P90X Extreme Home Fitness with Tony Horton Review

by Natalie Belford

P90X Extreme Home Fitness Workout Program - 13 DVDs, Nutrition Guide, Exercise Planner

Overall Rating:

Retail Price: $150.00

P90x is not bodybuilding. Its overall fitness. You won’t get huge, you’ll get strong and have good muscle endurance which helps out in the real world.

Pure bodybuilding involves many fewer exercises, fewer reps, much heavier weight, and would be quite difficult to pull off with the P90x limited equipment requirements. Plus you need a special diet to really get the gains.

The only specialized equipment you’ll need is a yoga mat, chinup bar, and some dumbbells. The tapes move at a good pace so you should probably get two sets of dumbbells, thats what I have and I find it works. With only one set you will pause the tape too much to adjust.

If you can afford and have the space for a full set of hex dumbbells than you have the best possible setup. With two sets of adjustable bells I rarely feel like I’m working too heavy or two light, I just use 15 and 25 pounders. For some movements a five or ten pound plate held in your hands is sufficient.

This is pretty hard. Harder than most workouts by quite a bit. Lots of movements, not a lot of rest time. Certain tapes are tougher than others but you will wipe yourself out on all of them unless you are not trying or are in elite shape.

A few of the individual DVDs in this package are “lifetime” workouts (ie. I can see myself doing them for years to come), including Plyo, Yoga X, Legs/Back, and X-stretch. The other workouts are all excellent as well, but to avoid plateauing it would be best to cycle in and out of these workouts once you complete the 90 day program.

It’s a 90 day program, about an hour a day (an hour and a half for the yoga), six days a week. It is time consuming and requires a commitment. But if you do this for those 90 days, even just one cycle, you will transform not only your body but your overall level of fitness and your mental state will be greatly improved by pushing you beyond what you thought you could accomplish.

Promo shot for the P90X Extreme Home Fitness Program

With a great mixture of muscle building, cardio endurance and functional fitness, this is really a well-rounded program. I went through it once, did it loosely for several months and have jumped back in the ring for another round.

Most of the muscle building workouts use your bodyweight – didn’t realize there were so many varieties of push-ups and pull-ups – and the rest use dumbbells. Each routine adds up to about 24 exercises in roughly 45 minutes along with about eight or nine minutes of stretching before and about three or four minutes of stretching after (which are a must).

Some routines are 12 exercises repeated twice, others are 24 individual exercises, all done in rapid succession which fatigues the muscles quickly and brings the results.

The first week of p90x is a difficult week. When you do the plyometrics workout, you’ll know what I mean. I’ve considered myself someone in good to excellent shape for many years, and around half-way through the second day, I had to pause the video, hands on knees, and make the pact with myself that I would finish plyometrics no matter what.

Since that moment, I’ve been completely sucked into the routine of p90x’s daily workouts.

The workouts are fun and varied enough to keep you from getting bored. What amazes me the most is the perfect spacing between muscle groups worked. Now I am tired and sore in certain areas for an entire week, but when I start to feel a little more limber in that area, it’s time to work it out again.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be tired and lethargic at work; on the contrary, you’ll have more energy, feel more flexible, and be able to do some pretty extraordinary athletic moves before long.

List of what workouts are included in the package

How it Could Have Been Better

Some of the worksheets are not as detailed as I would like, and are missing exercises, especially the legs worksheet. They are also frustratingly small.

The only downside for me was the DVD packaging. Every DVD I’ve purchased in my life came in a plastic case with the DVD barely suspended above the packaging. This entire set comes in a book format that forces you to slide out each DVD. Even though the sleeves are smooth, they are still made out of cardboard/paper and the scratches have already started showing up.

The workout itself deserves 10 stars. I’ve done it and I’ll definitely do it again. However, the food plan isn’t for everyone, especially diabetics. By the third month they’ve added lots of refined carbs (pasta) and that’s a no-no.

They also shy away from healthy fats like olive oil and coconut oil. So, if you have diabetes, please ignore the food plan and stick to what your doctor/nutritionist/dietician told you to eat. Other than that the workout is fantastic, challenging, and well worth doing.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended!

After carefully completing P90X program, I agree with all the positive reviews. There is no false advertising here, except for the assertion that you can finish these workouts in an hour (1 hour, 10 minutes is average). I found I got over the initial soreness in about 2-3 weeks. However, even after that, you go into each workouts knowing that you will be in some discomfort. Nevertheless, if you get through the program, I couldn’t imagine not getting positive results.

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