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
. I was able to do about 10 push-ups at that time.
