P90X Challenge: Week 8 Recap (Last Phase!)
I guess you can call this the beginning of the end.
Week 8 marks the beginning of phase three, the final phase of P90X. This phase takes all the DVDs of the entire program, and scrambles them up from week to week to achieve muscle confusion.
Muscle confusion is basically the basis of the entire P90X program, which keeps you from the dreaded plateau effect, where your results basically stall, even though you are working out just as hard.
Your body is lazy. It wants to figure out how to do the same amount of work with less effort. When you start a workout program, your body gets kicked into gear and burns optimal calories and gains optimal muscle, because it doesn’t know what to expect. If you continue on that same program, you will find that your results start to slow, and then eventually stop, because your body has figured out what you are doing, and can anticipate what is to come.
In order to counteract the plateau, you have to keep your body on its toes. Once it starts to get used to a routine, you have to switch it up, working your muscle groups in different ways and in varying intensities. to get maximum results.
The first phase of P90X was three weeks of the same workouts, then a rest week. The second phase was new workouts, and then a rest week. The third phase is a combo of alternating phase one and phase two workouts every week for maximum muscle confusion.
Because of this, I expect to see bigger results this last phase, even though, so far, having done phase one workouts for the first time in a month, I really had to jack up my weights to get in an intense workout. Translation? I am much, much stronger.
Have you missed anything?
P90X Challenge: Program Overview
