Saturday, April 17, 2010

Week 1 of Insanity: "This Sh*t Is Bananas"

That's an actual quote from the workout. The instructor himself is saying this about his own workout, and he's not lying.

How does Insanity compare to P90X? P90X has a large focus on weight lifting as well as including cardio. Insanity is straight up cardio that includes moves that will also improve your strength - it just uses your own body as resistance. The workouts are a lot shorter. While a typical day on the X will take an hour to an hour and a half, a typical Insanity workout is 40 minutes long. It just happens to be 40 minutes of cardio hell. I think in the second month the workouts go up to 60 minutes.

During my first workout, I told the TV screen "eff you" approx. 5 times. I have never sweat so much in such a short period of time. These workouts seriously define what it means to do an exercise to failure. You don't do push ups until you think you can't anymore, you do them until you fall on your face because your arms physically will not hold you up anymore. The workouts are structured on something called max interval training. In normal workouts, you elevate your heart rate for a short period of time then give yourself a longer recovery time. With Insanity, you try not to die for about 3 minutes and then you have 30 seconds to make sure you're not dead, then you start right back up again.

My recovery time has massively improved. I used to be panting and out of breath for a really long time after intense cardio. I was pleasantly surprised to find with Insanity that the 30 seconds of rest is usually enough. It also comes with a nutrition guide. I'm still only eating from the top two tiers of Michi's ladder, but most of their meals are easily adjusted to fit that criteria. The way the meals are structured, I'm actually not hungry at all. I've been doing 1500 calories for a while, but it's not always without effort. The Insanity meals however, have the perfect carb/fat/protein ratios and I haven't been hungry at all.

I'm liking Insanity a lot. I really like the change of pace. I like that Shaun T. teaches like a mirror - he'll say "go to the right" and he means my right, not his. I like that it will only take 40 minutes out of my day. I always feel like I need to do more after the workout because it's so short compared to P90X. A lot of people do a hybrid of Insanity and something else, but I'm really resisiting the urge to add cardio or weights to the program. I want to see what results I can get with just Insanity alone. Although, technically I am doing Slim in 6 three times a week with my mom, but I'm hoping she'll eventually do it on her own without me. I'm definitely no pro at the workouts. I don't get through every single section without taking breaks of my own. Sometimes, it's easy to feel bad that you can't do the dvd straight through - but that's actually pretty silly. If I could do the Insanity workouts without breaks, then I probably woudn't need Shaun T.'s help to get in shape. The whole point is that you do it to the best of your ability. You dig deeper, give everything you have and eventually everything you have will be more than it is now.

Stay tuned for my 60 day transformation. My goals are: 1) to reach my goal weight of 135lbs, 2) to demolish my muffin top into non-existence, 3) to lose another inch of fat off my thighs and 4) to maybe go down to a size 4? I don't care about that last one as much as the first three, but I wouldn't mind.

As always, feel free to ask me questions about fitness, nutrition and Beach Body products :)

xoxo,
Sweet Charity

www.SweetCMe.com

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