P90X Adventures: The Challenge - P90X3 Week 1

So,  I didn't really get to blogging about each day's worth of routine as I'd planned to, but I got through it.  I figure in the very least, I'll review the days I missed here.  Besides, I sort of viewed this past week as the "practice" week of sorts since my own P90X3 challenge group began yesterday!

I've got a few friends set to embark on 90 days of awesome.  They're gonna kick ass and get fit 30 minutes at a time!  So far, the group that I'm learning from has been pretty awesome.  People there are really supportive and keep things positive for each other.  It's also a good way to see a bunch of people that are on your level in terms of finding difficulty in the program.  The program is tough, but just like anything else, you do it enough and it'll get a hell of a lot easier.

Last week was kinda brutal.  Then again, remembering back, the first week of P90X was pretty damn brutal.  Mostly brutal in the way that I wasn't coming anywhere close to some of what they were doing on screen, but when I did, boy did I know it.  They had changed up moves I'd excelled at before into things that looked really "easy" but get you fatigued pretty quickly.

Agility X
This was definitely one of those that looked easy.  It's really not that difficult of a routine to do.  Probably one of the easier by far.  It's about endurance!  Sure, the move is easy to pull of when Tony starts out, but then he's going to go faster... and faster... and change directions on a whim.  Pretty soon, I was like a babbling mess but I made it through and man did it feel good to be done!  I'll take this over Plyometrics any day!

X3 Yoga
It was interesting to see them try to "cram" Yoga into such a tight 30 minute time slot.  This was obviously the longest of the P90X routines before.  They do a nice mix of moves and still manage to work in the calming and relaxing poses at the end.  There's a guy in this video who's ridiculous though.
Ted...
HO-LEE-SHIT!!
This guy is straight Yoga Level: Wizard.

I'm over here just looking at them do crow (used to be crane and you guys remembered when I tried that)

This friggin' guy... TED, he's already in crow and just casually stretches his legs up into a full goddamn hand stand.  Before that, we had a move called "Ted's Chair" which was like a leg up chair pose.  It looked pretty cool. I though I was awesome, then Ted goes and just floats up into some ted's chair-crane type move.

Goddammit Ted!! Stop Showing Off!!

So I (and probably everybody else doing X3 Yoga) have a new goal.  BE TED!!

The Challenge
This one threw me through a loop.  I've only ever done P90X. I'm used to the weekly format of resistance, carido, resistance, stretch, resistance, cardio, rest/stretch.  They're turning things on their ear already with Yoga going up to Wed.  Tony urges people not to skip it and I get it (because I used to skip it a lot too at first).  I wasn't expecting this routine.  On one hand, it's incredibly simple...

Pick two numbers.  A number for push ups, and a number for pull ups.

Then comes the challenge:  try to keep to those numbers for the duration of the routine.

...Oooh man...

I tried to watch all of these routines at least once beforehand so I knew what to expect.  When I watched this one at first I was like, Oh yeah, I can just roll like 20-15 or something like that.  By the end I was like... okay, uh, maybe 15-12.  Even THAT was wrong!!  I started out strong.  I'm like "okay, 15-12, I'll do more when I can". First set was standard pushups.  I banged those mofos out with ease.  I did 19, so I felt pretty awesome for starters.  Got my 12 pull ups done (chair assisted of course).  Boom! this is gonna be a cinch.
Then I had to do it over again... Ugh.  I made it about 2-3 round hitting my "numbers" and the rest of the time trying to catch them.  Sometimes I did, then the 2nd time around, didn't come anywhere close.  Oh man that thing got serious.  At the end, they had a "burnout" round where they wanted you to do 1 pull up (any variety) followed by 3 push ups.  As many times as you could within that last 2 minutes.

I mustered the energy and got at least 4 rounds of that done just choosing reverse-grip chin ups because those are a bit easier to do.  This was the first routine to really give me nausea from fatigue.  Push ups and pull ups are no joke.  Especially non-stop for 30 minutes straight.  Then came

CVX
So far, there hadn't been too much weight and resistance training for the whole week and now that it's practically over, I was thinking "okay, this must be some crazy serious leg day stuff"  I mean, chest and back was Thursday.  I was so used to that being a Monday thing.  This wasn't exactly a "leg day" routine in the traditional sense.  It was another cardio routine, except this time, there was a weight in the hands.  It was essentially like running sport drills.  It was kinda fun.  I got a lot of sweating in that's for sure.

Zu and I drove up to WA to visit some friends after I did this and took the dvds with me.  I was hoping to not miss Saturday's routine.  Things sort of worked in my favor as Zu headed down to Seattle to hang with her friends, my buddy Joe went off to watch the Sehawks game and Darrin wanted to get some more artwork done.  So we headed back to his place and I popped in:

The Warrior
THIS is currently the hardest routine I've encountered so far in the program.  I knew it was coming.  I'd been glued to Tony Horton's youtube vids and I hadn't seen the crazy assed moves he'd been throwing around yet in the routine, until now.  The warrior is basically a routine he designed for the military and then took that and put something together for P90X3.  Man, this was kicking my ass something fierce.  Then something unexpected happened.

Darrin decided to jump in somewhere past halfway just watching me attempt these ridiculous moves.

This move is EVERY BIT as hard as it looks!

We did our best attempts (with modifications) to do our best and forget the rest.  I mean really, sometimes we just sat there and watched jaws agape as they'd do something and I was just like "NOPE!".  Only to jump in when we saw something that looked really easy finding out that it became incredibly difficult so easily.  I think the thing that finally put Darrin down was one of the final moves where you do a squat jump and then come slowly back down to a squat on a 3 count.  Super simple move, but that come down.  He couldn't take it.  But you know what, he kicked ass and hopefully he'll decide he'll wanna get into it.  I assured him that everything else I'd done previously in the week was way easier.  That one is definitely one that doesn't inspire much confidence in people worried if they can pull off P90X3.  Although, you do feel like a total badass for surviving it!

On Sunday, I rested.  I was sore and beat to hell.  We drove back Monday and as soon as we got back after 6 hours of driving, I took Zu straight to Big 5 sports to get her a pair of cross trainers.  We stopped home long enough to change and then got to work on Total Synergistics.  This week was so much more improved over last week.  I doubled and in some cases tripled my rep counts for every move.  We had to take a bunch of breaks to get Zu up to speed on the moves as they showed up which made it a bit easier on us both. We had to work on a few further modifications for some of the moves because there are a few on there that really aren't all that modified, or the modifier in the group just forgot to actually modify.  Either way, she got through it and it wasn't nearly as bad as she thought it was gonna be.  I tried to tell her, but I think she just needed to experience it for herself.