I can designate a day for strength training and hit everything. I won't do as many sets for a particular group each time - for example during Legs & Back day you hit pullups eight times - but doing each of the four major types of pullups should still be enough to provide overall benefit.
No comments:
Post a Comment