In this on-going review of Insanity blog series, the truth behind the Insanity 60-day weight loss program is revealed with a play-by-play description of what the program is really like – and more importantly – if Insanity really works!

The Cardio Recovery workout portion of the Insanity program is the first “day off” in the program, although the term day off is used VERY loosely! Yes, it is an easier workout than the other Insanity routines, but to say that it is easy would be far from the truth.

Breathing & Stretching

Insanity Cardio RecoveryThe Cardio Recovery routine starts out pretty slow, which is a welcome change from most of the Insanity routines, all of which have you dripping sweat in less than 5 minutes.

The first 3 minutes are simple breathing and stretching exercises that, although not terribly difficult, do get you both mentally and physically prepared to start cranking things up during the rest of the workout.

Plank Work

The next 6 minutes consist mostly of “plank work,” which is to say that most of the movements include at least some portion of time spent in the classic plank exercise position. For anyone not familiar with the plank, it is basically the “up” portion of a standard push up. Your body is parallel to the floor, your arms are full extended, and your toes are on the floor.

The plank work exercises consist of several versions of getting into and out of the plank position, in and out jumps while in the plank position, and 1-leg pulses that work your hamstrings (back of the leg) and your glutes (butt muscles).

By the end of the 6-minute plank work section, your legs and shoulders are very much warmed up and ready for action, and your heart rate is also up high enough that most people will be sweating more profusely by this point in the workout.

Deep Muscle Work

The next section of the Cardio Recovery routine is a full 10 minutes long and consists of “deep muscle work”. In layman’s terms, it means is that you work your muscles through longer, slower repetitions, and you also hold several static positions in order to build up muscular endurance.

This portion of the workout consists mostly of squats and lunges, all done in 3 ways: slow, controlled repetitions; static  holds while in the contracted (difficult) portion of the exercise; and pulses which are short range of motion movements done from the contracted portion of each movement.

This 10 minutes of the workout is the most challenging, because there are no breaks to speak of. You basically get into a lunge or a squat position, and then you have to stay there LONG after your muscles are fatigued and begging for mercy.

Quadricep and Oblique Strengtheners

This part of the Cardio Recovery workout is about 4 minutes long and has some unique movements that most people have probably never seen before. They are meant to strengthen the quadriceps (top of the leg) and the obliques (side abdominal muscles).

The movements are done while in a modified “all fours” position where your knees are kept off the ground the entire time while you go through various leg and abdominal exercises – overall, some pretty cool stuff.

Hip Flexor Work, Flexibility, and Balance Poses

Coming up on the end of this workout, the next 9 minutes are spent stretching out the hip flexors, stretching your body overall, and working on improving your balance. The hip flexors are worked and adequately stretched during every single Insanity workout, and balance is also improved simply by the nature of the Insanity exercise routines.

The exercises in this portion of the Cardio Recovery workout aren’t terribly difficult, especially for people who have been doing Insanity for a few weeks, but they are still effective at what they are supposed to do, which is to increase your flexibility and balance.

Conclusion

The Insanity Cardio Recovery workout is just that a RECOVERY from cardio. It is not meant to be an easy workout, but rather just a break from the normal intensity of the Insanity workouts.

That being said, there are portions of the Cardio Recovery DVD that are far from easy, so skipping this workout is NOT an option during the 60-day Insanity program. You need this workout for the benefits of the workout itself, as well as for the much needed break from the rest of the Insanity craziness!

Buy Insanity Now!

Related Posts
INSANITY!
Review of Insanity – The Fit Test
Review of Insanity – Plyometric Cardio Circuit
Review of Insanity – Cardio Power and Resistance
Review of Insanity – The Fit Test Week 2
Review of Insanity – Pure Cardio and Cardio Abs
Review of Insanity – The Fit Test Week 4
Review of Insanity – Cardio Recovery
Review of Insanity – Core Cardio and Balance
Review of Insanity – Max Recovery
Review of Insanity – Max Interval Circuit
Review of Insanity – Max Cardio Conditioning
Review of Insanity – Max Interval Plyo
Insanity Before and After Pictures and Fit Test Results

© Aaron Potts - visit Fitness Destinations for more great information about weight loss, health, and overall fitness!
Fitness Destinations is proudly sponsored by the incredible products and services provided by Team Beachbody!

