P90X is seen as the ultimate challenge. 90 days of almost ridiculously hard exercise, endless hours of brutal workouts that push you to your limits and then challenge you to go one further. If you do what Tony Horton says, if you eat right, sleep right, and break through your barriers to reach that 90 day mark, then congratulations. You’ve proved yourself to be Extreme. But the question then becomes–now what?
One of the easiest responses is to go back and do it again. P90X comes with alternative workout calendars for those who want to repeat the program, from the P90X Doubles plan for those who want to add more cardio, or P90X Lean, for those who want to focus on losing body mass at some slight sacrifice of strength and speed. Most people find that, having gone through the workout once, they know what worked for them and what didn’t, and will devise their own workout strategy so that they can hit the areas they need to work on, and ease off on the areas that didn’t seem as necessary.
An increasingly popular method of repeating your P90X experience is to combine select workouts from Shaun T’s INSANITY Workout, replacing Cardio X, Plyo X and Kenpo with workouts such as Insanity’s Max Interval Circuit, Max Interval Plyo, & Max Cardio Conditioning. These allow P90X grads to not only challenge themselves with more intense aerobic and anaerobic work, but to also vary their workouts so as to maintain peak interest.
But say you want to take it to the next level. That’s where Tony Horton’s P90X Plus comes in. With 4 new DVD’s full of truly devastating workouts, P90X Plus is for hardcore grads of the original program who think they’re ready for the ultimate challenge. These 4 DVD’s can be spliced into your regular P90X workout, and you can think of them as bombs, lying in wait for you to reach their day so that they can go off and destroy you.
Or you can switch over to another extreme program like Shaun T’s, INSANITY Workout, the cardio equivelent of P90X that will target and attack your body from a completely different angle, with a philosophy that will have you working out at near your lactate threshold for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. 60 days of insane intensity will take your P90X results and shred them, stripping off any fat you may have left while revving up your cardio engine.
Finally, you can take it to One on One with Tony Horton. In the most exciting Beachbody development yet, Tony Horton is now releasing a new workout DVD every month wherein he works out in his home gym with a camera man, with no cuts, no edits, just raw, live footage of the man himself taking you through extreme workout after extreme workout. This is Tony at his most real, at his craziest and extreme, so if you think you’re done with the P90X program, if you think you’ve mastered everything Tony’s been able to throw your way, then you need to step up and go One on One with the master himself.
Great post and you write very well!
Thanks, Shandall! Much appreciated!
Can P90X be done by someone that is not quite up to that level yet if you just do the different routine until failure (i.e. modify)? I’m not trying to lose weight, but rather gain lean muscle mass. I am relatively thin and passed the flexibility/endurance parts of the P90X fitness test, just not the strength tests. Are the workouts “modifiable” using less weights, reps, or range of motion until eventually being able to handle them to completion? If so, I would rather turn the P90X into P180X instead of buying the Power 90 first.
Brett, that’s an interesting question. If you’re able to pass the flexibility and endurance tests, but are not quite there yet in terms of strength, then yes, I think you could do a modified version of P90X. Do assisted pull-ups, use lighter free weights, etc.
However, let me be clear: the intensity behind P90X is not just in terms of how much weight you are supposed to lift, but whether your system as a whole can handle that level of stress load. You’re going to be stressing your joints, your heart, your lungs, and energy reserves, not just your muscles. If you think you can pace yourself, keep up with the volume of workouts/week and moderate your resistance training so as to not burn out or hurt yourself, than I say go for it! You can potentially cycle through it several times, each times working out harder, longer, and with more weight, until you are where you want to be.
Just be sure to listen to your body as you go through this, and make sure to not push past soreness into pain. Good luck, and please let us know how your experiment goes!