Farewell (but not good riddance) P90X!

As I've been mentioning for some time now, we've been planning a move away from the modified P90X routine we started doing earlier this spring. As I hinted in my last blog entry, that change was slated to come very soon. Well, it didn't come as soon as I thought it might: I decided to give my back a little extra healing time, so we actually took about 11 days off from our upper-body workouts before doing our final P90X workout for this season. We did the last P90X routine this past Friday, and started today (the subsequent Monday) with one of the new Power 90 routines I found. Before I say more about the new Power 90 routines, though, let me recap a bit about the P90X routines we were doing.

I will miss our modified P90X routines. I usually find a really rigorous workout like that refreshing--though a small percentage of the time I do find it tedious and have to force myself to do the workout. Overall we enjoyed it and got some good health benefits from it. It's definitely not for everyone my age: you have to already be in pretty good condition before you start, or else be ready to take things really slowly. But for us it worked pretty well. I should probably reiterate on that score that, before we started our modified P90X, we had been working out with weights and some calisthenics twice weekly for several months. So we were prepared to step up the effort a bit.

So, though I'll miss our P90X workouts, I can leave them behind without much regret because I know we'll be going back to those routines. As I've previously blogged, those routines do have a place in our annual fitness plan--that place is in the cycling off-season. At the moment, I foresee us going back to our modified P90X perhaps as early as late November--or by Christmas, at the latest. We'll continue using the modified P90X until probably late February or some time in March. Then we'll switch to some less rigorous routine, perhaps back to what we plan on doing for the rest of the summer.

Which brings me to a key topic of the current blog entry: the routine we'll be doing until late November or so, and possibly for most of the year for the foreseeable future.

As I mentioned in my last entry, we are using parts of another fitness regime developed by the same company that does P90X--the regime is called Power 90 (sometimes just P90, sans the letter X). Once again, Tony Horton leads the exercises and, once again, we are excising out portions of the regime that suit well our fitness needs and goals.

The company that puts out these fitness videos/DVD's is engaging in a common capitalist tactic I would call marketing obfuscation. The idea is to put out a whole lot of products very similar in character and name, but to not be very forthcoming with information about what differentiates these products from one another. This same practice plays a huge role as well in computer/tech marketing, but it is found in some degree in many capitalist enterprises. The tactic causes consumer confusion, which results in poorly-informed spending, which, the instigators of the policy understand, will result in more sales of their products and thus greater profits. Maybe I'll write a more philosophical entry at some point expanding further on this matter, but for now I just want to point out that there are a number of products sold by this company that go under the label Power 90 and I'm not entirely sure how they relate to one another.

But, by sleuthing a bit I've managed to find two that I think will suit our off-season fitness needs pretty well. These two focus on upper-body strengthening and have but a very few leg exercises. And both are advanced phases of the regimes from which they're excerpted. Both go under the label "sculpt" as well. One is level 3 and 4 from Power 90 sculpt circuit, and the other is level 5 and 6 from the Power 90 sculpt circuit.*

Though both routines are called Power 90 and they seem to be numbered consecutively, they were obviously produced at different times (don't ask me to explain beyond stating that this is an example of marketing obfuscation). The 3-4 sculpt routine looks to me to date to the 1990's, while I'm pretty sure the 5-6 sculpt routine was produced some time after the turn of the millennium--perhaps as recently as 2003 or so.

Though I've viewed both routines in their entirety, we've so far only actually done one of them: the 3-4 sculpt routine. I'll leave a fuller report for later, but preliminarily I can say that I like the routine we've tried and, furthermore, I can observe that this is a lot more cardio-intense than the P90X routines we were doing. I was pretty winded throughout the first two thirds of the workout, which I never experienced doing our modified P90X. We'll do the 5-6 sculpt routine this Friday, so I look forward to seeing how that will go.

I want to observe at this point that I was pleasantly surprised by the Power 90 routine we did today. I had just been thinking to myself that we should find something for upper body exercising that would be more aerobic, like perhaps rowing. Well, this Power 90 routine ended up being pretty intensely aerobic, so it looks like I ended up getting what I'd hoped for.

So, for the next few months we'll be doing only these two routines twice a week (on Mondays and Fridays). As for what the future holds, I can say that, in the longer term, I'm looking forward to the time when I become less reliant on exercise videos. I view myself at the moment as very much in the learning phase regarding this sort of exercise: I need to just try a lot of different routines and techniques and find out what works and what does and doesn't go well together. At that point, I should be able to cobble together my own regimens using bits and pieces from the various things I've tried and using knowledge gained through practice. More on that later.
---------------------
* Why do they combine levels like this? If 3 and 4 are essentially the same level, then they should be called just level 3 or level 4. Oh yeah, I just explained why . . . marketing obfuscation!