"Sheryl Crow Stays in Shape with P90X"

In today’s installment of customizing P90X, we’ll address endurance athletes. As you might have surmised, doing the Back & Biceps workout isn’t going to improve your marathon time. And no week of P90X leaves you feeling ready to take on an Ironman triathlon over the weekend. So what’s the deal? The question we most often get is whether the X is going to improve your finish times, or should you skip it in favor of more sports-specific training?

Endurance Athletes Swimming, Biking, and Running

The short answer is that P90X can improve every aspect of your endurance sport. However, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions before you begin, because if you go about it the wrong way you can hurt your performance.

1: What are my goals in my chosen sport?

This question is vital because some of you likely do endurance events only to improve your fitness. When this is the case, you’re best off doing P90X the way it’s designed and suspending your sports-specific training.

Because you probably already have a decent aerobic base, you should respond quickly to the rigors of P90X. And while you’ll be sore and tired in the short term, and lose some of your endurance fitness, you’ll also make rapid body composition changes. These changes will help you should you choose to get back into your sport. However, with fitness as your measuring stick, doing rounds of P90X between rounds of endurance sports training will help you keep your fitness level high.

Things get trickier when sports performance is important. If PRs (personal records) are your ultimate goal, you’ll want to consider how P90X can help you make it happen.

Working Out with B-LinesIn the strictest sense, you should do P90X in the off-season. Most endurance athletes would benefit from a period each year where they stopped (or mostly stopped) their sports-specific training and did a good fitness program. This is especially true if you need to lose weight, or you have weakness because it’s likely your fitness results have hit a plateau after a long season where you did the same things over and over.

2: Which version of P90X should I do?

Your next decision is which schedule of P90X to do: Lean, Classic, Doubles, or some hybrid version. Here are some scenarios to consider.

If you’re an overweight person who has a high percentage of body fat, choose the Classic schedule, because resistance training and gaining muscle are the quickest way to slim down and change your body composition to more muscle and less fat, which will help you more than any other type of training.

If you’re fit with a lot of muscle mass, choose the Lean schedule. You’ll benefit from strength training and explosive cardio (which put different stress loads on the body than running, riding, swimming, etc.) but you won’t add more mass, which is good because strength-to-weight ratio is paramount in endurance sports.

Someone in between might choose a hybrid schedule, the simplest of which would be a program that begins with the Classic schedule and transitions to the Lean schedule.

The last example could also be used by anyone who’s closer to their race program and still wants to try some outside training. In these cases, you could start with the Classic P90X schedule for a phase or so (time will dictate this), then transition to the Lean schedule for a phase, and then perhaps transition to a customized schedule to accommodate your sports-specific training needs.

In the off-season, I wouldn’t recommend the Doubles schedule, which doubles up workouts, because the off-season is when you should make body composition changes, and also when you should rest. Endurance training is intense once you begin racing; when you begin to add miles into your program again, you want to be rested.

3: What if it’s close to my race season?

Most race seasons are long, taking up around nine months of the year on average. Since no one—even a professional—can peak for the entire season, you should set up your schedule with early-season objectives you train through and late-season objectives where you want to set your PRs. Remember, the actual season doesn’t matter—only your schedule does. You should choose to peak around times when you can focus and devote yourself to training, not an arbitrary date on the calendar.

Early season (your early season) is a time when you should be combining sports-specific training along with off-season training. These transition seasons are when you’ll want to incorporate a Doubles-style training schedule.

As an athlete, your Doubles schedule should have sports-specific work. This means you’ll want to alter the P90X schedule of your choice to incorporate your sport. As an endurance athlete, the general place you’ll add this training is the cardio slot on the calendar. Remember that one of the two daily workouts is always an easy cardio workout, which is a perfect slot to do your early-season aerobic conditioning.

As we get closer to the actual racing season, there are many other considerations. We’ll take these on per sport. Next time we’ll look at scheduling P90X with running. Then we’ll focus on triathlons and P90X.

