My P90X Results

Three months ago, I started an extreme home fitness program called P90X. Last night, I celebrated the end of it and am happy to share my results with you today.

For those of you who don’t know, P90X is an at-home fitness program that requires you to workout everyday for about an hour, for 90 days straight. There are no machines or fancy training equipment involved – it’s just you, gravity, and sometimes a chair, a pull-up bar, free weights or resistance bands.

I wasn’t exactly sure how well the program would work for me, but I had to do something active since working from home and taking care of a child was starting to become synonymous with a growing gut and a lack of energy. I chose P90x because I had seen a friend have some success with it, and the infomercials were just too darn convincing.

Before I started, I made a conscious decision to really go all out with it – to strictly stick to the program so I could maximize my results and follow the nutritional plan as close as humanly possible. I was offered to use a friend’s copy of the program, but I declined because I knew that if I spent the money to buy it myself, I would me more likely to complete it, since I paid for it.

On Day 0, there is a fitness test that you take so you can take it again 90 days later to see how much you’ve improved. Here are my results of the fitness test below, along with a description of what each part involves if applicable:

Body Fat Percentage

I used an at-home scale that also measures body fat percentage. I believe the actual numbers are off, but I used the same scale before and after so you see there was a difference:

• Day 1: 27%
• Day 90: 18.4%

I suspect both of those numbers are a bit high, because I don’t think I was at 27% when I first started out, but no matter what, I did lose a lot of fat, which is awesome! You’ll see in the pictures below.

Weight

• Day 1: 171.4 lbs.
• Day 90: 156 lbs.

Right before I started P90x, I had purchased two new pair of jeans. Well – now they don’t fit. My waist shrank a total of 3.5″, and I’ll be needing to get some new jeans. I’m okay with that though.

Resting Heart Rate

• Day 1: 62 beats per minute
• Day 90: 54 beats per minute

These rates were taken after 2 minutes of remaining calm and quiet. It is said that the lower your resting heart rate is, the better your aerobic condition is. Because my resting heart rate is lower now, it means that my heart doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood through my body.

Most of the following exercises are done “to failure”, meaning you count how many you can do until your muscles (or mind) won’t let you do anymore.

Pull-ups

• Day 1: 6
• Day 90: 28

This was a huge change for me. HUGE. I was never good at doing pull-ups before, and it’s the only thing that was holding me back from earning my “presidential fitness test award” back in elementary school.

Vertical Leap

• Day 1: 18.5″
• Day 90: 25″

I was never really concerned about how high I could jump, but it’s cool to use it as a gauge for how much stronger my legs are. If I were only 6 inches taller, I could slam dunk a basketball. I guess I’ll just have to work on getting my vertical leap up to above 30″ then.

Push-Ups

• Day 1: 29
• Day 90: 64

In the P90X program, you do A LOT of push-ups. It’s cool though, because there are several different types so it’s not just boring standard push-up over and over again. For example, there’s the wide stance, military, diamond, dive-bomber, one-arm, clap, plyo (jumping), and sphinx push-ups, all targeting different muscles in their own special little way.

Toe Touch

This is simply a measurement to see how flexible you are. Sitting, with both legs straight out in front of you, bend over and try to touch your toes. If you can’t you measure how far away you are (-), and if you can pass your toes, you measure by how much (+).

• Day 1: -2.5″
• Day 90: +1″

Wall Squat

Here is the quick description: place back flat against wall and lower your body into a seated chair position (quads parallel to the floor, feet directly below knees – think 90 degree angle here). Time how long you can hold this position.

• Day 1: 1 minute 37 seconds
• Day 90: 3 minutes 31 seconds

Bicep Curls

Simply record how many bicep curls you can do until failure. I was using a 30 lbs. resistance band.

• Day 1: 40
• Day 90: 106

In & Outs

This is an ab workout that required you to sit on the floor with your legs extended out, and you simply bring your legs in & out (bend & straighten) repeatedly until failure.

• Day 1: 40
• Day 90: 171

Pictures

I know many of you are interested in the pictures, so here they are:

As you can see by the smile on my face, I’m quite happy with the results. Plus, as I mentioned before, I feel like I have so much more energy now – which is perfect timing because Keoni, my 9 month old son, requires a lot of it. He’s starting to crawl!

A Few Things I Learned Along the Way

Like with any business or blog, just getting started is the hardest part. At the beginning, it was tough. I could barely do half of the workouts on the DVDs and would constantly drop out in the middle of routines just to rest. One of the mantras of P90X is “Push Play Everyday”, and that’s exactly what I did, and after a while I began to notice that what was once hard was getting easier and easier everyday.

Also, I learned that nutrition is more important than anything. What you eat makes up 85% of your results and the workouts and training is only 15%. It sounds crazy, but it’s soooo true. I’ve learned so much about nutrition by following this program that I’m now extremely conscious about what goes into my body. Like I heard someone once say before, “your body needs food for energy, like a car needs fuel to drive. If you want your car to run for a long time, you couldn’t fill it with crap fuel, would you? A high-performance car requires high performance fuel.”

I’ve played sports since I was born, but am now in the best shape of my life – and it literally only took 90 days to accomplish. Anyone can do this program, I’m sure of it – you just have to believe in yourself, and keep pushing play everyday, no matter what.

Lastly, I’d just like to say that I know this blog is primarily about business, blogging and earning money online, but really none of that stuff matters if we’re not healthy enough to enjoy life, right?

Thanks for your support and holding me accountable for this. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and tweets about how it was going. Oh, and I’ll be starting another 90 days tomorrow.

Stay tuned for a new Podcast session coming on Wednesday. Cheers!

p.s. If you’re interested in purchasing P90X for yourself, I would love it if you used my affiliate link below. If you’d rather not, that’s totally cool too – no worries!

Click here to purchase P90X

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