Why You Can’t “Spot Reduce”

The Importance of Working Your Core Muscle

P90X Review Legs and Back (Day 19 - Phase 1)

I don’t know if it was because I stayed up too late the night before, or it was the fact that I was going to go into work on my day off, but I was zapped of strength throughout this P90X workout.  The leg portion went well, the pull-ups were a struggle.  When I got Ab Ripper X,  it was like the first day I’ve ever done the workout. I can’t wait until I get caught up at work and relieve this stress.  Can’t be good for the cortisol level in my body right now.  One of the effects of high levels of cortisol is increased abdominal fat, so the sooner I get the stress level down the better.

Went to work and designed marketing materials including Adobe Acrobat interactive forms with fields that performed calculations.  Struggled with some of the Javascript code totake care of some divide by zero errors I was getting in some of the fields.  This is the first time I’ve ever created these fill in forms with Adobe Acrobat so it was a learning experience.  The results were some good sales tools our company can use to show the ROI of our products.

I left work at about 3:00 and stopped by Walmart to see what they had for fitness equipment.  It was really cold on Saturday and I had to park quite a way from the doors, so I jogged to the store.  Before P90X, I would have been a little winded, after almost three weeks of P90X I reached the door with very little effort.  It was great to feel the benefits of my hard work every day.

I’ve mentioned in some of my past posts on the arms and shoulders P90X workouts that I could really use another pair of dumbbells. Some of the exercises called for heavier weights, but I didn’t want to stop the DVD to swap the plates on my dumbbells so I’ve been using weight that hasn’t been heavy enough.  I didn’t want to buy the fixed weight kind since I already have a bunch of steel plates, so I’ve been shopping around for dumbbell handles.  They had a great deal on some dumbbell handles.  They were only $7.70 a piece.  They have heavy rubber padding on the handles and the collars moved smoothly on the handles so the machining was high quality.  After a stressful day it was nice to reward myself with something that will benefit my health in the long run.  These were not shown on the Walmart website and I couldn’t even find them on the manufacturer’s website, so I’m glad I stopped in to look around.

I can’t wait for Shoulders and Arms next Thursday…I’m going to be bringing it!

P90X Review Yoga X (Day 18 - Phase 1)

Did my Yoga X routine on Friday and was glad I did.  The previous workouts this week have been difficult to really put forth the effort and focus on the task at hand. I complete the P90X workouts, but my mind has been stressed out about work-related stuff.

Yoga X was different.  I tend to hyper focus on getting all the poses executed as well as the P90Xers on the video.  I really “bring it” and I’m rewarded by having a good workout and for an hour and a half any thoughts of the projects and deadlines at work are gone.

I’ve read some other P90X bloggers celebrating personal victory when they’ve mastered the Crane pose.  That one is impossible for me right now, I’d love to master that one.

P90X Review Shoulders & Arms / Ab Ripper X (Day 17 - Phase 1)

Shoulders and arms today, my favorite P90X workout.  I know I’ve commented about this in the past, but the workout seems rushed to me.  No sooner does Tony end the lifting the routine and tell you to record your results, then he’s onto the next exercises with weights in hand.  Even the editing is choppy in parts.  It almost seems like they were trying to put too many exercises into too small of a time frame.  What’s with the “bonus exercises”?  Even that’s different than the other days that I’ve been through so far.

I’ve been under the gun at work to finish a project for a deadline and the added stress is affecting my lifting efforts.  Well, things should be better next week, but this week I’ll be working 11-12 hour days and I’ll probably be at work all day Saturday as well.  By the time I come home I eat a little bit and crash in bed.  I have still been disciplined to drag myself out of bed at 5:00 AM each day.

Eyes on the prize, gotta keep my eyes on the prize!

P90X Review Plyometrics (Day 16 - Phase 1)

Ahh….P90X Plyometrics a workout like no other.  If you’re not sweating at the end of an hour of jumping and squatting, there’s something wrong.  While I was working out this morning I thought out all the workouts, Plyometrics is the one workout that the benefits you gain is in relation to how much you put into it.  It’s so easy to not quite give it your best and lie to yourself and think, “oh yeah, great workout today”.  I find myself dogging it every once in awhile and then turn it up a notch to make sure I’m really bringing it.  The other thing I realized is that plyometrics is one of the workouts that I don’t set a goal for during the workout.   A large part of that is that there is no worksheet involved in this exercise set.  Some of the exercises would be hard to quantify or measure, but others such as the Creek Jump would be easy to see if I made progress in the length I’m jumping.  That’s something I’m going to have to work on for some of the future Plyo workouts.

I used the yoga mat for extra cushioning, but my old creaky knees still took a lot of abuse and they were sore all day.