Tips for Starting P90X

P90X is significantly more than just a workout, and people realize that. For that reason, it is natural to want to know how to prepare for the program. I do have to admit that if you want to be successful with the program, which for many people means losing weight and getting ripped, you do have to prepare to a certain extent. For example, if you start off without equipment, you cannot do the workouts well. If your refrigerator is filled with junk food, there’s a good chance that you will eat poorly. Either situation will sabotage your success.

As the old saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

So if you want to plan for success, there are three categories of tips you should consider; Support, Equipment, and Nutrition. If you get nothing else out of this article, I want to be very clear that of all of the categories, if you want to lose weight, Nutrition is the most important.

Setting Yourself Up For Success

Perhaps the best thing you can do to enable success is to get an account on teambeachbody.com. The reason is that it provides some incredibly valuable resources. It allows you to record your measurements. There is a Body Fat Calculator and a Caloric Needs Calculator under Eat Smart > Nutrition Tools. The Body Fat Calculator will be invaluable to you as you should gain muscle and lose fat as you do P90X, so the scale will only tell you part of the story. Again, you want to do this before you start P90X.

Additionally, you want to take and upload your pictures. While I realize that some people will hate their “Before” pictures, you will find that it will be a source of pride later on.

As important, you can use the pictures to enter the Beachbody Challenge, which will get you a free t-shirt when you complete P90X. You can find info on the Beachbody Challenge through this link.

Also to keep you moving, teambeachbody.com will schedule and track the entire P90X 90 days for you. That feature is found under Get Fit > SuperGym and then you “Add a new auto-schedule”. As an added bonus Beachbody gives away $500 per day to a random person using that function.

While you can always contact me with any questions, teambeachbody message boards can also provide some answers as well, although the accuracy of an answer may vary.

Choosing and Scheduling a P90X Version

Before you start P90X, you have to figure out which version of P90X you want to choose whether you want to do Classic, Lean or Doubles. I can go into details, but the most important issue for people to know is that P90X Lean will not get you leaner. While the book, which was written about 6 years ago, does say it is intended to help you get leaner, the P90X Certificaion training I underwent stated specifically that Lean is for people who are not yet ready to try the full program. In short, think of it as P90X Lean = P90X Lite.

Click on this sentence to read my full article on which version to choose.

Then as mentioned above, you can let teambeachbody.com schedule and track your workouts for you.

Equipment

To get the best results from P90X, you do need the right equipment. While having access to a full range of equipment would be best, you can get by with a minimal set of equipment as long as it is the right equipment.

Click this sentence for my article about what equipment you need for P90X.

Proper Nutrition

As I said/implied before, if your goal is to lose weight, and especially get ripped, that requires proper nutrition. The workouts will get you fitter, but to lose weight, you have to eat the right amount of calories. Too much and you gain weight. Too little and your body will think you are starving, and it will try to save itself by burning muscle. The ideal calorie range for losing weight is approximately 750-1000 calories below your Maintenance Level. You can get the calorie range you need from the Caloric Needs Calculator on teambeachbody.com.

The one statement you need to remember clearly is:

Abs are made in the kitchen.

No matter how hard you workout, you need to eat properly to lose weight. Properly means healthy foods with the right number of calories.

Just “eating clean” will not do it. Again, you need to eat the right number of calories…not too much or too little. So clean out your kitchen and plan your menu.

You do not have to follow the P90X Nutrition Guide, but you do have to follow some healthy nutrition plan at the right calorie level. It can be a vegan plan, Body for Life’s nutrition plan, Weight Watchers, etc, but again it should be something that you follow and plan in advance.

Whichever plan you follow, you should by the food in advance, so that you have the raw materials for meals ready to cook, and more important, you have healthy snacks available. It is the snacking that usually kills your diet.

Supplements

A lot of people want to add supplements to their diet. The assumption is that supplements will help you get better results. If you eat well, you don’t need supplements. That being said, if you are not eating perfectly, there are some supplements that can help.

If you think you need energy before your workouts, a pre-workout drink would help. The common one is Jack3d, but it contains creatine and DMAA. Creatine is not ideal for women, and DMAA has been linked to some deaths for people with blood pressure problems. Beachbody has it’s own pre-workout drink that doesn’t have those ingredients, but does taste reasonably good and gives you an energy boost. Click here to learn more about that.

