It's been almost a week - but don't think I've been resting on my considerable laurels. I've done several more workouts for my chest, back, shoulders and arms - I've continued my physical therapy - and I've ventured into the Kenpo X and Cardio X workouts.
I've also measured everything that's appropriate to measure, and figured out that if I'm reading (and probably more importantly using) my skinfold calipers correctly, my body composition is in the neighborhood of about 19%. I still suspect it's higher than that, but since I've measured and calculated that number on a couple of separate occasions with slight variations in the measurements of skinfolds, I feel confident that I can at least use that number as a benchmark. Whether it's high or low shouldn't matter as long as it gets lower in the coming weeks.
So the Kenpo X workout is pretty tough - and fairly rough on my knees. I had to take it a little easy on the kicks. I decided to do the kicks because by and large, my knees were feeling pretty good. Fortunately they continued to feel good the next day, confirming that I didn't do anything terribly bad to them.
And then there was the Cardio X routine. I figured that would be a good one to whet my whistle for the other workouts since it touches on the Yoga and even the scary plyometrics workout. This one was very difficult - I nearly got my heart rate up to where it was on my faster run portions of my run/walk routine. Again I avoided any pain the next day even though my quadriceps felt some delayed onset muscle soreness the next day due to some of the jumping.
So the Cardio X routine was yesterday, and I took all my measurements yesterday, and I took the dreadful "before" pictures, so that meant I was pretty much obligating myself to start the real, full, and actual P90X routine today.
But first I had physical therapy. And not just normal physical therapy (though maybe that's a good thing). Today was the first day of my "step down" program. Meaning I'm done with the normal program, I just get to use their facilities and their expertise as I do all the stuff I can do at home, except for a few machines and devices that I can't quite replicate. I skipped a few of the recommended exercises since I knew they'd overlap with what I was planning on for the evening. Or the later evening.
Got home, had a quick dinner, watched Heroes, and then got busy. I did about 87 push ups of many varieties, about 15 pull ups and 8 chin ups. Yes, that's fewer than I was doing during the 100 pushups routine, but since these were all different varieties and hit all different parts of my chest and triceps, I think this was probably pretty good for a start. I also did roughly 75 rowing type movements with dumbbells. The weight here is still fairly low, especially since I moved to 2 circuits of this routine, as suggested by the videos.
And to the letter of the law with the P90X program, I went straight to the Ab Ripper X routine afterwards. It's still very hard, I still can't do everything, but I'm still working towards increasing what I'm able to do. But at the end of it, I had performed about 174 'reps' of all the various ab/core exercises combined. Really tough ab/core exercises. So don't scoff at the fact that 174 is only half of the 349 total reps that I could be doing. Supposing I didn't throw up mid-workout from the insane exertion.
Next up tomorrow is plyometrics. I'm a little scared - I just hope I can remember to take it easy on my knees and not catch quite so much air during the routine.
