Product Judgement: Insanity Workout Program

    Ahoy readers.  Or reader.  Or empty space of the interwebs that this blog is filling.  Or perhaps just ahoy futuer Alex re-reading this post.  Whoever. 

    That was a shitty intro.  Oh well,  It's done.  There is no possible way I could go back and delete that and type something better in.  I can't.  It has been written in stone.  Sad, but true.  And now, I must move on to bigger and better things!  Those bigger and better things would be the first installment of my product judgement of the Insanity workout program!  I decided I really needed to start getting into shape.  My parents died at an early age due to poor health.  I do not want to do that to my kids, and so I have chosen to make changes to get myself healthy. 

    A preface before I get into what day one of the program was like: This is an intense workout series.  It's not called Insanity because it's insane how easy it is.  That is the name given to it because you have to have a few screws loose to do this program and to stick with it.  This program is designed to be for 60 days (though in the end with rest days you end up doing for a little more than two months) and to get you in the best shape of your life.  If that sounds familiar, it's because it is not unlike P90X.  I did a month and a half of P90X but due to living in an apartment with no room and no money to invest in the weights needed to do that program, I was unable to fully take advantage of it.  I did notice marked improvement though in my overall shape, so it was nice.  As I said though, without a full set of weights (dumbbells and a pull-up bar are what you need) I couldn't really take full advantage of the program.  That's what is so nice about Insanity; no weights required.  All the exercises require only your body weight and a dogged determination and motivation to stick with it.  There is one more thing that if you have it, will be useful, but I'll get into that as I talk about day 1.  The program is designed to train you using "Max Interval Training" which consists of bursts of high intensity exercise followed by a rest period.  The max in Insanity refers to it being 3 minutes of high intensity followed by 30 seconds to 1 minute of rest.  (By contrast, traditional interval training will have you do 30 seconds of intense exercises followed by a minute or two of rest).  Because I don't want to go into too many technical details here, please trust me when I saw interval training is a great way to get into shape and is no joke.  It will help your heart work more efficiently, super charge your metabolism with a hemi engine and a few hundred horsepower and will make you a more explosive athlete (if you play an actual sport vs fantasy football like myself).  If you are interested in learning more about interval training, please feel free to click here and read to your heart's content about it: http://www.medicinenet.com/interval_training/article.htm

Day 1:

Fit test.  I did a fitness test that consisted of 8 exercises done for a minute each.  Between exercises were a brief rest to record your number of reps and to drink water.  Oh, and wipe the sweat off your face.  There was a lot of it.  Before you begin the test, the DVD goes through a short warm-up consisting of jogging in place, jumping jacks, the heisman, the heisman with two steps, butt kicks, high knees and the mummy run.  As an added challenge to make the warm-up more effective I included swearing at Shaun T. the trainer in the DVD.  After the warm-up, you go through some stretches then into the fit test. 

The fit test itself, as I mentioned earlier, consists of 8 exercises.  The first half will work your legs like no other, as many involve jumps.  Towards the end it works your upperbody as well with variations of the push-up.  Also, every exercise will engage your abs pretty intensely too.  After the first couple of exercises, I realized that in addition to your body weight and dogged determination it is nice to have patience and an ability to not try to kill Shaun T. and the two people in this video with him.  Of course, All three are all healthy super fit people with a combined 24 pack of abs.  The number of reps they were able to achieve on some exercises made me seriously want to go Chuck Norris and roundhouse kick the TV.  I did though, to the appreciation of my wife, resist that urge.  Instead, I just continued with a healthy dose of swearing and flipping the bird.  What was nice was they made it clear that resting was OK.  I could not keep up with them, though I desperately wanted to, I knew I could rest, and as the test went on, I noticed the exercisers themselves in the video resting.  This helped me feel at ease and not like a wuss and kept me positive and motivated to move on to the next exercise.  And though I actually only spent 8 minutes doing the exercises, it felt like an eternity with all the work it put me through.  Here is a list of what I felt was worked during this little fit test: EVERYTHING.  Knowing that was just a fitness test, and not the workout, I'm both excited and terrified of what day 2 and beyond will bring.  However, one thing I am sure of, if this program is designed to make be able to do well on the fitness test then it is going to be one helluva workout program and I'm going to be in some pretty awesome shape when I'm done.  I'll probably take to hunting wolves with my nothing but my bare hands as that's now legal in Wisconsin. 

Well, I think that's a good summary of day 1.  Check back here, I won't necessarily update everyday, but I will do my best to keep you aprised of the workouts, what they are like, their intensity, what challenges I faced and what progress I am making.  At the end of it all, I will declare and official product judgement.  How my rating system will work, I'm not completely sure.  I'm hoping to figure that out sooner rather than later. 

See ya!