So a lot of people coaching newcomers to P90X will claim that the first month is the hardest; that you’ll be sore the entire time and that you just have to keep “pushing play” and you’ll be in it for the long haul.
On one hand, I think that’s good advice in that, physically speaking, the first month IS the hardest and you certainly don’t want soreness to be the reason you quit a good program. I was sore as hell most of the time, and I was weak on most of the exercises. I still look back at the reps and weights of the resistance training from the first two weeks and I have to laugh. Wow, I was a complete wus! Now, I’m no Vin Diesal now, but I at least have some respect for my workout capacity these days.
Still. In some ways the first month was the easiest. I went into the program with a fire in my belly and a mind full of zeal and a few clear goals to boot — be able to do more than one pull-up, for instance. Plus, because I was so damn weak, I saw quick progress in obvious areas. “Wow, last week I was on my knees blowing on the ground trying to propel myself off since my noodle arms had long since failed and this week I wasn’t even blowing on the ground!” It’s hard to be a wus, but it’s even harder to stay that way when you start seeing rapid progress and a means to get stronger.
Fastforward two months, and THAT my friends is the hard part. It’s hard because you’ve already seen progress, you’ve already blown away a lot of the obvious weaknesses, but you still are having to work your ass off. There are still, like, four more weeks of this shanx, and you don’t know what the hell you’re going to do afterwards. More P90x? Pshaw, not likely! Maybe in a few months. But you’re in this weird limbo where you’ve made rapid progress but you still have a long ass way to go. Plus, although you probably won’t remotely plateau through most of the program, the progress is much more incremental, even subtle.
Happily, I only have two and a half weeks remaining this go round. My workouts have been slipping in a subtle way. I missed an Ab Ripper X routine completely, I’ve cut Yoga X short twice because of over-extending my weekend commitments; my eating has been sloppy. And to all that I can somewhere hear an indignant Beachbody coach screaming at me for half-assing it.
But there’s another side to slipping and how it affects us. For some of us, slipping on routines or our eating means we’ve failed and we might as well not continue. For me, it just means maintaining my intensity has become difficult, and I have to wonder why. And the truth is that I accomplished my major fitness goals with P90X faster than I realized I would, and I’m already trying to figure out what next big thing is going to motivate me and drive me to self-improvement in such a rapid manner. It might be taking a self-defense class. Or Kettlebell training. Or going through Insanity. Or a combination thereof! I haven’t figured it out yet, but probably the biggest thing P90X has given me is the desire for variety and self-expansion.
So I’ll keep pushing play and muster up whatever energy I have to finish up the program. Heck, I may even go through it again sometime in the (probably distant) future. I’ll surely incorporate some of the workouts here and there as they are really good ones. But I’m not going to beat myself up for slipping here and there. In the end, this program is about setting and reaching for personal goals, and that’s what I’m keeping in mind as I head towards the grand finale.
