Rest – Page 4 – Something Beats Nothing Every Time

Day 53 – Gumby would be proud

Flexible and green. At least 50% of what I need.

One of the best things about rest week is the requirement to do X Stretch. For those who choose to take Sunday (or day 7 whenever that is) off instead of doing X Stretch this will open your eyes to a new kind of workout. It is kind of like Yoga would be if it was really easy! Personally I choose to do X Stretch when I can but having it as part of the regular schedule in the middle of the week is a real refresher. I have to admit that although I am not the most flexible guy in the world I do enjoy X Stretch now. Working on my tendons, ligaments and fascia goes a long way towards my overall comfort and health on a daily basis. In fact, I noticed the other day that my back hasn’t cracked since I started P90X, a certain sign that the compression of my spine is far less than it was previously and that is always a good thing.

Day 52 – The Hamster Dance

Kenpo, my favourite.

Not only is rest week a great break from the hardcore workouts but it allows you to really enjoy the workouts rather than forcing yourself through them doing as much as you can. This extra enjoyment makes Kenpo an amazing workout. I got my recovery drink in the mail the other day and so I put some in my workout drink today since it was pretty hot in the basement. First let me just say that it really is not just hype about the drink, it has a good balance of nutrients but more importantly it really does taste great. Not since the first time I tried Met-Rx have I been impressed with the taste of a fitness product but I was truly floored by the taste of the recovery drink. I ordered mine direct from BeachBody and although it took longer than expected to arrive (by about 5 days) it was well worth it. Each packet makes 12 ounces which is about 350ml but I found that when I mixed it in my drink bottle (PureHydration bottle) which is 500ml it tasted just as good, not watery at all. By the way, I have a ton of reusable bottles, both composite plastics and stainless steel and I have never found one that keeps hot things hot or cold things cold like the PureHydration bottle does. It is literally mind blowing how good this bottle is. I had cold water from my cooler at home in the bottle which is black sitting in my Jeep. The bottle was in direct sunlight for over an hour and was hot to touch when I got to it. I opened the bottle and the water inside was just as cold as if it had come directly out of the cooler. Nothing much impresses me to be frank, but this really was amazing.

So I am into rest week 2, feeling fine, but starting to get a little apprehensive about what to do after the 90 days are up. I have a gym membership that I want to maintain because I love to bench and the equipment allows me to do lots of variations that I can’t do at home. However, I don’t think that I want to go back to my old weights routine. I have come too far to slip back into that static strength stuff. So now I have to develop a training method that works both weights and the P90X methodology into a single package. Ideally I would like a system where I could do the workout at home or at the gym so if I feel like throwing in a DVD instead of going to the gym one day it would fit with my program. Then I will market the system as a whole revolutionary fitness breakthrough and make millions of dollars. That is one plan anyway. You see, the problem is that people who love the gym almost always love it for the social aspect as much as the workout. I don’t necessarily mean social interaction but rather social exposure. I enjoy the gym for social exposure, seeing people, listening to them, doing that man-nod thing to acknowledge them but I definitely don’t want to interact with them. Ewww. So if you can take the precise approach of the P90X and mix it with the ability to be in the gym with the other gym rats and cardio queens you would surely have a winning combination. Especially since in order to get that type of workout you have to be with a personal trainer. If I can provide a personal trainer quality workout regime that can be done at home or at the gym or even in a hotel room but more importantly can be done in ALL locations I am sure some people would go for it…

I’m gonna let the hamster in my head run the wheel on that one for a while…

Days 40-43 Major Malfunction, Long Weekend

So I kind of messed up this week. I did Kenpo on Thursday because I was sure that was the right thing to do. I realized once I checked the schedule that I was supposed to do Yoga on Thursday and Kenpo on Saturday. I actually ended up taking Saturday off (well, I did 45 minutes on the treadmill instead) instead of Sunday and then doing Yoga on Sunday. Then on Monday I built a large TV shelf to sit on top of the fireplace in the living room that would accommodate the tuner, the Satellite box, the DVDRW and both the Wii and the PS3. However, between fixing that up and installing it which took around an hour with the ridiculous amount of cabling involved and the small but significant amount of gardening that I did I managed to miss out my workout all together. So I now find myself on Tuesday without having done my Monday workout which means that I will now have to go without a day off this week.

So here is the plan.

Tuesday: Chest Tri Shoulders
Wednesday: Plyo
Thursday: Back and Biceps
Friday: Yoga
Saturday: Legs and Back
Sunday: Kenpo

This will get me back on track for next week which coincidentally is a rest week which fits perfectly.

