P90X Short: No Time For P90X or to Maintain

While P90X is a great program, the major drawback for most people is the time required for the program. On top of the short preparation time, you have to allocate 60-90 minutes 6 days a week. Yes, you are worth the time, and it more than pays back in the gains in fitness that you will make, but even many driven people will have problems finding the time with their busy life. For that reason, I created a modified version of P90X that should be able to be much more suited to anybody’s schedule.


Before I go on, I want to be very clear that P90X Short, as I call it, should not be your first choice of a schedule. It is an alternative to not doing P90X at all. Additionally, you can follow the recommendations for one day at a time, when you won’t have time to do a full P90X workout.

The Schedule is the Same

Even when you are doing P90X Short, you follow the schedule as defined. The only difference is the length of the workout. Specifically, you cut out about half of the workout.

First, make sure that you always do the warm up and the stretch. Also, you should do Ab Ripper X 3 times a week. While you should do it on the days that it is defined, you can do it on any 3 days as long as it is not on consecutive days, and preferably not on Yoga day.

How to Cut the Workouts in Half

Some workouts repeat the same sequence twice. Other workouts do not. So the obvious way to cut Chest & Back and Shoulders & Arms in half is to just not do the non-repetitive portions of the workouts. In Chest & Back, just stop halfway through, and fast forward to the cool down. In Shoulders & Arms, the workout does sections of 3 different exercises and then repeats the section. Just fast forward past the repetitive exercises.

The other workouts, with the exception of Yoga X, can just be divided in half. Even though the exercises are different in the halves, they tend to cycle through the same muscle groups, so you will get the required coverage. As far as which halves you should do, that is generally up to you. I find the second halves tend to have more challenging exercises, so you might want to start there. The exception seems to be Legs & Back, where the first half of the workout works the larger muscles of the legs better than the second half. The back work in Legs & Back repeats, so it doesn’t matter.

Yoga X clearly is a completely unique workout throughout. The real work is in the first 45 minutes of the workout. However, you want to also try to work in Yoga Belly 7. A preferred alternative is to get the Fountain of Youth DVD from the P90X One on One series. Tony describes it as a 45 minute version of Yoga X. It gets to most of the critical aspects of Yoga X, including stretching and ab work, but is again half the time. If you need to order Fountain of Youth, you can click here, and the Fountain of Youth workout is the 6th one down on the pull down menu.

Modifying Your Diet

If you are doing P90X Short, you generally want to cut a fairly significant amount of calories from your diet. The amount of calories to be cut depend on your caloric needs. For that reason, you should go to the Caloric Needs Calculator on teambeachbody.com and calculate your calorie needs for P90X. Then go back and calculate your calorie needs for doing no exercise. Then average it out the two numbers. If you need an account on teambeachbody.com, click here for a free account.

How Does P90X Short Affect Your Results?

If you eat properly, you should generally have the same amount of weight loss that you would have doing P90X Classic. Muscle growth and strength should still increase, although probably not as much as with P90X Classic. Muscle improvement comes by creating microtears in the muscles, and generally you will get about 80% of such tearing doing half the workout. The second half of P90X workouts provides mostly extra calorie burning, and as long as you hit all of the muscles in the part of the workout that you actually do, you should get most of the expected P90X muscle benefits. Again, I peg it at about 80%, but admittedly that is at best a knowledgeable guess.

Conclusion

P90X Short is also a potentially great maintenance routine, as it provides benefits without having to do the full workout in a tolerable amount of time. Also as I said in the beginning, this is solely an alternative for people who could not otherwise do P90X. It is not intended to be a fully functional replacement of the P90X schedule. Additionally, if you are short on time, and have already completed P90X, you might want to try P90X+, which is a great workout, but is more of a muscle endurance and toning workout, rather than a strength and size workout. The biggest benefit of P90X+ is that the main workouts are usually about 40-45 minutes a day.