Flexibility is such an under-rated component of physical fitness, and in a program as intense as P90X®, it might seem like stretching for an hour is a joke compared to the intensity of the other workouts. Is it far less intense? Yes. Should you just skip it then? Absolutely not!

Stretching properly and effectively has many benefits, including workout recovery, injury prevention, and increased performance. The better you perform, the faster you see results, so that alone should motivate people to take the time to stretch.

The majority of the exercises that are included in the Stretch X DVD are movements that were taught in earlier workouts, including Yoga X. There are some new stretches as well, but it isn’t just the new stretches that give Stretch X its value – it is the fact that you are doing the stretches when you aren’t completely wiped out from a really intense workout!

During each of the previous P90X workouts, even though Tony Horton always does a great job of warming you up as well as cooling you down, your mind is still pretty scattered at the end of a workout simply because it was so intense. Tony is telling you to hang your arms down and rock back and forth, but you’re thinking about just face planting on the floor…

During Stretch X, you are not tired at all, with the exception of the residual soreness that most people will be feeling from the previous workouts. However, that isn’t to say that you won’t need to push yourself to your limits, just as you do with all of the P90X workouts. In Stretch X, you are simply doing it via effective stretches, rather than challenging resistance or cardiovascular exercises.

Overall, if you approach the Stretch X DVD with a calm and peaceful state of mind, you will get the most out of it. Be grateful for the wonderful break that it is from the high intensity workouts that you’ve become accustomed to, and just spend an hour taking care of your joints, and relaxing your mind.

The only caveat to all of that is to be sure – as with any workout – that you don’t overdo it. It is very possible to stretch too far, or to apply too much force to a stretch. If you end up with that type of an injury, you can count on being out of the P90X game for at least a week, if not more. For that reason, listen to Tony’s advice during the workout, stretch effectively and properly, and just enjoy the down time.

Your next workout after Stretch X will be back to Day 1 – Chest, Back, & Ab Ripper X – so enjoy the break while you have it!

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 8 – Core Synergistics
• P90X Review Day 9 – Cardio X
• P90X Review Day 10 – Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps
• P90X Review Day 11 – Back and Biceps

© Aaron Potts - visit Fitness Destinations for more great information about weight loss, health, and overall fitness!
Fitness Destinations is proudly sponsored by the incredible products and services provided by Team Beachbody!

A major health headline this week was a study dispelling the notion that you can be both fit and fat. Last fall, the wires were abuzz with citations about the dangers of being thin and fat (so-called “skinny fat”). With a national obesity rate of nearly 30 percent, we know that we’re overweight. But if thin isn’t the indicator of fitness, and you can’t be large and fit, how are we supposed to tell if we’re healthy? Let’s decipher what these studies indicate and sort through the murkiness about what it really means to be fit.

Can you be fit and fat?

The latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine reported a study of 39,000 women that suggested that fitness isn’t the only indication of one’s risk for developing heart disease. The subjects were between 50 and 60 years old and were tracked for 11 years. Nearly 1,000 got sick. The study showed that overweight women had a 54-percent greater risk of developing heart disease than those with similar exercise patterns who were not considered overweight. It also concluded that women who exercised, heavy or not, were two-and-a-half times less likely to get heart disease.

However, the study wasn’t fastidious in its parameters. It relied on self-reporting and used the BMI (body mass index) scale, rather than actual fitness tests, to determine the subjects’ fitness levels. This is where the study becomes questionable.

We tend to like things that come in simple-to-understand terms. Therefore, the government decided that we’d use the BMI scale to decide how healthy we are. It simply assigns you a number based on your height and your weight, leaving out such trivialities as lean muscle mass, body fat, basal metabolic rate, and other medical parameters. You may surmise that we all come in different shapes and sizes, so something as simple as BMI could be inaccurate. Your hunch would be correct.

