Fitness Destinations

Click here to see my personal P90X 90 Day After Pictures!

In this P90X^® review, the Chest, Shoulder, and Triceps routine is covered, and understanding this routine is critical if you really want to get a lot out of it. If you try to fumble your way through, you won’t see nearly as many results as you will by performing these moves accurately and intensely.

Intensity is what you are after in this P90X routine – NOT heavy weights. There is no room during this workout to try to be a hero and throw around a bunch of heavy weights, because – quite simply – this workout is hard. You will get more results, lessen your chance of injury, and build up more strength and endurance by keeping perfect form with lower weights rather than trying to “cheat” with heavier weights.

Also, there are a lot of body weight exercises in this routine, and they are spaced out appropriately to really burn out your muscles, so even if you are normally able to do heavy weights on certain movements, don’t let your pride get in the way when you have to drop the weight a bit in order to keep up proper form and/or the prescribed number of repetitions.

Exercises during this Workout include: Slow-Motion 3-in-1 Push-ups, In & Out Shoulder Flyes, Chair Dips, Plange Push-ups, Pike Press, Side Tri-Rise, Floor Flyes, Scarecrow, Overhead Triceps Extension, Two-Twitch Speed Push-up, Y-Press, Lying Triceps Extension, Side-to-Side Push-ups, Pour Flyes, Side-Leaning Triceps Extension, One-Arm Push-ups, Weighted Circles, Throw the Bomb, Clap or Plyo Push-ups, Slow-Mo Throw, Front-to-Back Triceps Extensions, One-Arm Balance Push-ups, Fly-Row Press, and Dumbbell Cross-Body Blows

This workout seems longer than some of the other workouts, but that is just because Tony Horton and the gang beat on the same muscle groups over and over again, and you never get all that much of a break.

That, of course, is why this workout is so effective, however, so be sure to give it everything that you’ve got. Whether you are a woman or a man, the muscles worked during this routine are the “glamour” muscles, so keep that in mind if you are thinking about giving up or putting forth a half-baked effort when you start to get tired!

See other related P90X Review posts:

• P90X Review Day 1 – Chest, Back, and Ab Ripper X
• P90X Review Day 2 – Plyometrics
• P90X Review Day 3 – Shoulders and Arms
• P90X Review Day 4 – Yoga X
• P90X Review Day 5 – Legs and Back
• P90X Review Day 6 – Kenpo X
• P90X Review Day 7 – X Stretch
• P90X Review Day 8 – Core Synergistics
• P90X Review Day 9 – Cardio X
• P90X Review Day 11 – Back and Biceps

The squat exercise has many different variations, and not all of them are the classic image that people get of some huge guy with chalk all over his hands trying to squat down with about 800,000 pounds of metal on his shoulders!

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Dumbbell Squats

When doing the dumbbell squat, you have many advantages over doing the classic barbell squat. For one, since the dumbbells are held down at your sides rather than having a barbell on your shoulders, you can focus on the exercise itself, rather than trying to balance a weighted barbell. Also, since the added resistance (the dumbbells) hangs down at your sides, it can be easier for novice exercisers to keep their head up and their back erect, both critical factors for doing a safe and effective squat of any kind.

When doing the dumbbell squat – as with all squats – be sure that when you squat down, your knees do not travel out in front of your toes. Your feet should be at least shoulder width apart and pointed straight forward, rather than angled out or in.Related Downloads:
Dumbbell Exercises
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Weight Loss Keeping your head up allowing the straight, but natural curve of your back, squat down all the way until your thighs are parallel to the ground, pause for one full second, and then push up through your thighs to a full standing position before doing the next repetition.

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Ask the Experts: Lower Body & Leg Exercises
Workout Resources: Lower Body & Leg Exercise

The Dumbbell Supination Curl is one of the best overall bicep exercises because it works the bicep muscles from several different angles and it engages the forearm muscles as well.

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Dumbbell Supination Curl

When you begin this exercise, you are holding the dumbbells down at your sides, with your palms facing in towards your legs. As you raise the dumbbells, turn your arms so that your thumbs rotate out away from your body. This has the effect of changing the angle of attack on the bicep muscles, which stimulates growth in a different way than "flathead" type of exercises like the Bicep Concentration Curl.

Also, you will engage the forearm muscles when doing the dumbbell supination curl, and since some of the forearm and bicep muscles and tendons wrap around the elbow, you will be providing additional stimulation there as well. Related Downloads:
Upper Body Exercises
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Dumbbell ExercisesThe graphic shows doing this movement with both dumbbells at the same time, although you can actually get better neuromuscular coordination and ultimately more strength by doing the exercise one arm at a time. 

Click here to see a massive list of websites that teach people to exercise!

Ask the Experts: Dumbbell Workouts

There are a lot of reasons why people want to workout at home, and there are many benefits to doing so. However, if you are considering working out at home, why not make it easy on yourself, as well as ensure success by doing it right?

The following list of 7 Simple Tips on How to Workout at Home will help you make the most of your home workouts, thus ensuring the success of your fitness and weight loss efforts!