Recovery drinks are also part of the P90X Nutrition Plan and are especially good after a hard workout. Click here for my article on recovery drinks and the purpose they serve.

Many people also look to protein bars and meal replacement drinks for when they are short of time. As far as protein bars go, there are a wide variety of options. Frankly, they are generally candy bars with protein and a multivitamin mixed in. The P90X Nutrition Bars were recently redesigned to be somewhat healthier than the average bar. You however can do your own price/taste comparisons.

As far as meal replacement drinks go, most of them tend to be chocolate milk with a multivitamin. Shakeology is significantly different as it contains as much protein as many protein drinks, digestive enzymes, probiotics, phytonutrients, and a wide variety of other components that promotes overall digestive health. Most important from my perspective is that it is intended to be used as a base, so you can mix it with a wide variety of different ingredients to create a myriad of different flavors. I can go on, but the video below better describes the product. Also while I know that Shakeology seems expensive compared to most of the meal replacement drinks available, that is not the case and the article you get by clicking here explains why.



There are other supplements that some people want to consider like Omega-3 fats, creatine, protein powder, vitamins, etc. Those are individual concerns, so please feel free to contact me directly with questions by e-mailing me at ira@irawinkler.com.

Support

While everyone goes into P90X with grand thoughts, there will be ups and downs. There will be days when you are surprised by the scale, in both good and bad ways. You will also have questions about the workouts and the nutrition plans. For that reason, please consider having me assigned as your Beachbody Coach. Besides of having completed P90X, P90X+, P90X2, and other Beachbody programs countless times, I am a P90X Certified trainer, and can either answer your questions, or find you the answers.

If you want me as your coach, you can click here to set up a free account. If you already have an account, please feel free to e-mail me at ira@irawinkler.com.

Conclusion

P90X is an outstanding program that will work, as long as you work. While pressing play daily is critical, so is basic preparation. That preparation especially includes proper nutrition. Most important, remember that even if you started out wrong, you can change at any time and increase your results. P90X really means that you are adapting to a lifestyle of eating right and exercising on a regular basis.

Notes From the 2011 Beachbody Coach Summit

The Beachbody Coach Summit took place from June 17-19, 2011, and as expected there were A Lot of announcements to share with everyone. I normally mail updates to my customers, however a message with all the information would be overwhelming, so I thought I would send everyone a message referring them to this blog post if they want more info on the subjects. So, enjoy!

P90X2

P90X2 is supposed to be available for the 2011 Christmas/Holiday season. Preordering will hopefully become available in August, and you should take advantage of it, as Beachbody is trying to balance out the projected orders, and only does a limited run for new programs until they see the demand, so there is strong potential that it might go out of stock early.



As far as the program itself goes, P90X2 will be a 90 day program that you do 5 days a week. Yes I wrote 5 days a week. There will be 14 workouts that are part of the program, which will have 3 distinct phases; Learning, Strength and Performance, and it appears that you will do different workouts in the different phases.

Tony Horton and his advisors describe P90X2 as the most advanced program ever put on DVD. Note that they did not say the most intense. While it will not be as theoretically extreme or intense as Insanity or Asylum, the entire P90X2 program was scientifically designed to provide maximum gains in all areas of fitness.

P90X2 is not however a program for beginners. Doing pushups while your hands and feet are on balls requires very significant core strength for example. It is designed to improve all areas of athleticism, but needs a good base to build on.

The above also touched upon the need for some extra equipment. While there will be alternatives for people who don’t have the equipment, P90X2 will use medicine balls, stability balls, a weighted bar, and a foam roller.

One major change that you might or might not notice is that there will be no traditional cardio in P90X2. As all the work is essentially intervals, you are improving your cardio vascular fitness enough for functional health as Tony stresses. Tony and the people he works with believe that intervals provide more effective improvements, and you also don’t see a functional reason for the normal person to just keep their heart rate in an aerobic range for extended periods of time.

Just to answer another question you might have, yes there will still be yoga, but it will only be about 65 minutes long.

For those of you that care, it might be available in Blue Ray format.

There will be multiple nutrition plans available to accommodate the most common dietary styles, including vegetarians and vegans. Shakeology will also be integrated into the plans.

I will provide more info and videos later, but please let me know if you have specific questions on this.

