Day 71: The Mother of All Workouts

You can't judge a book by its cover but you can judge a workout by your sweat-soaked shirt. As you can see in the photo, the P90X plyometrics workout is truly a soaker. My girlfriend, Karen, tried the workout with me today for the first time and loved it, even though it kicked her butt. Tony Horton, the creator of P90X, refers to plyometrics as the mother of all X workouts. In my opinion, that's an understatement.

Wikipedia defines plyometrics as a type of exercise training designed to produce fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions of the nervous system, generally for the purpose of improving performance in sports. Plyometric movements, in which a muscle is loaded and then contracted in rapid sequence, use the strength, elasticity and innervation of muscle and surrounding tissues to jump higher, run faster, throw farther, or hit harder, depending on the desired training goal. Sounds exactly like what I'm looking for.

Unfortunately, plyometrics is very difficult and probably the hardest of the P90X workouts. Something about exercising those fast twitch muscles creates an extra burn in your legs. Even the people on the DVD are huffing and puffing and moaning. However, despite the pain, plyometrics is still one of the four P90X workouts that I will include in future weekly workouts.

The four workouts that I plan on doing weekly are: X Stretch, Yoga X, Kenpo X and Plyometrics. None of these workouts develop the glamor muscles, but they do improve performance. I like big muscles like everyone else, but at this stage of my life, I care more about function than I do form. That doesn't mean I won't include some type of upper and lower body strength training in my weekly workouts but the focus will be on maintaining muscle rather than growing muscle.

In today's photo I am doing the Airborne Heisman. During this exercise, I jump from side to side bringing my opposite knee up as high as I can and holding it briefly. This exercise gives you a strong cardio workout and works everything from your glutes to your calves. When doing a plyometrics workout, make sure you wear shoes and use some type of padded mat to absorb the shock. Plyometrics is a high impact workout and you can easily injure yourself if your not careful. When I did my first plyo workout 70 days ago, my knees and hips were killing me for a couple of weeks.