1) Creating a Space

One of the most important tips about working out at home is that you must have a space that is dedicated to exercising. Ideally that space would be permanent and you would not have to put away your exercise equipment when you were done with it.

However, even if your ability to workout at home hinges on sharing your exercise space with common areas of the house (living room, dining room, basement, etc.), you must have a space that can be used at least part-time for exercising. If you do not have an area where you can easily do your home workouts, then you will end up not doing them, because:

• You won't take your workouts seriously if you are in an area of your house that doesn't "feel" like an exercise area.
• If you have to struggle with finding a place to workout on any given day, then it will become a hassle, and you simply won't do it. 

2) Minimal Equipment

You do not need an excessive amount of exercise equipment in order to do effective home workouts. A good set of dumbbells and an exercise ball are a great place to start, and you can expand from there only if you desire – it is not necessary. There are dumbbell exercises and exercise ball exercises that are radically effective if done properly and consistently.

If you allow yourself to believe that you need a lot of equipment before you can effectively workout at home, then it may not end up happening for 2 reasons:

• You may not have enough room in your home for a large stash of exercise equipment.
• The more exercise equipment you need, the more it will cost you to set up your home workout area.

In addition, although it never hurts to have access to a good treadmill or elliptical trainer, you can also get a great cardiovascular workout by doing plyometric exercises such as jumping jacks and high jumps, or doing circuit-style training that keeps your heart rate elevated for the entire workout.

3) Scheduling a Time

Setting aside a time for working out at home is just as important as setting up a place to workout. For many people it is difficult in the beginning to workout at home because there is no time when they "have to" do it. They think that since they can just get up and go workout whenever they want to that they will just do it later.

"Later" keeps getting pushed further and further back in the day, and before you know it, the entire day has gone by and you still haven't done your workout! Make it a part of your daily routine to exercise, and even put it on your calendar if you need to so that you don't schedule something else during your workout time. 

4) Removing Distractions

It is very easy to get distracted when you are working out at home because you have so many options for what you could be doing at any given moment. Between your own chores or responsibilities and the demands of your family members, neighbors, and even your pets, what started out as a planned workout can quickly become less than productive.

Whatever it is that you could be distracted by, be sure to remove it before you start exercising. That could include anything from turning off your telephone and your TV, to telling the people in and around your house that you are unavailable during your exercise time. It may take a few workouts before the new procedures become a habit for you and everyone else, so be sure to stick it out past the initial confusion. Everything smooths out pretty quickly.

5) Staying Motivated

For some people, it is difficult to be motivated in the home environment. It is not the environment that people generally associate with exercise, and without other people there who are also exercising, it can be easy for your motivation to leak away.

The best way to counter this is to do everything that you can to take your mind out of the home environment. Put on your headphones and rock out while you are exercising, use that time to listen to motivational or empowering audio programs, or even turn on the local health and fitness channel on the television to provide an appropriate backdrop for your exercise session.

6) Toys

A lot of people don't know it, but there are some incredibly fun electronic toys that you can play with at home that will allow you to have some fun while you are exercising!

The EyeToy Kinetic is a total blast and can deliver some amazingly difficult workouts while actually putting yourself inside the game.

Yourself Fitness is another gaming system where your virtual trainer Maya guides you through everything that you are supposed to be doing.  In addition to over 500 exercises, Yourself Fitness also comes with meal planning, over 4,500 recipes, and even shopping lists.

QMotion FunFitness is another system where you actually interact with the environment on your television screen, while playing racing games that you already own. Very cool stuff!

Here are pictures of each of the products listed above:

In addition to the game-related exercise systems listed above, there are also thousands of exercise and fitness DVD's that you can choose from in order to get a great home workout, and most of them require very little exercise equipment.

7) Nutrition

And finally, when working out at home, you have the ability to plan your nutritional intake to get the maximum benefit from your home workout program.

People who workout at a gym tend to either workout on an empty stomach, or wait too long after they workout before they get the calories that the body needs in order to recover properly from their workout.  

Ideally you would ingest some healthy calories one to two hours before exercising, and then again one to two hours after your workout. To find out what type and amount of calories you should be taking in based on your fitness goals, check out Nutrition Generator, which is an in-depth system of both planning and tracking your nutritional intake. 

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The Bicep Concentration Curl is an effective bicep exercise because it will isolate the bicep muscle, while at the same time giving a point of leverage so that you can move more weight, resulting in faster progress.

Be sure to visit Fitness Generator to get access to almost 2,000 exercise graphics as well as instructions on using bodyweight, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, and more!

Bicep Concentration Curl

Start with your feet flat on the floor, wider than shoulder width apart. Grab the dumbbell and then brace the back of your elbow against the inside of the knee. 

Keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground, simply curl the weight up towards your shoulder, hold for 1 to 2 full seconds, then slowly return to the starting position before repeating the movement. Be sure that your upper body does not move as you start to get fatigued. This will cause the exercise to lose its effectiveness, and could also lead to injury. 

Click here to see a massive list of websites that teach people to exercise!