So what did I do with my 4 days off? Well, I completely finished revamping the garage so that I actually have room to work and room to park the Jeep again. I built the shelf I just mentioned and installed it however if it works out fine and we like it, I will have to take it down and paint it black so it fits in. I did a good job with it too, routed the edges and everything to make it look professional! I also bought and installed a new stereo head unit for the Jeep, one with a USB port on front so you can use a flash drive for your music instead of CDs. That means I can get an 8GB memory stick and put every song I have ever heard on it! Nicole thinks we need a road trip now so we can listen to all that tuneage!

pioneerp3100 I did manage to fix the broken fence on the walkout deck and do some gardening, attempting to rescue our front yard flower bed that I built last year from the grass that has overtaken it. Weird how I still have stupid holes in the actual lawn but the grass grows like crazy everywhere I don’t want it to. I also “fixed” the mirrors in the basement, ever since I installed them I have been meaning to glue them to the wall instead of having them rest on the rail I built for them. I had assumed that if I glued them to the wall they would all be aligned properly and would look perfect. Not the case. In fact, the wall is so messed up that the mirrors are even worse than they were. Oh well, lesson learned that if you want a mirror wall, get a large mirror, don’t try to make one from small mirrors. Actually, it would probably have worked OK if I had stuck the mirrors to a surface I knew was flat and then against the wall. Maybe I will try that if I can get them off the wall now. Stick them to a piece of MDF and then attach that to the wall… hmmm…

So there you have it, a few days of major achievements around the house but not the greatest outcome on the P90X front. Although, even though I missed 2 workouts I added 2 days of cardio. Maybe that will all even out in the long run.

Day 35 – Couch Surfing

It’s Sunday. Rest Day. Cardio day not stretch X.

Nicole worked floor hours this morning and I stayed on the couch attempting not to sleep through the Hungarian Grand Prix. With Lewis Hamilton finally getting the success he deserves it should have been easy but even with the excitement of wheels falling off the cars I was unable to see the whole thing in once sitting. What is really weird is that no matter how far I rewound the DVR to watch it again, I always woke up with 4 laps to go.

I finally managed to finish the race and squeeze in a 40 minute jog on the treadmill. I then set about trying to get motivated to get back in the garage to finish some of the outstanding issues however with the rain and the thunder and so on I decided I would have a leftover steak from the BBQ yesterday and power nap my way through the afternoon.

One thing I can say about P90X is that I don’t feel at all guilty taking a day off like I used to. I know I am working hard enough to earn that rest time and even more importantly I know that I am working so hard that my body REQUIRES that rest time. Me, the couch and the cat, like the Three Musketeers were inseparable.

Did I feel guilty about not stretching? Not really, I actually stretched before and after my run this morning so I really didn’t feel like I was missing out. Â I spent the rest of the day in front of the computer sorting and reviewing photos and making sure the backups were done and so on. I was astonished at how many pictures we have at home but compared to people with kids I am sure we are still pretty much bush league. I have 10,000 pictures in my TO SORT folders, imagine going through all that!

Day 28 – Twitch

Yoga X

That Crazy Quack electrocutes another victim…

Today has been weird. I do feel much better after yesterday’s day off but I am having all kinds of weird muscle spasms. I think I am a little dehydrated and that is making my body do bizarre things. I feel like my phone is vibrating in my pocket where it is actually my quad muscle rippling with spasms. Same goes for my right tricep which has been pulsing like it is hooked up to Dr. Ho with a beat as regular as that new fangled rap music everyone is talking about. This morning my back felt much better. It is still a little stiff but the pain of the pull is almost gone. Nicole spent her day painting the main floor bathroom and I spent mine cleaning the garage, putting up the maps in the basement (which almost caused a fight between Nicole, me and the cat) and furthering my career in NHL09. Once it came time to go to see Tony the Devil I was ready to go. I had also gone to Home Depot after our weekly Costco trip and found a metal bar which is thicker than the chinup bar and that I can have confidence will not break. I am going to install it before Monday’s return to chinups and that should give me a much needed boost in my pull up proficiency. The Yoga X was good, it certainly passed more quickly and I found myself able to do a couple of positions that I had been unable to get up until now. I think it is the Half Moon maybe, anyway, one of the stupid twisty ones that I couldn’t do because I couldn’t reach the floor. I know that sounds really bizarre that someone wouldn’t be able to reach the floor but you have to understand that reaching over a massive leg with a behemoth sized bicep and triceps is not easy. I know many many men who would love to be in the position of having 19″ arms but believe me, it is not all it is cracked up to be when it comes to Yoga. Anyway, I am confident that I am getting more and more flexible as time goes along. I know I have decent balance so I don’t have difficulty with the balance portion of the workout however I feel like even that is improving. I think it is my focus that is getting better. Lifting weights like I have for years takes very short bursts of effort and as such very short attention. Yoga lengthens the amount of time that your mind spends concentrating on each muscle group and as such gives you much better control over them. I have found that as time goes along I have become much better at working the body part that is flexed and being able to relax the rest of my body, my face included. Usually as I struggle below 300+ lbs of bench press my face and indeed my entire body is contorted with effort. I am gradually finding that it is possible to channel that effort solely into the area being worked. Ya, weird I know but it seems to be true.