Article by Steve Edwards

Running is the most popular form of exercise in the world. So it should come as no surprise that explaining how to incorporate our exercise programs into someone’s running schedule is one of the most popular requests we get here at Beachbody. Today we’ll look at how to create a program that gives you the benefits of P90X without compromising your ability to set a personal record (PR) in your local marathon.

This article is part of a series on customizing P90X, and it will benefit you most if you’ll take some time to read through each of the preceding articles. (See the Related Articles section below.) After all, what’s 30 minutes of your time if you’re going to spend the next 3 months training like a Spartan? Most importantly, read the last article (Part V), because it talks about structuring a yearly schedule. P90X is not training for running. But if you strategize correctly, it’ll help your running improve.

What type of running?

Of course, the word run means very different things to different kinds of runners. Usain Bolt and Yiannis Kouros may both be running, but the physiological challenges they face could not be more different. Bolt, as you probably know, holds the world record for the 100 meters. Kouros holds records for distances from 100 to 1,000 miles. Most of us lie somewhere in between these extremes, so we’ll focus on the more popular “distance running” distances, from the 10K to the marathon, for which training is similar.

This article will not discuss what to do for you running. That’s what your running coach is for. Instead, we’ll look at how to structure P90X around your current workout schedule, and when to alter it.

The perfect schedule

In the last article I discussed the off-season approach. This is when you should do your non-sports-specific training. Since all athletes can benefit from taking a break from their sport each year, the best case would be for you to stop running and just do P90X. After completing P90X, you would then combine your early-season running training with a maintenance schedule of P90X, which would flip-flop over time. As you got closer to your objectives for the year, you’d run more and do less X training, until you finally moved into a phase where you’d only be running.

But life is rarely perfect, and very few of us can carve our schedules into neat training blocks. This means multitasking. Most of us will likely find ourselves in a situation where we need to look as good as we can for a class reunion in July and are still trying to get a PR in an August marathon. That’s the kind of scenario we’ll address today.

Foundation

Given that you’ve probably already been running, P90X is your foundation program for your running. This means that you should only begin the program if you have time to structure it properly. If you’re within a few months of an important race objective, you’ll be much better off waiting until after you’re finished to begin P90X.

Periodization

If you’re unfamiliar with this term, read the previous articles. Your running training should follow a similar approach to P90X in that it should be laid out in phases. Unfortunately, most people don’t really do this on their own, and if you don’t employ a coach, this is likely to be the case with you. And that’s cool, because you’re about to get a periodizational schedule to use.

In the simplest sense, your running should target your weaknesses well before your scheduled objectives, and then bring your strengths into form close to race time. Your X schedule will do this to a degree, because that’s how it’s designed as a program: to force adaptation early on, with results showing up later as you master the exercises.

Unlike the normal P90X schedule, which you should do if you have the time, today’s example will sacrifice some of the ultimate goals of the classic X schedule in order for you to adapt more quickly and to leave you with more energy for the higher volume of running you’ll be doing later in the program.

Recovery

The schedule laid out here is intense, as most doubles schedules are. Keep in mind that no schedule is worth overtraining for. If it’s too much, back off and restructure it to fit your current state of fitness.

Putting it all together

This schedule is just one example. You’ll need to adjust yours around your schedule. But this model should fit for most of you trying to get the most out of both your running and P90X. It’s important to remember that while you’re training for running, your speed will likely decrease. This is because you’re creating muscular breakdown in order to improve your capacity to run faster later on. This means you’ll be slower early in the program, but once your recover and convert your new strength into running speed, you’ll be faster.

Block 1 (Weeks 1 through 3)

* Day 1: Chest & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 2: Plyometrics

* Day 3: Shoulders & Arms and Ab Ripper X

* Day 4: Yoga X

* Day 5: Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: Kenpo X

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic hike and/or X Stretch

Note: No running in the first block is by design. For aerobic work, keep your heart rate way below threshold.

