Tag: weighted vest

It is phase 2 week 1 and that means chest, shoulders and triceps workout with Tony. I felt like I had been taking it a little easy and so after a conversation with a coworker the other day decided to break out the Mir Weighted Vest I bought recently and see how painful it would be to do P90X wearing the thing. Well, I lived to tell about it but only just. I went from cranking out 30-40 pushups each minute to about 15! The worst thing was that I had only put 20lbs into the vest!! I was amazed at  how much more difficult it was doing the most basic things with the vest on. I know I have lost 60lbs but putting 20 back was torture. I don’t know how I had the energy to carry around all that extra weight.

Even without the weight, that workout is tough for me, not because of the movements but because I get increasingly frustrated with the lack of tricep work and feel that of all the P90X workouts, this may be one of the weakest. The problem is exactly what I fear P90X:MC2 will suffer from, an attempt to make things “interesting” leads to ineffective movements, overly complex and time consuming motions that waste valuable time setting up or mastering when you could and should be doing basic, slightly modified moves. A great example are the amount of overhead tricep extensions in this workout. That movement is never going to do much for size and has a high risk of injury. It would be far better to use close grip push ups or bodyweight dips on 2 chairs than to keep trying to isolate the muscle that way. Anyway, it’s nitpicking a bit, I find I sub my own dips on my dip station instead and I am happy.

Happy until I put on a 20lb weight vest that is…

Come to think of it, just wearing the thing with 50lbs in it would be a workout in itself, walking up that hill I ran last week with an extra 50lbs sounds pretty evil and just the kind of thing I would do.

I must be getting tired, I just edited the word “just” out of that last sentence 5 times! Who uses just 5 times in one sentence!?