Goodbye P90X, Hello StrongLifts

My love affair with P90X lasted for about 3 months before I gave up. Why? Because I was simply not seeing any more results. I am not saying P90X is flawed. Neither am I endorsing it. It just did not work for me. I think P90X works for people who are very fit at some point in their life, but have since become overweight. Even in the infomercial for P90X, they mostly show people who were rowers or athletes or runners or well trained people who slacked and then took up P90X and saw good results. I am not one of them. I was never fit. Never lifted weights, never ran more than 100 yards never lifted more than 30 lbs using any known muscle nor was in rowing, boxing, tennis or any other physical activity ever.

I just have a weak body. And it has always been that way. So I could not use P90X to get back to my fit state. After discovering that it is not working well for me I started searching for some workouts for skinny folks like me. I came across stronglifts. This workout was different. And not as intense as P90X. I did not need to do my workouts for 1 hr straight with very little rest time in between sets or exercises. This is more like 1 hr of workout with adequate rest. Just 5 reps per set is very encouraging. I started out strong lifts 5×5 on February 23, 2009.

Initially the workouts felt very easy. I was feeling very motivated. I could see my graphs going up every time I workout because strong lifts 5×5 starts with a very low weight initially and every workout day you increase the weights by 5 lb. I felt very confident. I continued this for about 3 months. But then had to stop and move on to another workout plan.

In my next few blogs I will write about

• My workout logs for stronglifts
• Body Fat % and weight changes due to my increased eating habits
• Why I had to quit stronglifts 5×5 and what I did next

Filed under: Uncategorized, p90x, strong lifts, workout

Some before and after stats from age old workouts

I first started recording P90X stats from september 2008 onwards. But all the data that I wrote in a notebook went missing. So I stared to record them online in google spreadsheet. This started sometime on december 6, 2008. This was also the time at which point I have finished phase I of P90X and just decided to split the total time into 2. When I first started P90X I was barely able to do 4 pull-ups. It is surprising enough that I can do any pull-ups at all . I was able to do about 10 push-ups at that time.

By early december of 2008, I was able to do 7 pull-ups and get around 20 push-ups! That is a great progress isn’t it? Instead of going through each workout and how much I did I will just copy paste the progress stats from my spreadsheet here. The first one is for Chest Shoulders and Triceps.

Notice how I have 1 date above and another below? That is how I used to split the workout into 2 parts for 2 weeks. The time is when I stopped the first week, which is the 13th exercise. The blue background indicates that I performed the exercise easily and it is time to increase the weight. I went from as few as 20 push-ups to doing 28 push-ups (see exercise #14, side to side push-ups). Similarly dips went up from 20 to 31. I have improved in every single exercise in those short 2 months.

Here is the Back and Biceps workout

Again went from 7 pull-ups to 13. Not a lot but that is not bad for a 2 month period. Bicep curls went up from 15 to 20.

I will give some body weight and body fat stats during that period in my next blog.

Filed under: Uncategorized, exercise, p90x, strength gain, workout

Introducing P90X

Having done some dumbell curls and seeing no results at all, I decided to try some professional workouts. One sunday as I was flipping channels I came across a P90X infomercial. I know to be very wary of any infomercial but I decided to try that out anyway. The main reason for trying it out was because I did not know of any exercises that I should be doing. I did not know what a set or rep meant. So I thought this will be like a personal trainer for me.

Although P90X was supposed to be done by people who are already kind of fit, I decided to give it a try.  I brought a bunch of dumbells and got down to business. The first few weeks were brutal. I was barely able to finish all the exercises. The workouts are usually 60 mins but I took long breaks and in the end it took more like 90 mins and I was barely able to do any exercises towards the end. I went on like this for a few days and they proved to be very tiring and I was always weak to do any other activity. I continued with the pain for the 1st phase which is 1 month long, but after that I could not take it anymore.

So I decided to break the workouts into two 30 minute sessions. I would do the first 30 minute session of each workout in week 1 and next 30 minute session in week 2. This would mean that I will take double the amount of time, but at least I will have some energy to do something else. I always did all my workouts in the evening after coming back from work so I was already tired by the time and could not do all that well. Initially I used o skip some exercises like chin-ups from “back and biceps” routine. But I kept a very good record of every single exercise I performed and how much weight I used and how many reps I did.

Later I got myself a chin-up bar and started doing the chins-ups too. Although the exercises were very difficult especially towards the end (even though it is 30 mins workout I used to take 1 hr), I did see some physical improvements and some strength gains too. But the gain were very slow to come by. I am not sure if that is normal or if P90X was not for me. I will share some before and after stats for my pull-ups, push-ups etc in my next blog.

One mistake I did not was not taking pictures. So I have to go by my memory or with any photos of me when attenting parties or meeting people. Anway I felt P90X was not too bad and decided to continue until the end of 2008.

Coming to food, I still did not pay much attention to what I ate. I got the P90X protien shake and used to drink that post workout but other than that I ate all kind of junk food at other times and never ate at regular intervals. I would have a huge meal, then wait 6 hours and then another huge meal. The gap is usually filled with coffee or mountain dews. So I don’t know if that was effecting my strength gains. Another big problem with me is that I feel full very easily. Which is the main reason I think I was always skinny no matter what I ate, just because I was not eating enough.

In my next blog I will give more details of my stats and how things unfurled as the year was coming to a close.

Filed under: Uncategorized, exercise, p90x, strength gain