Recovery/Transition Week

* Day 1: Core Synergistics

* Day 2: Plyometrics

* Day 3: Yoga X

* Day 4: Legs & Back

* Day 5: Core Synergistics

* Day 6: Long aerobic hike or easy run and X Stretch or Yoga X

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic hike and/or X Stretch

Note: Not a traditional recovery week. An endurance athlete tends to have a different base and should be stressed differently. While the intensity of the first month should be high, the volume is low compared to how much many people run.

Block 2 (Weeks 5 through 7)

* Day 1: Chest, Shoulders & Triceps, Ab Ripper X, and easy run

* Day 2: Plyometrics

* Day 3: Back & Biceps, Ab Ripper X, and easy run

* Day 4: Yoga X

* Day 5: Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: Long run and X Stretch

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic hike and/or X Stretch

Note: The easy runs should be aerobic. The longer run can have some amount of tempo intervals, but should still be considered base mileage.

Recovery/Transition Week

* Day 1: Core Synergistics

* Day 2: Easy run and X Stretch

* Day 3: Yoga X

* Day 4: Easy run and X Stretch

* Day 5: Core Synergistics

* Day 6: Long aerobic hike or easy run and X Stretch or Yoga X

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic hike and/or X Stretch

Note: This should feel like a true recovery week.

Block 3 (Weeks 9 and 11)

* Day 1: Chest & Back, Ab Ripper X, and run workout

* Day 2: Plyometrics and recovery run

* Day 3: Shoulders & Arms, Ab Ripper X, and run workout

* Day 4: Yoga X

* Day 5: Legs & Back, Ab Ripper X, and recovery run

* Day 6: Run workout and X Stretch

* Day 7: Rest and/or X Stretch

Block 3 (Weeks 10 and 12)

* Day 1: Core Synergistics and run workout

* Day 2: Cardio X and run workout

* Day 3: Ab Ripper X and run workout

* Day 4: Yoga X and run workout

* Day 5: Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: Run workout and X Stretch

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic hike and/or X Stretch

Note: “Run workout” denotes whatever your coach or your own running dictates. It doesn’t necessarily mean a hard running workout. “Easy run” means subthreshold throughout. This should be followed with a true recovery period of yoga, stretching, and easy runs. Follow this with a rigorous running training block that ends with enough time so you can taper off for your event—usually 2 weeks.

Remember, don’t be afraid to experiment. Your perfect schedule is personal. If something doesn’t feel like it’s working, don’t hesitate to change it. However, it’s also important that you let your program work. As I said before, as you’re training, you’ll get slower before you get faster. Changing your program so this doesn’t happen will not allow the physiological adaptation to occur that will improve your speed later on. If you have any specific questions, or want to run your program by someone, you’ll find many examples of these on the Message Boards.

Article by Steve Edwards

Mixing P90X and triathlon training is not something that’s an obvious fit. After all, triathletes have three sports to train for already. And beyond that, they’re some of the most notorious over-trainers on the planet. But as you well know if you’ve read this series of articles, training hard doesn’t necessarily mean you’re training smart. So this week let’s up your triathlon training IQ and get some X into the mix.

“You’re all triathletes,” said the keynote speaker, a famous cycling coach, to a large group of multi-sport athletes at a conference I was attending. “That means that 90 percent of you are over-trained right now.” Triathletes, historically, are the consummate “if some is good, then an excessive amount is what I’m going to do” group of athletes. Steeped in obsessive lore, the most famous triathlon stories are usually about training instead of racing. And for those in the inner circle, it’s even worse. Once asked by a reporter from a triathlon publication what he did for training, triathlon icon Scott Molina replied, “I’m not going to tell you, because you’ll think I’m an idiot.”

Triathletes: you gotta love ‘em. At least I love ‘em. But then again, I’ve been called stupid/obsessed/crazy (among other things) over my training endeavors for most of my life. And yet it’s triathletes who, more than any other group, try my patience on the message boards. “Why,” they’ll ask, “can’t I train for an Ironman and do P90X doubles in my spare time? All I was going to do was sleep anyway.”

