Day 66 - It's good to be BACK (& Biceps)

It's great to be back in the swing of things.

Coming back full-bore after being on the sick bed for a week is TOUGH. Coming back full-bore doing P90X ... You gotta have Big Cahonies!!!

Chest, Shoulders, and Tri's left half of my upper body still feeling blasted from the workout. Now it was time to get the other side. And, today I got to work on my "now" most favorite exercises: PULL-UPS!

Week 7 I had had to take P90X on the road, so all my "weights" were with the GREEN band (and we all know how much I dislike using the bands because I like NUMBERS!!) I wanna know what I'm pulling/pushing, not a color. But either way, I used my reps from week 7 with the weight #'s of week 6 and added 5 lbs. I know I'm getting strong because I was able to hang with the +5lbs.

I've noticed something about P90X and myself. I definitely like the workouts (A.K.A. THIS ONE!) is that there is NO REPEATS! Every exercise I give it my all, go to or near to failure on each and once I'm done.. I'm DONE! I can go all out on that exercise and get it out of my mind and move on to the next exercise with the thought of : "Crap, I gotta go back and do it all again." Don't get me wrong, I still get pumped on all the other workouts, but I think it's just a mental thing for me.

Another reason why I like this workout is that I'm still doing more pullups than I EVER have before in my entire life. If you look back on my Fit Test Day 1, I struggled to barely pull out 3 wide pullups. Now I'm hitting 8-9 consistently since the starting of phase III. I don't know what happened, but it just hit midway through phase II.

I believe it's due to the fact that I stopped using the chair during all my workouts as a crutch. It makes sense. At the start of P90X, I used the chair on ALL my pullups. I didn't even try to do any by myself, and that started me into the habit of always using the chair and never pushing myself to do them by myself. After I started to work out at my work's gym since I wanted to start the Doubles program and working out at the gym during my lunch time freed up time at home to pull out Cardio X. While working out at the gym, there were guys doing pullups like they were second nature. They'd do 8-10+ at a time. Me...HA, I still used a chair as a crutch. But how "cool" (or whatever you wanna call it) to see someone doing pullups with a chair?

So I made a mental change. At the start of each and every pullup exercise, I will do as many pullups on my own as I can, then after giving everything to pull myself up, I'll have the chair there ready for me to use to bust out the remaining. And that's how it all started. At first it was 4, then it was 5, then 6, then 7, now I do at least 6-7 on my own before I even start to get fatigued enough to pull out the chair. My main goal is to bust out 15. I don't know why, it's just a number that strikes me as a milestone.

Being that I only have two weeks left until my first round of P90X is complete, I still have a long ways to go, but we'll see when I do the fit test on Day 91.

I'll be back tomorrow pushing play.