Eureka, I found it!

I should acknowledge up front that the discovery I'll announce in this entry is likely to be earth-shattering mainly only to yours truly. It is something I had been searching for for quite some time, but had begun to suspect did not exist, so it's a relief to me that I finally found it. But since it suits a need that is peculiar to my own fitness ideas and program, what I've finally found is bound to constitute a ho-hum moment for most others. But, hey, this is my blog about my fitness pursuits, so I can exult in whatever I want, right?

Anyway, anyone who's read my previous blog entries will know that I've been on the lookout for an alternative upper-body workout. When I began looking for a good upper-body workout in the wake of my initial upper-body fitness forays which had been centering around using the Soloflex, I discovered the upper-body workout segments from the P90X regime. I excerpted the four P90X workouts that concentrated on the upper-body and began using them last fall in a twice-weekly, two-week rotation.

While I generally "enjoyed" (with such enjoyment as can be gotten from enduring these rather grueling workouts) the P90X exercises and learned a bit more about fitness from them, I found them too rigorous for my fitness needs throughout most of the year. I decided fairly early on that those workouts, though they could fit into our overall regimen, should be restricted to a certain segment of the year, and that during the rest of the year I needed to use something a little less strenuous.

So I started checking out other Tony Horton exercise regimes, thinking I'd be bound to find something that was less rigorous but that provided the needed focus on upper-body strengthening. After a lot of looking and sampling I settled on two segments from two similar regimes: one segment came from the Power 90 routine (circuit 3-4 sculpt); the other was from the Power 90 Masters series (circuit 5-6 sculpt). These were a bit shorter than the P90X routines we'd been doing (about 40 minutes as opposed to 55 minutes) and contained a good deal of upper-body strengthening exercises. We started using one each of these for our twice-weekly strength-training sessions.

But these routines also contained a few lower-body exercises, which I didn't really want in our routine (we use cycling for lower-body strengthening, as I've stated previously). So, these were not the perfect fit but, as I began to presume, might be about the closest I could find.

Well, recently I decided to do a little further searching and, lo and behold, I finally found the thing I'd been looking for for several months: a Tony Horton routine that was comparatively short and that focuses exclusively on upper body. It's from the Power Half Hour series, a segment called "Arm Toner."


This routine is really just the thing I'd been looking for to use during our more "relaxed" portion of the fitness year. We'll want to have a portion of the year when we're not totally forsaking upper-body fitness, but are doing just enough to keep the muscles limber and not turning to flab. It's also nice to work up at least a little sweat exercising the upper body.

So why is this routine such a great find? Well, it fills the bill nicely in terms of the length of the workout--exactly one half hour. Another nice feature is that there are no rep counts: you just perform a given exercise for a set amount of time--I think it's one or two minutes--then move on to the next exercise. I think you do two sets of most exercises--I've only viewed the whole routine once so I have not yet figured out its structure. But from what I've seen so far, this should fit really nicely into our fitness pursuits.

I managed to find a copy of just this routine on Amazon for a little under $7.00, shipping included--so the price was definitely right, too. I should mention on that note that the whole Power Half Hour regime actually consists in five or so different sessions and that the Arm Toner session is only one of the five. But, as was the case with other Tony Horton regimes, there's only one segment of Power Half Hour that really interests me.

It might sound like I'm turning this blog into some kind of promotion for everything Tony Horton puts out. I have to admit that I generally like the upper-body routines he's put together and that they're easy to follow. Another virtue of his programs is that they require very little in the way of equipment. Owing to this desgin feature these workouts incorporate a fair amount of calisthenics or bodyweight exercises--another big plus in my view. In my defense, I do have in mind in the longer term, once I've got more experience with upper-body fitness, creating my own routines. But, it seems for now there's not a very good way to dodge the accusation that I'm promoting his materials.

As for how we'll use the new Power Half Hour routine, I'm still deciding on that. At the moment I envision switching over to this for our twice-weekly strength-training sessions some time after that start of the new year. We'll probably stick with that until cycling season hits--say in April or maybe May.

On that note, I've been saying for some time now that I want a less rigorous upper-body workout specifically for the cycling season--so that our strength-training won't interfere with our preferred form of fitness, cycling. Well, I'm reconsidering where best in the fitness year more rigorous vs. less rigorous upper-body workouts belong. What I'm actually thinking at the moment is that we might cut our strength training down to once a week during the cycling season, but that the workout we would do during that part of the year will be an intense one. On that scenario, we'd do something like our modified P90X on Wednesdays (currently our rest day), while Mondays and Fridays (our current strength-training days) would be days off. That would provide the advantage of giving us rest days both before and after our most intense cycling days--Saturdays and Sundays. And our less intense cycling days--Tuesdays and Thursdays--would sandwich our strength-training day. On that scenario, our modified P90X would be a four-week cycle, and we'd do the cycle something like 4 or 5 times over the course of the bicycling season.

As the cycling season is winding down, say in October or so, we'd go back to our modified Power 90 strength-training regime, resuming our two-day-per-week strength-training schedule. This is all tentative and represents my thinking at the moment. Rest assured I'll be posting about whatever regime we end up adopting.

At some point I plan to list the exercises along with the structure of all the strength-training routines we do. So that's on tap for a future blog entry. I'm also thinking of offering my critique on the latest beachbody fitness hype--called Insanity (which I'm thinking, in my facetious way, of renaming to Stupidity). Look for those topics to be covered in future entries.