It’s been a while, so I thought I should give a little update.

My plan to do Insanity at school has failed miserably. The first week or so was fine. But once homework picked up, it stopped immediately. I’m still doing our interhouse sports and playing in the grad school football league, but when it comes to napping/relaxing or being exhausted during my free time, I choose the former.

I have made the plan though to do Insanity over my 3 week winter break. While it isn’t extremely long, it’s still enough to kick start me into wanting to work out again. But the nice thing is I’m already looking forward to it.

Today’s workout was Pure Cardio. Definitely not my strong point. On top of that, all my workout buddies were busy, so I had to do it solo. This is a mean workout. The warm is tough like always. But after that and the stretch, it’s all cardio. No breaks, no repeating moves at different intensities. Just move after move after move, one minute per set, for about 15 minutes. This was really tough. I think this is one that I’ll improve on a lot though.

And just an extra thought here: Insanity is ridiculous on your calves. All of the jumping, balancing, and agility moves seem to hit your calves. Mine burn like fire during the workouts. Nice.

Recovery workout today. It wasn’t too bad. There was a lot of stretching and stability moves. And lunging and squatting. Lots of lunging and squatting. My butt and quads were really tested. But it left me feeling pretty good.

Another tough day. It’s actually remarkable. The warm up is actually a pretty tough thing to do. Then you have to stretch now that you’re already tired. And the last two sets of intervals are actually really short time-wise. But when you’re doing it, it feels like forever. Today was definitely tough. The power jumps, globe jumps, and 8 squat hops/8 pushups were the hardest I thought. Today was just Dan and me.

Tomorrow is the recovery workout, so we’ll see how it goes. It doesn’t look that bad.

Early in the afternoon I just felt like doing a little work so I did 3 sets of pullups and pushups. It felt good. As for how it affected my workout at night, the pushups made a couple moves harder, but I don’t think it was a major hindrance.

As for today’s workout – Wow. It’s everything they promised. It’s intervals. It’s not very long. And it is exhausting. I got a great sweat going. And I have a feeling my legs are going to ache tomorrow. But wow was it fun. The short breaks are really difficult though. After the first full set of intervals we took a triple length break, but aside from that we worked hard today. It was good. Today it was myself along with Dan and Giulio.

That’s right! It’s time for something new. I started Insanity yesterday with a group of friends. We have ridiculous time restraints due to our classes, so we’ve made an agreement. If we have time, we’ll do the workouts. If we don’t, there’s no need to feel bad. We’re already working really hard mentally every day. A workout isn’t the highest of priorities. But we’ll do what we can.

For Day 1, Dan and I did the fitness test. That’s a bear of a fitness test. I’m legitimately sore just from those 24 minutes yesterday. But I got my starting point numbers, and I got a good burn going. This is going to be some hard core cardio work.

I’m sorry to say that this won’t be as thorough or well-documented as my summer P90X workouts. I won’t be taking weekly pictures and such or weighing myself weekly. This is just my way of trying to stay in shape while I’m at school. You’ll still get my opinions of the workouts and such though. That’s the big reason I blog.

Changed my mind about these last two days. I’ve worked hard all summer, so I can take today easy and tomorrow as a stretch day and be happy with that.

I’ve got a lot of work and packing to do by Thursday, so my run with P90X really is about over. It was fantastic. I can’t wait to get to school and throw down on Insanity. It’s going to be awesome.

I wish I had more time to finish out P90X Classic this summer. I’ve seen such spectacular results. I’ll continue to work hard at school though to hopefully maintain what I’ve worked so hard for.

So. Results. Let’s look at the numbers.

Wow, wow, wow. That’s all I can say. I’m so happy with my results! This is big time stuff here. Let’s break it down.

Weight… I managed to break through the 170 pound barrier. That invisible wall I’ve had for a long time. I blew by it! Over this summer I’ve managed to lose 11.69 pounds. In the 6 weeks I’ve been doing P90X Classic, I’ve lost 8.82 pounds. That’s big time. The more interesting part is to think what might have happened if I started with P90X Classic from the start and hadn’t wasted my first month.

Pushups… I increased my max number of repetitions by 14. That’s great progress for 6 weeks. Especially considering that there’s only one chest workout a week. That’s a lot of progress in a short amount of time.Add in the rest of the summer, and I upped my maximum by 19 reps. Great!

Pullups… Here is where I’m really proud. Throughout the weeks I’ve been mentioning how many total pullups I was doing each workout. And that number had been going up greatly. It really paid off. I upped my maximum number of pullups by 7. This is fantastic. I’d love to be able to get to the point where I can hang with Tony and the gang and bust out 12 to 18 reps per set on every pullup move (excluding the Corn Cob of course). That’s a great sign of physical fitness, and I’m on my way there.

I just looked at the goals I posted back at the very beginning of the summer. Now while I had to switch to P90X Classic, I actually succeeded very well on reaching my goals. My goal weight was 165. I think being off by just under 3 pounds is perfectly okay since I wasted my first month. I exactly met my pushup goal of 70. And I surpassed my goal of 15 pullups, which is just amazing.

I just have to say that I’m so happy with how I look and feel. I feel great about myself, I feel great physically, and I feel more confident than ever. I can’t wait to get back to school so everyone can see how I’ve changed. It’s always fun to see people’s reactions to your hard work.

Before I post the pictures, I’ll say what I always do. These picture were not modified in any way. The ONLY changes made was cropping out extraneous background and resizing them to a proper size while maintaining the height and width ratios. I tried to take pictures in consistent poses and with consistent lighting. The first picture set will contain a picture form the first weak of P90X Classic, and the second picture will be from the end of my 6th week. The second picture set will be the same as the previous, but with a picture from the first week of summer, thereby showing my changes over the entire summer. I hope you like the pictures. Click any of them to see the full picture.

And here are some extra pictures for fun… The first two are the kinds you would see in an infomercial, using a side turn to make the pictures look even better. The last one I just like a lot.

What a wonderful day today was. My testing went really well. I’ll save that for my results post. After doing my testing, I did Ab Ripper X, along with a few sets of bicep curls and tricep moves to work my arms a bit. Nothing extreme, just enough to work up a little sweat.

Gotta go work on the results post. Here’s this week’s pictures.

I celebrated my birthday early today. And it was fun.

I weighed in this morning. Fantastic results! I took my pictures too. I’ll post them tomorrow. Let’s put it this way, today was a great day for me.

I never ended up stretching due to all the things I did today. That’s okay though.

I also had a big cheat dessert, three pieces of cookie cake with lots of icing and a soda. It was a great reward for all the hard work I’ve done. And I’m still doing some workouts this week, so I don’t have to feel guilty about it.

Tomorrow I’m going to have some great stuff to post.