I mean, c’mon, we’re talkin’ about the sporting obsessed. Remember, the first triathlon wasn’t the sprint or even the Olympic version of the race. It started with the Ironman and worked backward to more conventional distances. And along that line of devolution, let’s take a look at how we can improve our triathlons by moving more of our training into our living room. P90X may seem like a big undertaking for that average person. I think you triathletes, however, are going to have to buy in to the “less is more” philosophy.

Why P90X?

Let’s face it: though the X is primarily a performance-based program, most of us do it because we want to look better. As one college baseball player said to me, “To be honest, I’m happy with my sports training. I’m only doing X to look good on the beach.” Yeah, well, Charles Atlas may be the guy you want around when the bully’s kicking sand in your face, but you sure wouldn’t want to haul all his bulk around Kona. Triathletes may want to look better, but the kind of muscles the Chest & Back workout develops is going to offset any strength gains by adding wind resistance to your aero position. For this reason, a serious triathlete needs to make some concessions in the P90X regimen.

The upside is that as I said before, most of you are over-trained. This means you’d get faster by running, riding, and swimming less than you currently are. And that’s where the X comes in. By structuring your year periodizationally in a way that includes both strengthening your weak areas and recovering from your overused ones, you’ll get faster by spending less time working out.

The perfect schedule

In part V of this series we discussed the off-season approach. It would benefit you to read the entire series, but if you’re pressed for time make sure you at least read parts IV and V, which are about endurance and weight loss. If you’ve got a race approaching, there’s no point in beginning P90X. It’ll break you down and slow you down. In a perfect world, you should begin your training program soon after your final race of the previous season. In an imperfect one, at least schedule X as far out from your main objective as possible. As a gauge, there’s no reason to start X if you’ve got a race approaching in less than three months’ time. Hopefully you’ve got six months; nine is even better.

Foundation

P90X is the foundation phase for your sport-specific training. This is why you don’t want to do it close to any important race. You may train right through early-season races, but you’ll get no benefit from X training close to an event where speed is important to you.

Periodization

All triathletes are familiar with periodization. You don’t all do it, of course, but you know that you should do speed work, aerobic work, and threshold work separately, then bring them together closer to your big race. Consider P90X to be the foundation plan for your foundation plan. It’s where you’ll strengthen your body and improve its capacity for improvement in all the areas detailed above.

Recovery

Oh, the “R” word! This is where we don’t train, or at least don’t train hard. No pain, no hallucinations, no glycogen-depleted hobbles home after an 8-hour training day. The horror. But you know you’ve got to do it sometime, or you’ll become like one of those triathletes you know who’ve been on a plateau for the last 2 decades because they’re more addicted to their morning 3-hour swims than they ever could be to coffee.

Here’s where you’ll want to place P90X in your schedule: at the season’s end when you shouldn’t be running, riding, or swimming anyway. Not only will it give you something new to focus on, but no matter how fit you are, it will blast your endurance-oriented cells into oblivion and leave you sore and tired enough to feel as though you’ve spent 20 hours each week on your bike.

Putting it all together

A full round of X, done during the off-season when you’re resting from your sport-specific training, would be preferable. Then you’d begin doing maintenance X work, along with your specific training increased in volume and intensity.

You may want to alter the classic schedule or even do the lean schedule if you’re a high-level competitor who’s worried about muscular mass in a strength-to-weight-ratio sport. P90X won’t get you huge, but the classic schedule will almost certainly add size to your upper-body muscles. Whether or not you’ll find this a benefit is a call you’ll have to make for yourself.

If you feel you need the overall body conditioning that P90X offers and are willing to sacrifice your race results for a while, you may want to put together a hybrid schedule that combines P90X with your current training. It’s hard to write a schedule for everyone because there are hundreds of personal variables to consider. This is why so many athletes hire personal coaches.

Below is just one example of such a schedule. Yours should probably vary, but by using this template, you should be able to get an idea about how to make your own schedule. You could also consult my blog, where I create hybrid training schedules for myself all the time.

I would write a schedule like this for individuals who are fairly triathlon fit but have been doing too much sport-specific training and are pretty weak outside their sport-specific movements, causing their triathlon times to have hit a plateau.

