Recovery Phase

The P90X Extreme Home Fitness program is designed in three training blocks of 28 days. Each block is broken down into two phases: Adaptive & Mastery Phase; Recovery Phase. Adaptive & Mastery is pretty self-explanatory. You do these exercises. Your body isn't used to them, so it must adapt to the movements, build new strength to do them more easily, and eventually master the movements. And that's when you change what you;re doing. It's called "muscle confusion." Never let the muscles settle into a routine. That's when your body hits a plateau. After three weeks of Adaptive & Mastery, just when the muscles are solid and you feel confident and secure about the exercises, the program changes.

The Recovery Phase eliminates all the weight training and focuses on stretching, cardio, and core training, and allows the muscles that have been worked so hard in the lifting and pulling workouts to fully recover. And grow. It also introduces a few new workouts, such as "Core Synergistics" and "Stretch X," while working in a few familiar workouts such as "Yoga X" and "Kenpo X."

Today is day 22, the first day of the Recovery Phase of Training Block 1. I was looking forward to a brand new workout, but was disappointed to look at the schedule and see that today is "Yoga X." But the mantra of P90X is "Just press play. So I did.

I've been having trouble with "Yoga X" because of my aforementioned lower back/left hamstring. The hamstring is extremely tight, and is either the result of or the cause of my lower back pain. Today I vowed to take it a little easier through the stretches and poses of "Yoga X," and to my surprise, thgouh I still couldn't do all the poses or hold the ones I could do for as long as they do in the video, I was able to do more than I could last time. I even tried and found some success with the balance postures, which had me perched precariously on one leg while extending various other limbs out and up! Where the last three times I skipped the middle half-hour of "Yoga X," today I stuck it through and at least tried all the poses and movements. I felt damn proud of myself. Not to mention soaking sweaty wet.

So it's this kind of stuff for the rest of the week. Next week begins Training Block 2, with a workout of the Chest, Shoulders & Triceps, and, of course, the dread Ab Ripper X!