Day 27 – Saturday 18th July 2009. Stupid Monitor.

So I was cleaning out the garage today and decided to put the 20″ monitor out by the kerb for someone to take away, it is working fine and it’s free, I thought it would be gone in no time. However, as I reached to put it down on the electrical transformer in the front yard I felt a slight twinge in my back. A muscular pull type of feeling. Â I spent the rest of the day hobbling around and trying to keep my back warm, mostly by finishing Need For Speed:Undercover on the PS3 and renting NHL’09. Anyway, it came time to go to the basement and I really couldn’t face it. I knew that by tomorrow my back would feel much better and didn’t want to risk hurting it more, especially since it was Yoga X. I just couldn’t face 90 minutes of that kind of pain. So I switched tomorrow’s day off with today and will do Yoga tomorrow, hopefully in much more agreeable condition.

Wow! A real day off!

Day 26 – Time is really flying

I can’t belive it is already day 26. Tuesday will mark 1/3 of the program completed! I am feeling good because it is rest week and I no longer feel like I have been beaten with a baseball bat, I am sure next week this optimism and sense of wellbeing will be replaced with hostility and pain but until then I can say I could do this forever!!! Today is core synergistics again and I am looking forward to it becasue it is quite a fast paced workout and now I know what the exercises look like and feel like I can put a bit more effort in to it.

I love once you get the hang of things. This core workout is not bad once you are able to keep up. It is a lot of abdominal stuff but not as challenging as Ab Ripper thankfully. I guess because it is rest week they kind of want to go easy on you which is nice however my heart rate monitor is showing me still way ahead of where I would usually be with my gym workouts. One bizarre upshot of this workout is that I finally got around to documenting some of my own conditioning that I use for the Gymnastics girls which will come in handy next year. It has only taken me 5 years to get around to doing it!! Like I mentioned in a previous post, it is amazing how similar some of the moves and structure is to what I put together for them, I guess that means I am on the right track with my methodology.

I am supposed to be studying for my Nutritionist Certification at the same time as I am doing P90X, however I am far far behind in my studying compared to my 26 days of workouts. Hmmm… about 22 days behind actually.

Day 25 – It’s about time!

Stretch X

About time, it is now Thursday of rest week and we are finally getting a break. Even I, with my Tin Man flexibility, find a degree of relaxation and soothing wellbeing in Stretch X.

So I am working out in the basement, towards the end of the day when the sun is shining in through the walkout glass doors. This means that on days like today I can actually stretch in a large strip of sunshine as it floods in through the patio door. I feel like a big lazy cat stretching out on the one strip of warmth, it’s a very surreal feeling but it really REALLY is relaxing. I am pretty confident that the neighbours behind can’t see in, since they are almost 1/4 of a mile away but then again even if they could why would they bother watching some guy stretching. That would be weird.. for them I mean.

What can I say about stretching, my flexibility is better although my middle splits is just laughable even after the last 3 weeks of working on it. For some reason my inner thighs and hamstrings are incredibly tight and getting any sort of progress is, I fear, going to be incredibly slow. However, even with the slow progress I feel a lot less tension in my lower back from my hamstrings which is a huge bonus. I always felt that a large part of my problem with my back stemmed from my legs whether it was tight hanstrings or ITB shortening creating a pulling on the lower spine crushing the vertebrae together. All I know is that once I started doing ITB stretches I found a great deal of relief during those days when my back would have a dull ache all day. In fact I was so happy I shared those stretches with people here: http://iamcanadian.org/workout/stretching.htm so that anyone with the same post-surgery pain as I had could find some relief.

I also found some of the entries from when I did the original P90 program way before P90X came around. Apparently I was just as hostile and my behaviour just as erratic as today. This was posted November 15, 2005! Check it out:

Day 4 – I Hate Tony!.

