Tony Horton’s P90X Extreme In-Home Workout seems at once easy to adopt and incredibly hard to do so at the same time. Why? Because the allure of the 90 day program is such that anybody should feel capable of committing to it. Three months or a full body transformation seems like a tiny amount of time to invest for such dramatic results. But then people actually sit back and look at their day to day schedules, and wonder: how am I ever going to squeeze an extra hour out of my already busy life? Where am I going to find the time?
What can make it even harder is knowing that for the next three months you are committed to being well rested and fed so as to be able to complete the exercises honestly. It’s almost (almost!) not worth trying to do a session of P90X if you’re hung over, have skipped breakfast and only got three hours sleep. You’re going to drag yourself along, you’re going to suffer, and that hour with Tony will feel like utter misery. So how do you insert P90X into your life while still having a life?
The truth is that to fully commit to P90X, you have to make some fundamental changes to the way you live your life. If you are in a position where P90X is an attempt to change your life again, to take control of your exercise and eating habits, if you look in the mirror and are not pleased with what you see, then perhaps P90X represents more than just a chance to acquire bigger biceps. If you’re already fit, already eating well, sleeping well and looking to just up the challenge level of your fitness routines with P90X, then these won’t be problems for you. But most people, I believe, will be coming to this program in the hopes of achieving some sort of radical change.
So think about it: radical change. One of the core messages of P90X is that you will not achieve a total body transformation if you just stick to the exercises and eschew the nutrition guide. For your muscles to grow and for your metabolism to become more efficient you need to have good, healthy fuel in your system. You have to change the way you eat. Small portions, six times a day, from a prescribed list of health carbs, proteins and fats. Changing the way you eat is a massive shift, and much harder actually than making yourself pick up a set of weights each day. That’s why the nutrition aspect of P90X is actually considered the truest obstacle and the stealthiest reason why most people fail to finish their 90 days. People don’t take it seriously, and thus fail to achieve their results.
If you commit to the exercise, and you commit to changing the way you eat, then the next step will be to ensure you get enough sleep. Again, strangely hard to do, in that most people already have certain lifestyles and sleeping patterns that can be tremendously hard to adapt. But if you don’t sleep enough, your body won’t have sufficient time to repair the microtrauma you’ve done to your muscles, and you will fail to see gains. So you have to commit to at least 8 hours sleep each night, and, to be honest, if you are doing the P90X program properly, you’ll be craving that sleep.
So look at how much your life will already have changed by this point: exercising once a day, a new diet, and a regular, better sleeping cycle. That is much more than just finding a way to insert a single hour of exercise into your schedule: that’s a new way of living your life. That’s re-prioritizing health and fitness over the things that led you astray to begin with. So perhaps the question to be asked is not, ‘How can I insert P90X into my life,’ but rather, ‘Am I willing to fundamentally change the way I lead my life for the better?”
