P90X week 1 review

My friend, Greg Harris, gave me a chance to try out his P90x videos.  Last Saturday (10/17/09) I started the program.  The first day is a chest, back, and abs workout.  I set up everything in my garage and went to work.  The people in the videos are freakin' strong.  Waaaay stronger than I am.  I did gymnastics competitively when I was younger and competed in rock climbing in highschool and college, so I've got some pretty decent upper body strength.  However, these guys took me to the cleaner.  It's not that they are doing a lot of heavy weight.  It's more like a lot of reps with very little rest between.  Think multiple sets of 30 push-ups and 20 pull-ups.

Anyway, my chest and back too sore to workout those muscles again for an entire week.  I mean, I couldn't do a pushup for a whole week after the workout.  Anyway, the other workouts weren't as taxing.  Basically, the program works like this.  You do a 1-hour workout 6 days a week based on a prescriptive schedule.  Every day is a different muscle group.  You need minimal equipment (floor mat, pull-up bar, some barbells) and not a LOT of space, but probably about 10' x 10' at the bare minimum.

What I like about P90X:
-lots of variety on the workout exercises
-little rest between exercises means the hr stays elevated
-minimal equipment required
-I can do it at home, right after a bike workout in the garage making it very time-efficient
-the guys who leads the routines has a lot of energy and is motivational (If he gets irritating, I can just play music and mute the video)

What I don't like about P90X:
-nothing so far.  The plan makes sense to me.  The workouts are quick and fun.

I'm a little worried that my upperbody will start bulking up, but we'll see what happens.  It's low-weight, high-reps stuff, so it shouldn't happen.  I am psyched for my core muscles to get stronger though.  I'm modifying the P90X plan for my cycling workouts so that I'm doing the leg workouts on hard training days and cycling through the upper body workouts on my easy days.

back at it

It's been almost 2 weeks since my last report, so he's the brief recap.  I raced both of the Frisco cx races on 10/3 and 10/4.  I double-flatted in the first race and flatted in the second race.  That resulted in me running a LOT and finishing at the back of the pack in both races.  great.  I didn't race the following weekend because I was feeling a little sick and it was really, really cold.  Last weekend, I intended to do the Valmont Park race, but I didn't pay attention to the flyer and I thought the race went off at 3:30pm (like every cx race this year), but instead the put our race at 11:00, so I showed up to the site and realized I missed it.

Other than that, I've been doing some interval training pretty much every other day.  I feel like I'm getting stronger.  I did day 1 and day 2 of the P90X program this weekend and my chest, back, legs, and abs are still sore today.  I may or may not do that program, but I realized that my body is pretty imbalanced with only cycling all the time, so I need to mix it up to prevent injury.  Of course, I can't lift my arm above my head right now as I write this because of the muscle soreness, so what do I know.

I'm going to try to get in a bike workout on the trainer this evening and hope to race this weekend.  We shall see..

good days and bad days

With high intensity training, you've got your good days and bad days.  On my easy days, I go pretty easy.  Usually I'm averaging less than 210 watts and never higher than 240 watts or so.  It's a comfortable pace for me.  On my hard days, I'm doing what I call "Race Intervals".  This consists of riding 5 minutes at the lower limit of your functional threshold, then 2 minutes at the upper limit, then repeat two more times for a total set of 21 minutes.  For me, I'm riding at 329W for 5 minutes, then 383W for 2 minutes.  This is a really hard workout because you never get to recover.  I think it's good for 'cross because it's pretty realistic of the racing.

I did one set on Wednesday, but couldn't make the second.  This morning, I made my two sets and felt like I could do at least part of another.  Here's a graph of my heart rate for the sets on Wednesday and today.

The red line is my heart rate from the first set of Wednesday's workout.  As you can see, my heart rate had already spiked to 190+ on my second 2 minute interval and at the end of the workout I was near my max.  There's no second set data because I was wasted.  The green line is my first set from today's workout.  As you can see, I was recovering better (hr lower during 5 minute portions) and my hr didn't spike as high for the second and third 2 minute intervals.  The purple is the second set and, as expected, my hr is pretty high right from the start, but again, I didn't get as high of a hr on the last 2 minute portion.

This is telling me that I was recovered, rested, and motivated for this morning's workout.  I think this is a good example of how you can have a bad race or training day and not know what went wrong.  If I look back at the days proceeding these days, it helps give me an idea of things to try and things to avoid during my easy days.  (Incidentally, last night, I had pasta and acorn squash for dinner and the night before Wednesday's workout, I had Chick-fil-a fast food.  That may or may not have had something to do with it).

Overtrained?

The last few weeks I've had some difficulty with the workouts.  I'm usually able to make the first and sometimes the second interval power level, but after that I can't make anything.  This morning I made the first interval, but couldn't do the second, so I just did a tempo ride for 30 minutes.  The interesting thing was that during the tempo ride, my HR was really high and I almost couldn't even ride at the power level for 30 minutes.  It may be that my power levels are too high, that I'm stressed, overtrained, or just still recovering from the weekend. 

However, I don't have much stress at all right now and I felt very recovered when I started the workout.  I'm going to take an easy day tomorrow and try again on Friday.  If I fail again, then I'm going to just do tempo workouts on my hard days for a couple weeks and hope that fixes it.  If that fails, then I need to take a week or two off, and forget the cross season and start up slow and easy for the '10 road season.