Chest, back, legs, shoulders, biceps, triceps. (Oh and calves. Stupid calves. Always skipped those.) For years whenever I lifted weights my exercises were done in this order. The actual exercises would vary – dumbbell flys one day and flying dumbbells the next (Kidding! Sorta!) – but the workout stayed the same. Why? Well because I was new and I didn’t know any better. But mostly it was because this was what my first trainer taught me. For reasons I cannot now recall she said that it was important to go from large muscles to small muscles and to alternate working the front and the back of the body. There might also be some Body For Life mixed in there. Either way, I lived and died by that order.
But does the order in which you do exercises really matter? Is there some kind of workout synergy from super-setting chest and back that makes them more effective than if done alone? I don’t know. But I do know that a lot of fit pros believe it. Rachel Cosgrove used this principal with the “complexes” in the final phase of her Female Body Breakthrough (still my most effective Great Fitness Experiment ever) and I remember those workouts as some of the most brutal we’ve ever done. Jillian Michaels also used the same theory in Making the Cut. Turns out Tony Horton is a fan as well.
Phase III of P90X is all about the order of the exercises based on a principal called post-activation potentiation or P.A.P. PAP is described as “combining high load strength movements with biomechanically similar plyometric/ballistic movements as a means of taking advantage of Post Activation Potentiation (PAP), a phenomenon that refers to enhancement of muscle function as a result of its contractile history. P3 has found that complex training is far superior in developing athletic power to either resistance training or plyometric training alone.” Sounds pretty sweet to me! I love a workout that gives you more bang for your sweaty buck. The PAP workouts promise you’ll torch fat, increase strength and make grown men cry.
In Phase III you are given two “PAP” workouts – upper and lower – and told to alternate them on lifting days. You are given two complexes made up of four exercises and you go through complex A four times followed by complex B four times. They’re tough workouts. Really tough. I was a shaking puddle of sweat by the time we finished the first complex and the second one felt like death the first few times. For this reason I liked Phase III the best out of all the P90X 2 phases. There weren’t any so-crazy-I-can’t-attempt-them moves like there were in Phase II and yet the moves we were given were challenging.
The downside however was that you are only given those two workouts for all of phase III (you do P90X 2 yoga, plyocide and other previously introduced workouts on the other days) and phase III is supposed to last 3 – 9 weeks. Those complexes get old fast. Especially since each one is repeated four times per workout. Some people enjoy the predictability of the same moves every time – the better to measure your progress by? – but I prefer variety.
And I may just be showing my ignorance here but the order of the exercises – the whole point of PAP, right? – felt completely arbitrary to me. Some days due to equipment being used by other patrons I had to mix up the order or even sub in a different exercise and those workouts didn’t feel any different to me. I also didn’t drop any body fat during this phase. The science behind PAP seems pretty sound but I’m not sure that P90X 2 implemented it in the most effective way. For instance, a huge part of PAP (as I understand it) is that you do some heavy lifting move immediately followed by a plyo move that works the same movement and yet in one of the upper body complexes you do a pull-up move followed by an ab, then a shoulder and then a stretch. Out of the four only the shoulder move could possibly involve heavy weights and there are zero plyometric or ballistic exercises in the whole complex. Color me confused. But as we have already established I am not an expert of anything (including potty training and after 4 kids I really ought to be) and I could be misreading the research and/or Tony’s explanation. If you have an answer for this please educate me in the comments and I’ll update this post with your explanation!
Science questions aside, I did like Phase III a lot. I would definitely mix in these workouts into our regular routine.
Now, onto my overall P90X 2 assessment. I really wanted to love this workout. Really, truly. And yet I didn’t. I’m not sure if it’s just because my expectations were so high from the first P90X or because I’m not good at the elephant-on-a-ball circus tricks and therefore dislike anything I’m not good at. But I didn’t love it. Mind, I didn’t hate it either. It was a good, solid workout and I enjoyed it but if in the future if I get feeling P90X-ish again I’ll likely return to the first version.
What I Liked About P90X 2
1. Creative moves! So much of fitness can feel like there’s only one person actually taking the test and everyone else is just copying their answers so it was fun to have some genuinely unique and interesting exercises to try. Hello crunchy lever pull-ups, I love you!!
2. Lots of variety! You get the 12-14 DVDs (depending on which package you buy) plus Tony offers lots of options within each video.
3. Tony Horton is a riot! I know that some of you have commented before that his jokes are only funny the first eleven times and then you must mute him but since I did the workouts at the gym I was able to chuckle freely to myself at home when he looked straight in the camera and crooned “Was that as good for you as it was for me?” after some miserable exercise.
