You are wrong.
Use common sense. As I said above, extensive cardiovascular exercise, extensive weight lifting, great nutrition, and plenty of rest will yield results. If you'd prefer to pay money for all that to be packaged in gimmickry like p90x, go crazy.
Also, what happens day 91? You have to keep going, right? It seems like this program has a pretty high attrition rate, and I'd bet it's unlikely for even those who finish the 90 days to keep it up for much longer. And what residents or 3rd year med students have the time for this, really?
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I think the idea is that after 90 days you keep going at a more relaxed pace with a more traditional workout routine to maintain what you've built. Its easier to maintain physical fitness than it is to make serious changes in your weight at muscle mass. They're aware that most people can't sustain this level of commitment indefinitely, so they ask you to instead to commit to enough time to make a real transformation (about the same as season of a high school sport) and then assume that you will level off. They have a section in their fitness guide about different approaches for maintaining your fitness after you're done.
A more plausible workout routine would be a daily half hour on an exercise bike.
The problem is you don't gain a lot of ground with this approach. This is a low intensity cardiovascular maintenance routine. Its not terrible,its pretty close to what I'm planning for residency, and it will definitely help you keep your rates of weight gain and heart disease to an acceptable minimum. However I don't think you'd see a very dramatic difference in how you look or feel.
I think P90X is a great system because it allows you to do 90 minutes of high intensity exercise per day, coupled with an intense diet, in a way that doesn't result in you hurting yourself. Could you put together a similar routine yourself? Yes if you know what you're doing, but there's a pretty big knowledge base to exercise and nutrition and most people (including most medical students) really don't know it. Knowing what makes a good exercise routine is not 'common sense', its something you need to learn. I've had a lot of friends attempt DIY fitness programs and they often did stupid things that resulted in lasting injuries: exercising similar muscle groups on consecutive days (or every day), pairing a low cal diet with a lifting routine, doing heavily weighted exercises with poor form ((weighted squats are a disaster waiting to happen unless you really know what you're doing and have two good spotters), insufficient/nonexistent warm up routines, etc. These aren't impossibly dumb mistakes, they're very common errors. I like the way that P90X uses mostly body weight exercises for your major muscle groups, hits those muscle groups no more than twice a week, devotes significant amounts of time to warm ups and flexibility, has periodic recovery weeks with lighter exercise, and emphasizes a eating sufficient amounts of protein and calories for muscle growth in their diet.
I would love to see a study of the injury rates with crossfit. These routines seem designed to cause as many serious injuries as possible. Weighted exercises where the goal is to go as fast as possible? Running with weighted vests?
haven't started P90X or Insanity yet, but I'd like to and just want to hear about the best way to do it.
I have the DVD's for P90X and have converted them to video files that I can play on my Iphone.
Do you guys watch the videos at home?
Do you convert the videos to mp4's and watch them on your iphones/ipad in the gym and work out along? That seems bulky and difficult.
Do you convert the videos to audio files and just do what he says when he says it in the gym?
I have a portable DVD player. Very chap and works well, though the IPhone system sounds good too. I wouldn't do the audio file thing until you've run through each routine a couple of times because you're going to need to watch what they're doing. You can do the routine in your apartment, but if you're a guy on the weight lifting days I think that means investing $500 in those select tech dumbbells because the resistance bands don't give you nearly enough weight. If you have a gym and it has a pullup bar that will also work.
