It is kind of funny to look back at my first posts. I don't think I knew exactly what I wanted. I thought I knew my body well, but I was truly ignorant. I think I saw the perfect bodies on the P90X commercials and I thought after 90 days, I'd look like that. I didn't think about weight loss or weight gain. I just thought I'd magically look like the "after" pics after I did 90 days.
Although I followed the exercise routines very religiously (I think I missed 3 workouts over 90 days), I will admit that I didn't subscribe to their diet exactly. However, I recorded everything I ate and kept a diet of around 25-35% protein, 15% fat and 50-60% carbs. In my mind, I was not looking to gain or lose weight, so I maintained a diet of about 3000 calories a day. The P90X workouts burned between 700-1000 calories a day, so I netted around 2300 calories a day...essentially my maintenance calories.
I had already been working out before P90X, so I didn't gain a tremendous amount of strength. However, I definitely could do things after 90 days that I couldn't do on day 1. You can see improvements in reps and weight in the final weeks. However, some of that is because I was so initially afraid of the workouts that I started out with ridiculously small amounts of weights.
As far as how I looked...I saw NO difference on day 90. You could see nothing in my before/after pictures. And my dimensions on day 90 were practically identical to my dimensions on day 1. People have been very quick to blame it on the diet. I am OK with saying not following the diet will reduce my results. But will diet truly eliminate ALL results? And it isn't like I didn't follow the spirit of the diet or was drinking chocolate shakes all 90 days. I had a healthy high protein diet. I believe P90X alone (even with the diet) cannot truly provide the results that many people need. In order for P90X to be most effective, you need to be somewhat out of shape, be slightly overweight, have too much body fat and have too little muscle mass. You have to be able to be able to burn off excess fat while building muscle...two things that are impossible to do at the same time (do your own research) unless you are at the perfect starting point (overweight, high body fat, low muscle mass). And even then, you need a dose of good genetics to get to the classic P90X after pics. People who are already generally in shape (and without super genetics) are not going to be able to eliminate that last bit of body fat and build even more muscle at the same time.
Let me share with you what I went through before and since and what I've learned about my body. About a year before I started, I went on a crash diet. Nothing good came from that except I kept track of everything I ate and how it affected my weight. Here are the results:
What you have here is daily caloric intake on the x-axis (from left to right) and daily weight change/loss on the y-axis (from top to bottom). Each point is a single day where I weighed myself. Here you can see that at about 1750 calories of food in a day, I would lose up to 0.2 pounds in a day. And at closer to 2300 calories of food in a day, I would lose 0 pounds. That is how I got my "maintenance calories" or how many calories I can consume without gaining or losing weight.
After my 90 days of P90X, I took some of the exercises and made my own workouts. I decided to increase my weight, use machines and not do too much cardio-intensive stuff. I increased the calories I ate (heavy on the protein) and tried to gain muscle instead of fat. I got up to about 174 pounds, all along keeping track of my measurements...specifically my waist. Here is what I saw:
On the x-axis (from left to right) is my historical weight (which ranged from 146 to 174). Yes, 146 was WAY too light...that was in the middle of a crash diet and I was crazy back then. On the y-axis is my historical waist measurements in inches. Each dot represents some day that I measured my weight and waist. What you see here is almost a straight line that connects the dots. It essentially means that as I gain weight, my waist (which represents fat) gets bigger. I wasn't able to ever gain JUST muscle weight. Fat (as measured by my waist) always came along for the ride.
Here is another way to look at it:
Here I show a number of measurements on different dates...P90X start, P90X end, the end of where I was trying to gain muscle/weight and two points during subsequent P90X runs (yes, I did it a few more times) where my weight was 166 pounds. Here you can see that at the end of P90X, I lost a tiny bit of waist and chest but everything else was the same (my thigh measurements are suspect). When I went though a weight gaining phase, I gained essentially the same percent of weight as in inches on my waist and biceps (representing fat and muscle). And at the two points in subsequent P90X runs, you can see my waist and muscle (waist and biceps) essentially stay the same.
The take home message is: I gain weight, I gain fat AND muscle. I lose weight, I lose fat AND muscle. I can't separate the two. So I'm essentially doomed to be super skinny without muscle or fairly muscular with a small spare tire around my waist.
So why did I keep doing P90X if it doesn't make a difference. Well for two reasons. First, it is a run workout that keep me in shape (cardiovascular wise). It also burns enough calories to keep me from gaining weight. It is an all-around workout that hits every muscle and it is structured in a way to cover all the bases...weight lifting, flexibility and cardiovascular. So bringing P90X into my lifestyle is keeping me healthy. The second reason is whenever I find myself gaining weight, doing P90X is so intense that it is easy to lose that weight again without killing myself too much on a diet.
But there is another reason...one that I find confusing based off of the numbers I put above. After a year of doing it, I actually am starting to see some interesting improvements. Even though my waistline is staying the same, I'm starting to notice that abdominal definition you see in the commercials. Maybe it just takes more time than 90 days to start to see that.
Anyhow, I'm going to keep P90X in my routine. I'm essentially doing the upper body workouts of weeks 9 and 10 (alternating back and forth) while doing Ab Ripper, Yoga and Plyo twice a week and Kenpo once a week. My knees are starting to protest the Plyo, so I may switch one Plyo day to Core Synergistics.
So that is where things are now. I'm currently dropping weight from about 178lbs (I'm at 169) with a goal to get to 162 and finally stay there. Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (another P90X-er) was at 162 and was about the same height as me and everyone talked about how healthy he was, so it sounds like a reasonable figure to stick at. At that point, I'll continue to net around 2300 calories while sticking with P90X to maintain overall health.
Thanks for reading and good luck to anyone who tries P90X. Obviously, it worked for enough people to make all those before-after pictures and if you are at the right weight/fat content/muscle content and have the right genetics, it can work for you too. And even if it doesn't it will likely make you a more healthy person which is better that looking perfect anyway.
Hopefully this blog will be helpful to someone going through the same stuff that I did.
INDEX of every workout (in order)
INDEX of every workout (grouped by workout type)
WORKOUT SHEETS
