I made it through the first week! I don’t have any statistics on how many people bail out of the Insanity program at this point, but there must be some who don’t like it enough to continue, or manage to injure themselves. I am happy to say that I don’t hate it so far, and I am being careful not to get hurt from one day to the next. My left Achilles tendon is a little sensitive, from jumping and landing so much, but I am using the foam roller and stretching to keep it in good shape. For the amount of actual exercise time (about 30 minutes), these are the most physically draining workouts I have ever done.
A quick rundown of the workouts I completed this week. (The Extreme Fitness Results blog has a good summary of these workouts.)
- Plyometric Cardio Circuit (Tuesday/Saturday): This is the introduction to Insanity, the first workout after the Fit Test. There’s a lot of jumping, as implied by “Plyometric,” and by Saturday I gave it a better attempt than the first time, but I still ran out of steam in the last 10 minutes of the 42 minutes total workout time (including stretch and cooldown).
- Cardio Power and Resistance (Wednesday): This has a couple of push up variations thrown in, but it is not drastically different than the previous workout. I am used to push up circuits from P90X, but not in between crazy jumps and squats.
- Cardio Recovery (Thursday): This is a stretch routine comparable to the P90X X Stretch, but since it’s Insanity, we have to break a sweat somehow, right? The combination of lunges, squats and balance poses definitely make it a challenge, while stretching all the body parts that are used in the other workouts. It’s shorter than the recovery workouts for P90X or P90X2 (just 33 minutes instead of an hour), and it really emphasizes the lower body.
- Pure Cardio (Friday): I previewed all the workouts before doing them, but I should have been watching a little more closely with this one. The exercises are about the same as the Plyometric Cardio Circuit, with one big difference: There are no breaks in the 15 minute main workout circuit. This comes after an 11 minute warm up (several crazy exercise circuits), and an eight minute stretch. I kept waiting for a 60 second break, as seen in the previous workouts, but there were none! I guess I had made some improvement, though, because I was dead tired but I managed to say “That’s it?” at the end. Still waiting for that break, I guess.
After a day off (with no desire to exercise at all), I am ready for week 2. I think it will be important to get a good night’s sleep for as many nights as I can, and continue to be careful about my exercise intensity and preventing injuries.
Related Posts
Beachbody Insanity (my workouts and related posts)
Anyway, back to the divine providence part… I was ready to spend the $120 for Insanity, when just before Christmas my brother-in-law tells me, “Don’t bother buying Insanity. I will give you my DVDs when I am done. I’m pretty sure I will never want to do this again!” I mean, here’s a guy who has done several rounds of P90X, has a black belt, and the martial arts style he prefers has been described to me as “Letting yourself get punched, repeatedly, so you can get used to it while defending yourself.” Ouch. Basically, he prefers strength training rather than constant cardio, and Insanity is taking its toll on his knees, too. Now he’s passing it along to me, because he claims I am better at cardio (ha!) and I might actually enjoy the program. He also expects progress updates, maybe to see how I’m suffering?