While BMI can be a decent indicator across similar groups of people, it doesn’t account for athletic body types. Using the BMI scale, almost every wrestler, bodybuilder, and NFL player would be classified as obese. And while heavier people, fit or not, induce more strain on their hearts, there are many other factors to consider prior to categorizing them as being vulnerable to health risks. Without knowing these other factors, it’s difficult to make hard conclusions, especially when you consider that those with lower BMI numbers may be “skinny fat.”

At least it was clear that those who exercised, whether heavy or not, greatly reduced their risk. The conclusions of the study seemed to miss out on something very interesting—a comparison between thin women who didn’t exercise and heavy women who did.

Can you be skinny and fat?

Trying to answer the above question, we’ll refer to a study from London’s Imperial College showing that those who appear skinny to the naked eye but are unfit are still at risk to a rash of health problems.

Since 1994, Dr. Jimmy Bell and his team conducted MRIs on nearly 800 people, creating “fat maps” that show where they store fat. As it turns out, people who don’t maintain their weight with a combination of exercise and diet keep huge fat deposits around their internal organs. The scientists theorized that excessive inner fat can confuse the body’s communication systems, leading to heart disease, insulin resistance, or type 2 diabetes.

Again, fat and active people had a much lower mortality rate than the skinny and sedentary. This means that, as far as your health is concerned, a fitness test is a much better indicator than a scale or what size dress you fit into. As Bell explained to the Associated Press, “The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined.”

What does it mean to be fit?

Webster’s tells us that fitness is “the capacity of an organism to survive and transmit its genotype to reproductive offspring as compared to competing organisms”; Dr. Fred Hatfield, in his book Fitness: The Complete Guide, gives us a more layman’s view by defining it as: “Your ability to meet the exigencies of your lifestyle with ease and room to spare for life’s little emergencies.” Both definitions refer to functioning in the present as the main indicator, meaning that all these studies on heart disease in aging individuals probably aren’t even the best bases to use to make conclusions about an individual’s state of fitness.

Fitness is, in the simplest terms, your ability to perform in the world. We all have different goals and agendas and, in the end, we’re all going to die. But there are a few things that we all share, no matter what kind of life we lead. If we consider the eight parameters below, and if we can perform them decently, we can consider ourselves to be fit. And, more than anything else, a fit life is probably a lot more fun than a non-fit one.

1. Body-fat percentage. This is the percentage of your total body weight that is composed of fat. Ten percent to 14 percent is considered good for men, and 14 percent to 18 percent is considered good for women. Unless you’re a weight-dependent athlete or a fitness model, you don’t need to go to extremes, but all of us should strive to be within this range. Being far under it has health risks too but going above it is what most of us need to worry about—and what the obesity epidemic sweeping the world is focused on. Not only does excess weight put our bodies under extra strain, but excessive amounts of fat change our abilities to function properly. So far more than your weight, you should be focusing on keeping your body-fat percentage within this range.
2. Aerobic endurance. This is how efficiently your body transports oxygen. It’s a baseline fitness parameter that aids every more intensive fitness effort, from yard work to sex to running a marathon. Indicators of good aerobic fitness are a low resting heart rate and the ability to recover quickly after cardiovascular activity. You help increase this endurance by doing any type of activity but more efficiently when you do continuous low-level activity, like hiking or jogging.
3. Muscle mass. Like body fat, our bodies require a certain percentage of muscle to stay healthy. This varies per individual, but we all need muscle to meet the tasks of daily living. Above the age of 30, our bodies lose muscle mass each year, so it’s important to do resistance exercise to keep muscle mass. Besides aiding movement, muscle mass protects our organs and skeletal structures. To age gracefully, it’s vital to keep our muscle mass percentages high.
4. Flexibility. This isn’t the ability to do pretzel-ish yoga movements but simply your ability to move your body freely through a full range of motion. It’s important that we stretch our muscles because they contract during exercise and the daily rigors of living. Keeping your muscles supple gives you a buffer against being injured and is an indicator of overall fitness. It will help you age without as many complications.
5. Strength. Strength is the ability to use your muscles to generate force. It’s often defined in more specific terms, like limit, starting, or explosive strength, but they’re all a variation on the same theme—your body needs to be able to move stuff around. Most importantly, it needs to move you around. As we age, we lose muscle mass and strength. Mass protects your body. Strength moves it and keeps it from falling over. Furthermore, strength training requires short bouts of high-intensity outputs. These stimulate hormonal responses that also decline as we age. In a nutshell, strength training slows the aging process. The stronger you are, the slower you age.
6. Static balance. This is your ability to maintain control of your body’s center of gravity over your base of support. The importance of this ability is obvious, since life’s no fun if you’re always toppling over. It requires use of all of the aforementioned factors, and the best way to get it is to practice. What’s really important is that to stay in balance your body uses smaller muscles, called stabilizer muscles (the large ones you see are called prime mover muscles); and these help keep your joints tracking properly. A person with good balance has less chance of incurring an injury, especially an injury due to overuse.
7. Dynamic balance. This is the same as the above, except you control your center of gravity while in motion or in flight. The eccentric motions created in practicing dynamic balance not only stimulate hormonal responses but fire something called high-threshold muscle cell motor units. It’s important to train dynamic balance as you age and, symbiotically, training this action helps keep you young.
8. Agility. This is your ability to move dynamically in different directions quickly and randomly. It requires that you use starting strength, explosive strength, limit strength, and dynamic balance in combination, so all of those areas must be conditioned. Plyometric training, like that incorporated into Tony Horton’s P90X®, in combination with stretching, helps you stay agile as you age.

