Getting in Shape

Image via Wikipedia

I have a personal fitness goal and I’ll admit that it is basically as vague as “get in shape” but I think that’s ok because, well, being in shape is important, undefined and a lifelong pursuit — it’s not something that you accomplish and then stop. What can be specific is the way in which you hope to accomplish it. For about the last year I’ve been trying and failing to use an exercise program called P90X. P90X is designed to be a 90 day workout program that is a complete program targetting flexibility, cardio, muscle strength, etc. etc.

It’s a 90 day program and I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to implement it for the last year.

Something isn’t working and something has to change.

Great goals are great goals but accomplishing them also requires honesty and instead of beating myself up over why I’m failing at this I decided to try and figure out why (don’t get me wrong I’ve given myself a hard time over this more often than I care to remember). The truth is that I’m not in as good shape as I thought I was in and for now P90X is just too damn hard. What’s more, the workouts are too long and instead of even trying to do part of an exercise routine I just use the excuse “well if I just do this little bit more work I can justify taking an hour and a half to exercise”. But since there is ALWAYS more work to do I never get to doing what I need to do to take care of myself and my health.

It’s a vicious cycle and it has to stop.

There are somethings that I really like about P90X; the videos give pretty good instruction on how to do the actual exercises and it basically gives you a schedule of what to do and when. The whole process of using muscle confusion to get results is great but I really don’t have the time or know-how to figure out when to do which exercise and how to get the best results — it’s a science and with P90X the research is done for me.

So in being honest with myself I decided to seek out another workout program which is not quite so advanced and has shorter exercise routines. That’s when I found a program called Power 90 (coincidentally a precursor to P90X itself). I’ll be starting tomorrow and hopefully actually be able to stick to it and achieve some results. Maybe I’ll even blog about it here as I go along.

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