Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The Straight Dope: P90X: Muscle Confusion Two

This ain’t your granddaddy’s weight training program. It’s too early to explain just what they are, exactly, but one thing that comes to mind consistently while doing the mc(muscle confusion)2 resistance workouts is a line Tony says in the preview to one of the P90X resistance workouts, “It’s just good old fashioned weight training.” P90X mc2 decidedly isn’t that, so today we’ll preview its weight training workouts.






In fact P90X wasn’t really old fashioned either. One of the things that make it so successful is that its workouts are complex. It takes a while for most anyone to master it and that keeps your progression curve heading skyward. This, of course, is part of our overall strategy for the program. By creating some amount of what our marketing team coined “muscle confusion” your body keeps adapting, and this prolongs the period of time it takes before you master the program and start to plateau.

But compared to mc2, 90x is old fashioned. Not only have we designed workouts that keep you adapting longer, they also target laser-specific weakness in the body that occur across a broad spectrum of the population. In the most laymen of explanations, this means that your muscles will not only grow and get strong, but they will do it in a way that’s forcing your body to use them more effectively. So as your muscles grow they are also going to work better from a biomechanical perspective. This means, quite simply, that beyond just improving how you look you are going to get better at doing stuff.

The first time you go through these workout it’s going to feel strange to most of you. At times you’re spending so much focus on holding the various positions that you may hardly move any weight. As your balance improves so will your ability to move more weight but, more importantly, you’ll be moving it with a more harmonious kinetic chain. This you’ll notice in your movements as everything you do in your daily life that requires you body to move will become easier. It’s the kind of feeling that’s addicting in an “I never thought this was possible” sorta way. Once you’ve felt it you’ll never want to go back, which challenges us to keep coming up with new and better stuff.

If this seems like a brush over of nearly half of the program’s workouts, consider that it’s really all you need to know. Decide, commit, and you’ll succeed beyond what you realized was possible.

pic: sure granddaddy was big but could he move?

Posted by Steve Edwards at 8:54 AM

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