© Aaron Potts - visit Fitness Destinations for more great information about weight loss, health, and overall fitness!
Fitness Destinations is proudly sponsored by the incredible products and services provided by Team Beachbody!

OK, for all of you people who think that yoga is for wimps, I challenge you to try the P90X® version – Yoga X! Not only is it incredibly challenging, but rather than just perverting yoga into some mindlessly intense workout, Yoga X actually flows in a manner that is both extremely effective, as well as executed in a manner that is true to the yoga lifestyle and philosophies.

Yoga X is based on Hatha Yoga, and as Tony Horton talks about in the video, the benefits of yoga apply to average people who simply want to be more healthy and more flexible, and they also apply to professional level athletes and sports participants – and, of course, everyone in between.

The level of muscular control, mental focus, and overall body coordination that yoga requires are enough to make even the most in-shape person question their level of overall fitness. Believe me, I have been doing weight training and cardiovascular training for more than 20 years, and there were some yoga poses that pushed my muscles to the extreme, and also produced a massive amount of body-cleansing sweat.

Yoga may look easy, but when done in the Yoga X manner, it is both challenging, and extremely rewarding as well, not to mention the strength, core stabilization, mental focus, and flexibility benefits that come from doing it on a regular basis.

There are far too many individual movements in the Yoga X program to give a review of each pose, so I will instead just touch on the major sections that this workout is divided into: Moving Asanas, Balance Postures, Floor Work, Yoga Belly, More Floor Work/Cool-down.

NOTE: Give yourself plenty of room to do this workout. You’ll need a length on the floor as long as your body is with your arms extended fully overhead and your toes pointed out, and you’ll need that same vertical distance in order to stand up on your toes and reach for the sky. You’ll need the width around you equal to the width of your body with both arms extended out fully to your sides.

Moving Asanas

This is the most physically challenging part of Yoga X from a strength and endurance perspective. Keep a towel close by because after 10 minutes or so (or less!) you will be sweating profusely. Perspiration is great for cleansing toxins out of the body, so don’t combat it by making it cooler in your house. In fact, if you keep it warm, it will increase the physical benefits of sweating, plus the overall feeling of being cleansed by the end of the workout.

The Moving Asanas part of Yoga X includes plenty of repeat movements, which is great because – especially if you’re a beginner – the repetition really helps you to get the hang of the movements, and to increase your ability to do them effectively.

Some of the movements in this section include the Runner’s Pose, Warrior One, Two, and Three, Reverse Warrior, Twisting Triangle, Prayer Twist, and the Half Moon. As with all yoga movements, concentrate on your breathing, and Tony will remind you of that several times during the DVD.

The Moving Asanas part of this workout lasts for quite awhile, and constitutes a large portion of the “extreme (X)” part of Yoga X. After this part of the workout, several parts of your body will be very fatigued, making the movements for the rest of the workout challenging, even though they are not as physically hard from a muscular strength standpoint as some of the earlier poses.

