What's the Deal with P90X?

More and more, people are starting to notice that I'm doing something because of the results I'm getting. And more and more, I'm hearing the question, "What's the deal with this P90X thing you're doing?" I explain to them that it's an extreme and diligent workout regimine that uses "Muscle Confusion" so that you don't plateau. I want to thank DarkSiren for posting this on her blog because this is a great look at how P90X and P90X+ came about.


Xamining the X
By Steve Edwards

With the arrival of P90X®+, many of you might be wondering how we could
improve upon the "most extreme home fitness system ever." The simple answer is, there's always new training, new techniques, and a new way to look at things to take them (and you) to the next level. P90X is the step from fitness to extreme fitness. The Plus takes it to yet another level. Our focus was to give you more options to maximize your fitness experience. P90X+ is not trying to top the X but to enhance its efficiency for those who have reached the peak. Let's take a brief look at the science behind P90X and why you'll want to add X+ to your home fitness arsenal.

The History: What's Next?

P90X wouldn't have come about if not for the success of Power 90® and Slim in 6®. Designed around our principles of Slim Training® and Sectional Progression™, we marketed these to combat the rising obesity epidemic at the entry level. Both of these programs could be done by just about anyone, whether an ex-college athlete or a couch potato who'd never exercised a day in their life. As our database grew and the number of Success Stories mounted, we were besieged with the obvious question, "What's next?"

But P90X didn't come about overnight. We knew we were creating a market for a highly advanced home fitness program, but we wanted to make sure that it would be perfect, or at least darn close to it. As we kicked around concepts and ideas, we developed a few simpler graduate programs, such as Power Half Hour® and Slim Series®, as well as broadened our appeal to the entry-level client with the addition of Yoga Booty Ballet®, Kathy Smith's Project: YOU™, Turbo Jam®, and Hip Hop Abs®. Our long-term vision was to bring in clientele from all walks of life. Then, once committed to our healthy lifestyle, we would provide the means to take them to the ultimate level.

The Periodizational Approach

Periodizational training is training in specific blocks in order to achieve a goal. While the standard in athletic training for decades, it hadn't been applied to home fitness except at its most basic level. In our initial meetings on how to construct P90X, a periodizational approach was the first concept that we all easily agreed upon.

Our challenge was then how to come up with a program targeting overall fitness for every individual. When you train for a sport, your goals are pretty clear. With general fitness, targets can be across the board. Instead of focusing on body sculpting, the X approach would be overall body fitness and performance. We wanted to achieve increases in strength, speed, power, flexibility, aerobic efficiency, and mind and body awareness—a tall order for a 12-week program. But we knew that if we could pull if off, body sculpting would naturally follow.

Muscle Confusion

Athletes train in blocks. These are phases of increased intensity with a recovery period between each block. As you move through the phases of each block, you alter what you do in order to keep the stimulus to the stressed energy system high. The more fit you are, the quicker the body adapts and the more often you need to move into the next phase or block. We call this process of altering your exercises Muscle Confusion. In reality, it's total-body energy system confusion because you're doing the same thing to your aerobic system, your anaerobic system, your lung capacity, and so on. But that was too long an explanation, so we settled on Muscle Confusion.

The reason athletes train this way is that when you begin an exercise, your body goes through a period of time when it adapts to the new movements. Once it's adapted (learned how to do the movements efficiently), you get to a mastery phase where your muscles (and all stressed systems) respond to training and make enormous fitness gains. This period is short because your body is always trying to become more efficient. The more efficient, or better, you become at something, the less it affects you, so naturally, your results will then level off. This is called a plateau.

Once you hit a plateau it's time to reshuffle the deck and begin another block. A targeted recovery phase enables your body to heal its microtrauma and grow stronger for the upcoming block. This way, each subsequent block can be slightly more intense than the one previously completed. Using calculated training blocks, your results curve will continually point skyward.


Periodizational Dieting

Luckily, we'd had a lot of experience with our members and Success Stories that gave us a solid idea on how to craft that ultimate training diet. Similar to that way your body adapts to exercise, it also changes and adapts to different nutritional strategies. The P90X diet is based around how we've gotten the most overall success with all of our members.

Essentially, this is done in three phases. First, we limit carbohydrate consumption. Among other things, this teaches the individual the role the carbs play in their diet. When reduced, the body is forced to look for energy from sources other than blood sugar. Since stored fat (and some muscle) doesn't fuel the body as efficiently as glycogen (or blood sugar), this phase not only teaches the body to use its fat more efficiently for energy but teaches the individual how to feel the way carbohydrates fuel their body. Subsequent phases add more carbs to facilitate harder training until, ultimately, the relationship of food as fuel is well understood.


The Ultimate 12-Week Transformation

With this combination of diet and exercise, we were able to achieve incredible results in human performance over a 12-week program. And because of the variety of workouts we created, P90X could be retooled to target various goals and could be used over and over again.

So Why the Plus?

No matter how good a program is, you don't want to do the same routines forever. You can, and it would work, but it's more efficient using the modalities described above if you continually find ways to force new adaptations on both your mind and body. When we then analyzed the fitness gains achieved during a cycle of P90X, we knew that we could actually increase the intensity per minute and continue to provide fitness gains to X graduates, in even less time!

There's a rule in both diet and fitness (that seems particularly unfair to de-conditioned folks) that allows you to do less to maintain—or even improve—your fitness than what it took to get in shape in the first place. It's why a piece of cake does little to an athlete, whose raging metabolism can put the empty calories to work, but will go right to a sedentary person's thighs. A well-trained person can also push their body harder and tax their energy systems quicker than their less-fit brethren. When sprinter Michael Johnson was training for his Olympic double (he won both the 200 and 400 meters and set world records), the public was surprised to hear that he finished the bulk of his training in less than an hour. But for ultimate performance, efficiency is far more important than time. The Plus follows this model—combining difficult moves in a symbiotic fashion in order to maximize your workout time for ultimate results. The new question begs, are you ready for the Plus?