P90X: Planning, Preparation, Acheivement

Bring It home on your own level.

The tribulations of would-be P90Xers are often quite bland, so I'll try to give you a bit more, adding color and repartee along with my planning notes. Clearly, P90X is not a plan for everyone, owing to miscellaneous and sundry reasons. With all the busyness of what I intend to accomplish over the next year in my personal life-plan, incorporating P90X will definitely be a challenge. I invite anyone interested in making a serious plan that works and hold concurrent interests to read my blog regularly.


Drive and Interest Among Men

For some time now, P90X has been a fitness plan of deep interest. Who wouldn't want to be in the best shape of their lives, in soundness of mind and body. For men, who foremost seem to be driven by visual rationale, the models who flaunt their chiseled abdomen muscles and glistening biceps project a singular theme: Dudes, get this fit and you will be a wanted man! For women, such ideation is undoubtedly bawdy (men don't really think this way, do they?). Girls, I have news for you, yes we do, even the more-refined of us.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of strength training and physical fitness among men is the erroneous suggestion that men concerned with the form of their abdominal, biceps, and even gluteus muscles harbor unresolved sexual tensions and are latently homosexual. While I know this theory works only too-well for a zeitgeist among gay men, I must attest that nothing could be father from the truth. Additionally, as the male ego is actually quite fragile, the temerity and constitution needed to incorporate fitness into a life-plan is rarely strong enough to endure ridicule, restricting us to the fitness annals of fantasy football and the greater World of Warcraft (/s).

A State of Affairs: What I've got to Work With

In the last three years of moving to the Los Angeles Basin, I've encountered weight-gain and lethargy. Being a graduate researcher has meant many long hours at a desk, with little residual motivation to exercise appropriately at day's-end. As of this moment, 2010/01/12 (12:04:30), I weight 175 lbs and am 5'9"+ (I've shrunk from 5'10" via caffeine~not good). Oddly, it is the little things that really begin to make the difference in motivating one toward a hierarchical goal. 175 lbs isn't that bad, but considering that triathletes sometimes take as long as 10 years to modify their body fat content from 15-10 %, it is these nuances that are often the hardest to attain.

I've noticed that over the past year my pants have become increasingly tighter, and I've only kept "good" camera images, hiding my abdomen when I'm relaxed or off-guard. My personal fitness level has not dropped such that I can't go for a 4-mile run or enjoy the greater outdoors, but while I remain active, telemark skiing, hiking, and whatnot, it is during these moments when I've been caught (via photo) unawares. I can do better.

While I may look okay when cutting a telemark turn on one occasion... a quick dip in the chilly Stanislaus river is less heroic when buttressed with a supportive layer of padding on my mid-section. So, while I have been blessed with many stellar adventures, I have grown tired of carefully monitoring/editing the photographic record to project a less-than-accurate image.