Balance Postures

This portion of Yoga X is not very long, but it is still challenging, and it makes for a perfect transition from the intensity of the Moving Asanas to the less intense Floor Work that follows.

One of the challenges in this portion of the workout is that you are standing on either one leg or the other during the poses, and your legs are very tired at this point from the earlier movements. One thing to consider when you are standing on one leg is whether or not to lock your knee in place. If you do, then it is harder to balance, but the strain is taken off of the front of your thighs. If you don’t lock your knees, then your quadriceps (front of your thigh) are strained because they are already tired, but it is easier to balance that way.

Movements in this section include Tree, Royal Dancer, and Standing Leg Extension, and they are all challenging in their own right.

Floor Work

The intensity is not nearly as high by this portion of Yoga X, but that is not to say that it isn’t still very challenging. As with most yoga movements, the length of the stretches can be modified in various ways in order to make it more intense or to increase your flexibility as you become more flexible and build up your strength levels.

Movements in this section such as the Cat Stretch and the Frog will be welcome opportunities to really stretch out and be grateful, while movements like the Bridge, the Wheel, and the Table can really challenge muscle groups that have already gotten plenty of work during the session.

Yoga Belly

For anyone in the beginning of their P90X journey, you will at first be appalled by more abdominal exercises after having just done Ab Ripper X on Day 1 and Day 3, but the addition of these yoga ab movements will increase the speed of your progress in the abdominal area, as well as give your body new challenges that are not covered in Ab Ripper X.

Also, unlike other abdominal exercises, the Yoga Belly movements are static movements for the most part. You get into a pose, and then hold it there. This allows you to really make that “mind-muscle” connection (neuromuscular coordination) while at the same time strengthening your front and side abdominal muscles, as well as the muscles in your lower back.

Exercises in this section include Touch The Sky, Boat, Half Boat, Scissor, and Torso Twist & Hold.

More Floor Work/Cool-down

By this point in the workout over an hour has transpired, and you are pretty well spent. Even the people that Tony Horton has in the video with him – all of whom are in incredible condition – have been really challenged by Yoga X. The stretching and cool-down exercises in this portion are a welcome wrap up to a very challenging exercise session.

Movements such as Happy Baby, and Child’s Pose are relaxation and stretching that are more than just welcome at this point, and Corpse Pose and Fetal Pose are aptly named yoga exercises, because that’s about how you feel by the end of Yoga X!

Tony wraps it all up with the Meditation Pose including some surprisingly relaxing heart-felt “ohms” that he encourages you to do as well. Although I’ll admit to not actually vocalizing the ohms myself, I did get a real sense of peace and accomplishment listening to Tony’s all-encompassing audio finale’, and that was a great way to gratefully close out an incredible workout session.

Conclusion

Overall, I have to admit to being impressed with the Yoga X workout. In my years as a personal trainer and just overall exercise enthusiast, I never got around to peeking behind the curtain to see what yoga was all about, and I see now that – done properly – it has a lot to offer.

I would definitely recommend Yoga X for anyone who thinks that yoga is not an intense and effective workout, and I would certainly recommend it to any present yoga enthusiast as a way for them to fine-tune their techniques, and to really take their yoga workouts to the next level.

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 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 10 – Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps
• P90X Review Day 11 – Back and Biceps

© Aaron Potts - visit Fitness Destinations for more great information about weight loss, health, and overall fitness!
Fitness Destinations is proudly sponsored by the incredible products and services provided by Team Beachbody!

Each edition will focus on one part of the process, and you can access each of the completed posts by clicking here: Health, Diet & Weight Loss Checklist.

Part IV – Flexibility

Flexibility is something that many people do not take enough time for as part of their health regimen, and they limit their potential progress by doing so, as well as putting themselves at risk for injury.

This part of the Health, Diet, and Weight Loss Checklist will focus on informing you about the importance of flexibility in your health and physical fitness program, as well as giving you the basics of how to practice flexibility exercises.

© Aaron Potts - visit Fitness Destinations for more great information about weight loss, health, and overall fitness!
Fitness Destinations is proudly sponsored by the incredible products and services provided by Team Beachbody!