Asylum Review: Speed & Agility

The first official day of Asylum is the Speed and Agility DVD. As with all Insanity workouts, you never know what to expect. However, the Fit Test did give you a feel for what to expect. So, here is the first impression review of what to expect in the workout and review of the workout.

The warm up was actually a series of primarily jump rope exercises about a minute each. These include jumping rope with high knees, criss crossing, etc. Every set was about a minute each and it ended up being about 10 minutes long. There is no repeating of the exercises multiple times. There is no bar graph on the bottom of the page about the level of difficulty, like there is in Insanity. I guess the philosphy is that you are always supposed to push yourself. Stretching was less than 5 minutes.

I have to admit that the early part of the actual workout was more difficult mentally than physically. It was a lot of concentration to do the quick feet through the agility ladder. For the first section of the workout, I really didnt feel like I was being worked that hard, and probably could have got a more effective workout if I wasnt worried about fast feet stepping in the right places. I assume that over the next 30 days, it will get better.

However the workout did become progressively harder. You can see the value of the agility ladder, as In and Outs are now measured and you are pushed to bring your feet in tight. That takes a lot of work after awhile, and Shaun T keeps coming back to Ins and Outs. There are a few moving push ups. I lot of hops on one and two legs that begin to wear you out. Also, I was surprisingly hurting doing Bear Crawls, which you end up doing several variations of throughout the last 15 minutes.

I dont intend to go exercise by exercise through the program, but in general, you do a move for a minute and then move on. You do come back to In and Outs, and do variation of some of the moves you did before. Again, Asylum is emerging to be much more like a Pure Cardio workout, where you dont go through multiple sets that you do with more effort in the progressive sets. It is go all out on every set. I did this workout in a hotel room with the air conditioning on very high, and yet despite my early comments about the workout being more mentally than physically hard, I was drenched in sweat. So far it appears that Insanity is meant to make you a better athlete, who needs agility as much as they need to build up endurace. I am not sure if I can say that this workout was harder than lets say, Max Plyo, but if I stick with it, I know I will be quicker and possibly as fit.

This is however Day 2 and there are 6 more DVDs to try out. There is however a theme that seems to be emerging that Asylum is definitely more in tune to make you a better athlete, rather than just getting you in better shape. Strength is tonight when I get back home.