This schedule contains no racing, but you could work races into it. Your personal races should all be labeled A, B, or C. A races are priority races. None should be scheduled near this period. B races are where you’d like to do well but not necessarily peak. These are to be taken seriously and none should be here either. Around B races you should be doing more sport-specific training. The difference between B and A races is that you may schedule a B race during intense training while you would always taper and peak for an A race. This schedule will address your weaknesses and get your ready for a C race. This is a race you enter so you can work on things like transitions, race tactics, and scheduling, and so you can dust off your racing form. Slow times are to be expected.

Your actual multi-sport training should be planned by you or your coach. For P90X, I’m going to use a hybrid of the classic, lean, and doubles schedule.

Block 1 (Weeks 1 through 3)

* Day 1:  P90X Chest & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 2: Easy swim and P90X Plyometrics

* Day 3: P90X Shoulders & Arms and Ab Ripper X

* Day 4: Easy ride or run and P90X Yoga X

* Day 5: P90X Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: LSD (long, slow distance: ride, run, swim, or “brick” [combo] workout like bike/run, etc.)

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic ride, run, or swim and/or P90X  X Stretch

Note: Your sports training should be easy technique training done in zones 1 and 2.

Recovery/Transition Week

* Day 1: P90X Core Synergistics

* Day 2: P90X Plyometrics

* Day 3: Easy ride, run, or swim and P90X Yoga X

* Day 4: P90X Legs & Back

* Day 5: P90X Core Synergistics

* Day 6: LSD (long, slow distance: ride, run, swim, or brick/combo workout)

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic ride, run, or swim and/or P90X  Stretch X

Note: Easy, again, is the key with your specific training. Your goal here is engram training: building neuromuscular coordination patterns.

Block 2 (Weeks 5 through 7)

* Day 1: P90X Chest, Shoulders & Triceps, Ab Ripper X, and easy run

* Day 2: Swim drills and P90X Plyometrics

* Day 3: P90X Back & Biceps, Ab Ripper X, and easy run

* Day 4: Easy ride or run and P90X Yoga X

* Day 5: P90X Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: LSD (long, slow distance: ride, run, swim or brick/combo workout)

* Day 7: Rest or easy aerobic ride, run, or swim and/or P90X Stretch X

Note: Here you can begin coached workouts. These should still not be full-on as your priority is still on your X training.

Recovery/Transition Week

* Day 1: P90X Core Synergistics

* Day 2: Easy run and P90X Stretch X

* Day 3: Easy swim and P90X Yoga X

* Day 4: Easy ride and P90X Stretch X

* Day 5: P90X Core Synergistics

* Day 6: LSD (long, slow distance: ride, run, swim or brick/combo workout)

* Day 7: Off

Note: This should feel like a true recovery week.

Block 3 (Weeks 9 and 11)

* Day 1: P90X Chest & Back, Ab Ripper X, and easy run or ride

* Day 2: P90X Plyometrics & easy swim

* Day 3: P90X Shoulders & Arms, Ab Ripper X, and easy run or ride

* Day 4: P90X Yoga X

* Day 5: P90X Legs & Back, Ab Ripper X, and transition practice

* Day 6: Hard brick/combo workout

* Day 7: Rest and/or P90X Stretch X

Block 4 (Weeks 10 and 12)

* Day 1: P90X Core Synergistics and coached workout

* Day 2: P90X Cardio X and coached workout

* Day 3: P90X Ab Ripper X and coached workout

* Day 4: P90X Yoga X and coached workout

* Day 5: P90X Legs & Back and Ab Ripper X

* Day 6: Coached workout

* Day 7: Recovery ride, run, or swim and/or P90X Stretch X

Note: There are too many variables to discuss your sport-specific training, so I’m leaving that to you and your coach. If you do race at any point in the schedule, alter it so you take at least a couple of easy days prior to the race. Racing always takes a lot out of you and you’ll want to avoid over-training at all cost. I think it was Paula Newby-Fraser who said that it’s better to be 25% under-trained than 1% over-trained. If you want to run a schedule by us, check out the Message Boards.

Article by Steve Edwards