P90X iPhone App

The long awaited P90X iPhone app should be available in August. This was the most secretive part of the whole summit, where they wanted all recording stopped. While it is still unclear as to what can tell you now, I will say that it has the workout tracking that you all wanted, and so much more. You will definitely be able to take P90X to the gym. From the little bit that we saw, I can tell you that the P90X app is AWESOME!

To answer other questions, you should be able to run the app on iPads, as well. There was however no information about Droid or other pending smart phone versions.

Active Duty Military Coach Fees Waived

As many of you know Beachbody actively supports the military and their families. To further that support, people who have an active duty military person in their family will be able to sign up to be a Beachbody Coach for free, which saves $39, and the later monthly fees ($15) will also be waived. This means it is essentially free for you to be a coach.

While this is clearly an outstanding opportunity for military families to create a second income with no money out of pocket, it is also a great way to get all Beachbody products at a wholesale cost. For example, Shakeology will be $90 per order for military families. You get all programs, including Insanity and TurboFire for the coach prices of $90, and it costs you nothing.

Please email me at ira@xcompanionguide.com if you are interested or need more information.

New Shakeology Flavor

The new Shakeology flavor was formally debuted at the summit, and is named, Tropical. They describe it as based primarily on Banana, Pineapple, and Papaya, and was designed to be a light flavor that is there to enhance the flavors of what you add to it. It was designed to be versatile. For the summit, they were blending it with pineapple, strawberries, yogurt, and milk, and the closest thing I could describe it as was somewhat of a bubblegum flavor. I don’t however believe that that description does it justice.

Many coaches were mixing the Tropical with Chocolate flavors and loved the combination. Personally, I love chocolate, and prefer the chocolate, but I definitely liked Tropical more than Greenberry.

While it is pretty much ready to go, Beachbody is a major stickler for all around quality, especially with regard to Shakeology, and they are still making sure that the formula will have significant shelf life and will not be impacted by adverse shipping conditions. They intend for the flavor to be ready to ship by the end of the year.

Vegan Shakeology and Other Flavors

Very ironically, all of the people who designed Shakeology are vegans, and given that Shakeology uses whey protein, it is not technically a vegan product. They all drink it though. Given the market, they are continuing to work on Vegan Shakeology, and have the product ready during the first quarter of 2012. While I realize this is not the news you want to hear, I get enough questions about this, so I wanted to give you a status that Beachbody knows of your concerns, and is actively addressing them. Apparently the holdup is that they have had difficulties finding a formula that has a flavor and consistency that will meet all standards of quality, which includes taste and consistency.

While there was no detail about this subject, there is also at least one additional flavor in the works that they hope to also have ready in the first quarter of 2012. It will not however be Vanilla, as many people hope, as that flavor was nixed last year as it was being ready to be shipped. Again, they could not get enough quality vanilla that was not chemically treated to have a good flavor as a lead flavor. They will not compromise their core beliefs even when the demand for the product is huge.

New Tai Chi Program

The only new program announced, besides P90X2, is a Tai Chi based program. I will have more information on that later in the year. For those of you not familiar with Tai Chi, it is a martial art that is essentially a slow movement of Kung Fu sequences. The program is designed for people of all ages, but is probably going to be more popular with people who have flexibility issues, difficulty with the harder programs, or just want an easier program for a change that strives for mental clarity.

The New $100,000 Beachbody Challenge

Beachbody has completed renovated what was previously known as the Million Dollar Body Challenge, and renamed it simply, The Beachbody Challenge. Now you can win up to $100,000. Everyone who enters gets a T-shirt for just submitting their story. While a huge transformation is outstanding, for just signing up and submitting your Success Story, you will get a T-shirt. The only requirement is that you have an account on teambeachbody.com. If you are my customer, or have a coach, you already have an account. If you dont have an account yet, please click here for a free one. If you want more information, please e-mail me.

If you are interested in this in any way, please contact me so I can help you. My e-mail is ira@xcompanionguide.com. I have helped many people make it through their respective program, and have decades of experience in fitness and nutrition, and I am more than happy to help you find the right program for your needs, and make it through the program with the best possible results.

Beachbody Continues to Grow and Improve

As you can tell, Beachbody continues to grow and expand their product lines to better serve you. They also have a special concern to supporting members of the military and will continue to support them and their families however they can.

I have clearly thrown a lot out here, so please feel free to personally contact me if you want details on anything mentioned here, or anything else related to fitness, nutrition, or Beachbody in general. I can again be reached at ira@xcompanionguide.com.