What you need to know before you start P90X — Part 1

I am just a regular guy. I am not a gym rat. I have no desire to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, rather, what he used to look like).

If you are just a regular guy who is wondering if P90X is right for you, read on, because it just might be exactly what you need, so I’ve put together a set of “rules” that I came up with based on my experience with P90X.

RULE #1: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE — OR WANT TO BE — A MUSCLEHEAD TO BENEFIT FROM P90X.

What I usually tell people is that my primary fitness goal — as far as looks go — is to make sure my chest sticks out farther than my gut. To measure this, I simply put on a properly sized t-shirt and stand up straight. Is my gut pushing out against the shirt? If the answer is “yes”, I have more work to do.

If you are, like myself, a man of a certain age, i.e. 40-plus, your fitness goal probably also includes the shrinking of a lifetime’s worth of accumulated gut fat. You may have tried other fitness programs. You may have looked around at your peers, noted that most of them are even fatter than you — except that one skinny guy, who you’re pretty sure is an alcoholic, and the well-built dude, who must just have good genes — so you have resigned yourself to the fact that as we get older, we just get fatter, nothing can be done about that.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I figured I was out of time and out of luck. I was walking a lot (15,000 to 25,000 steps per day), I could do 200 pushups in an hour, I was doing crunches, I, er, owned a pullup bar. My age, I figured, must just be doing me in.

I had not heard of Tony Horton”s P90X — I guess I don’t watch enough late-night tv, or, maybe, on second thought, I watch just the right amount — until my brother told me about it. He had always been a stocky guy who had to watch his weight, and he’d been in-and-out of bodybuilding all his life, so when he described the program to me, I figured it was only for guys who loved to wear speedos, shave their body hair, and stare at themselves in the mirror all day, so I didn’t bite.

I guess I reached the tipping point in February 2010. I was tired of spending hours a day walking for exercise with no apparent health benefit. I was treading water — at best — with my weight. Well, okay, it was steadily creeping up from a recent low of 180 to a precarious 195. Still quite a way from my peak of fatness at 235, but I knew the signs. It was only a matter of time before I would be there again … and beyond.

I told my brother to order me P90X. That was easily the best fitness decision of my life.

All that leads me to the gist of the matter, which is that if you are a regular guy who just wants to get into shape, you may have seen the P90X infomercials and thought, “That’s not for me.” But it worked for me, and it can work for you, too.

RULE #2: STICK TO THE DIET PLAN.

Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.

I knew this going into P90X, so I was very willing to adjust my diet to 50% protein – 30% carbohydrate – 20% fat, as prescribed by the program’s diet guide.

“Diet!” you exclaim. “I thought this was an exercise program.”

Sure, it is, but please refer back to the first sentence of this section. “Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.” You can work out all you want, but if you are going to eat like a pig, you’ll continue to look like one, although, admittedly, you will probably have a pretty decent body underneath all the fat.

But this is no regular diet, so don’t worry that you will be starving yourself. According to the P90X calorie requirement calculator, I could have eaten about 2400 calories per day on their plan. I cut that back to a goal of 2000, so that way if I went over a bit, I was okay. You may not think that is a lot of calories, but when half of them are protein, it’s pretty challenging to hit that goal.

One thing I will tell you right now is that when I started P90X, I gave up all sugary sweets. Everything. No cake, no pie, no candy, no you-name-it. You obviously don’t need to do that, but I had to do it that way — go off it completely — because I am not good at moderation. I can honestly say that I haven’t missed that stuff at all. Perhaps in the future there will be a time when I can add some of it back into my diet — in severe moderation. I do still eat fruit and other naturally sweet things, but sugar for me is a no-no.

RULE #3: PUSH THE ENVELOPE, BUT TAKE IT SLOW AND STAY WITHIN YOUR ABILITY.

P90X is tough. You may find that you cannot, even at the end of the 90 days, finish the routines without modifications. For sure, for me, the pullups will take a lot more time to get where I want them to be. I can’t even come close to putting up the numbers they do in the videos.

That is really one of the beauties of the program. I mean, what good is an exercise program, if you can complete all the moves right from the start? I was on that program, and it involved walking for hours on end every day. Where did that get me, besides from here to there and back again?

My greatest fear when I started P90X was getting hurt, because that’s what I do – I tend get all excited about a program, and I throw myself in there, push it too far, hurt myself, and I am out of commission. That’s why I say “push the envelope, but take it slow”. You surely need to push yourself to improve, but don’t go overboard and get hurt.

Tony provides modified moves for many of the exercises. Use them, if you need to, with the goal being to keep working, and testing the water every so often, until you don’t need the modification — you may find this happens rather quickly.

RULE #4: TAKE EXTRA BREAKS WHEN YOU NEED THEM.

This is really a continuation of the last thought, but it’s important, so I want to beat it to death.

It’s a DVD. Hit pause. Take a few extra breaths, then start back up again. You will be amazed at how fast you improve.

RULE #5: WRITE IT DOWN!

Speaking of how quickly you improve, the best way to see it, besides looking in the mirror, is to use workout sheets to write down your reps and the weights you used.

This will also assist you next time you go to do the exercise, because you will easily be able to see how much weight you did last time, so you can quickly adjust the dumbbells. Trust me, it’s tough to remember, so writing everything down is a must.

And that’s it for this post, but I’ll post more P90X “rules” in the next few days. In fact, here’s Part 2.