Last night we did the cardio workout after dinner. Not smart. I really have to remember either to eat a lot less before the workout OR to do the thing right after work so I donâ€™t feel like a bag of pudding in the back of a pickup truck! Now I realize that it is only day 4 today which means that we have only done 3 workouts so far but I already harbour a festering hatred of Tony the guy in the video. Lucky for Nicole she gets to go do Yoga Booty Ballet if she wants to, but since I canâ€™t see myself doing Yoga or Ballet and I have no booty then I guess itâ€™s me and perky boy with the poor sense of humour.
Speaking of which, my clothes are just as tight and all I have lost so far is my sense of humour.

Day 24 – Chinup bars and P90x quitters

July 17 2009 – Kenpo – again!

Seems like just a couple of days ago I was doing Kenpo. Skipping that day obviously has thrown off my perception a little. In fact, I did Kenpo on the 12th which is only 3 days ago and checking the schedule I am only one day off so even with the rest day it would only be 4 days between Karate workouts rather than the usual 7.

I realized something really bizarre today, I tend to close my eyes during Kenpo. I don’t do it during any other workout except Kenpo and it is really confusing me. I mean I really enjoy the workout, it goes by quick and I really feel like I get a good workout so why am I closing my eyes when kicking and punching? Anyway, the more I do the Kenpo the more I like it. As with all the P90X workouts, it is only as difficult as you make it and the harder you push yourself the more of a workout you will get. Today I was sweating like a beast after I finished because I tried to get my kicks higher and my body twisting more into my punches. Evena little change will amount to a lot if you are doing over 100 reps total. In the back of my mind was the fact that tomorrow is stretch X which is basically a rest day so I wanted to get as much out of the workout as I could while I could.

I am also trying to find a way to produce a better chinup bar than the door mounted one I have. I know it is rated over 300lbs but I just don’t have the confidence in it. I was thinking of putting a metal or wooden bar between the support pillars of the deck so I can use it outside but in reality putting one between door posts would be best. I just want to be able to do everything that I would do at the gym as far as chinups go. I find myself holding back with the setup that I have at the moment due to fear of falling (again!) and hurting my back (again!). I will see what I can find at Home Depot as far as bars go, in fact I may go to Fitness Source and see if they have any straight curl bars I can use. I also wonder if shelling out for something more substantial may put me in the ballpark for a better chinup bar instead, I mean I can’t be the only 250lb guy who wants to do chinups with confidence can I?

Now I don’t want to sound superior, or to jinx my progress but I am trying to find a P90X blog where the person has actually managed to do the 90 days and it is almost impossible. The vast majority of blogs contain a handful of entries, a litany of excuses and a pathetic fading away to nothing. Come on people, it’s not that hard! Well, it is that hard but seriously, commit to something and stick with it for once in your life! There are a few blogs out there by the P90X coaches, of course they are completely biased when it comes to discussing the program, maybe it is something they put in the recovery drink to brainwash people. Maybe it is the same stuff they put in the Mac Get-An-iLife Kool Aid. Anyway I am searching for blogs away from the official P90x Boards just to get an unbiased opinion. I guess they are harder to come by than I imagined hey would be.

Speaking of the Forums at Beachbody, they are a great resource but again there are core members who have done P90x multiple times and if you pay attention you will see the same high attrition rate of people starting and either giving up or caving in just a few days in. It is good to read some of the stories but it is also full of people with crazy expectations and unreasonably high hopes blowing smoke up each others behinds. I guess that is human nature though. So for the time being I will stay detached and hopefully put together a 90 day experience that people can actually relate to and compare to their own journey.

Day 23 – Uncharted Territory

Core Synergistics.

If you ever decide that you think this may be a fun time, maybe even that you are up for the challenge I suggest you bear one thing in mind.

Tony Horton is a lying 0% bodyfat weasel.

Week off my butt! This is not rest, this is just a Little bit of everything from pushups to core, from plyometrics to curls all rolled into one vicious little workout. I envisioned a week of pampering, gentle stretches, cool breezes wafting over my body as I massage my aching soul with simple, preferably laying down, comforting exercises. Not likely. If you call this a rest week then you need your head examined. Just because we don’t do chinups for a week doesn’t make it a week off! The workout had weights and most of the exercises that didn’t have weights were core of some kind. In fact, at one point it felt like I was in one of my own Gymnastics classes because the moves were so similar to what I get the kids to do every fall. Anyway, once I got over the shock of not being wrapped in cotton balls and tickled with a feather I found the workout was OK. It wasn’t gut wrenchingly difficult, I didn’t make any of the scary noises I tend to do during the regular workouts so I suppose in a way it was a “break” from the usual. It was, however, a lot of abdominal work which I assumed it would be. Some of the moves I found difficult, some indeed were impossible for me at this point. I am not looking forward to being able to dothem because frankly they look painful but I suppose at some point I will be able to.

Weasel.