4. Standout Yoga. I loved the first P90X yoga (although confession: I generally did it on double speed so the 90-minute workout ended up being 45 minutes with a lot less standing around in Dancer.) And P90X 2 yoga is also fantastic. Many yoga videos get too into the whole spiritual side of things and I like to keep my workouts shallow, er, moving, and this is “fitness” yoga at its best. Seriously you have to try this amazing yoga progression for your butt: crescent lunge to warrior III to half moon to rotated half moon to standing split to single-leg knee-to-forehead crunches and back to standing split ALL WITHOUT PUTTING YOUR OTHER FOOT DOWN. Your butt will hate you but you will love it.
What I Didn’t Like
1. Creative moves. I know, it’s a love-hate. I went into this more in my Phase II review but some of the moves were too crazy for me. I love me a good challenge but some of them – like falling into a push-up position from standing – just seemed too risky to be worth it. Even if I landed it – which I did eventually – I took all the impact in my wrists, something that just seems like a bad idea. And as Gym Buddy Krista noted, there were quite a few moves using different sized balls that were not easily modified. Either you did it right or you ate carpet.
2. All the marketing. It’s Beachbody. There is a special P90X line of supplements now. They have a fancy website. All of which they like to remind you of every 4.5 seconds. I mean, I get it – it’s a necessary evil but that doesn’t mean I didn’t throw my dirty socks at the screen every time the commercials came on.
3. No leg work. I truly don’t understand this one. From 25 different variations on the pull-up to 50 variations on the push-up, there was tons of upper body work – my shoulders and lats were pretty much continuously sore for 3 months – and yet the only leg moves this workout offers are some non-weighted plyometrics. Where are the crazy sumo squats? The Mary Katherines? Heaven help me, the Sneaky Lunge?? I need weights danggit! Our legs felt so neglected that the Gym Buddies and I took to adding 3-5 legs moves to each workout just to feel balanced.
4. No emphasis on heavy lifting. One of the things I loved best about the first P90X was how it got so many people to try lifting heavy. And yet this time around the weights definitely took backstage to all the balancing ball moves. I missed the heavy lifts.
5. No book. I whined about this before and I may be the only person who cares about this but having the instruction booklet for P90X 1 was invaluable to me. I don’t have all that equipment at home and the book allowed me to do it at the gym and track my progress for each lift. I sorely missed that book this time around.
Results
I didn’t lose any body fat although I do think I got stronger as I definitely increased the number of pull-ups I can do. I lost a Gym Buddy. That doesn’t seem like a great trade off…
Your Conclusions
Do you think that the order in which you do certain exercise is important? Do you follow a particular order? So those of you who’ve been doing P90X2 as well – am I missing the point? How did you like it?
At least I now have a good excuse not to buy it. This is much better than the fact that every time I pass by my set of original P90X I feel as though it is taunting me to come back. I even had a nightmare once about having Tony Horton show up while I was sleeping and telling me that I wasn’t “bringing it..” I can live without the carpet burns also.
You know my history with P90X, so it’s no surprise that I won’t be doing Part Deux. Although I think Tony Horton is great ( and funny!).
As far as order of exercises, I’m of the mind that if you get them done, you’ve accomplished something. But then, I’m not a pro athlete, or training for any kind of event. So what do I know? 🙂
One last thing: I think the success of P90X has created a mindset that every workout has to be ” extreme”. Which is fine some of the time, but not ALL the time. It leads to injury and false expectations: now everyone wants to lose 30 pounds in 90 days, or if they’re not completely wrecked at the end of every workout they’rd not working hard enough. For most of us, it’s just not the case. Just my humble opinion.
I agree with basically all of this! Comprehensive review and honest too 🙂
I especially agree with the comment about heavy weights taking a back seat. I am happy to be back to my heavy weights again. I still do plenty of balancing in yoga…I’d rather leave that to yoga and focus on lifting heavy things in my weight training. Call me boring.
I also thought the same thing about P.A.P. I think your interpretation of it is spot on, but I am no expert either.
Looking forward to your next experiment!
I think that the major schools of thought have sound theory although one is more widely accepted. The big muscles to little muscles theory comes because when you do larger muscle movements you want to have your muscles at their utmost effort and coordination. Alternatively, starting with small muscles then moving to big (biceps then back) is said to wear out your small muscle to the max before going to the large movement so that big muscle is activated as much as possible to compensate for the lack of small muscle assistance.
Personally I like to do them all and change the order often because I get bored easily. I see the most change in my body composition when I do this as opposed to same ol’ same routines every day.
THAT is an amazing P90X image.
AS far as I remember the only reason behind working alternating muscles is that you can work one after the other without really resting, so you get in more in less time. The bigger muscles first is partly because they require more ATP, which you just have more of in the beginning of your workout. And they generally use more muscles (squats use more than just quads, yadayada, you know all this) than the smaller muscle lifts.
You liked the Yoga!?!? I only did that one once. Hated it.
Thanks for the link to the P3 site. My nerdy physiology professor side is loving it.
Since I’ve never done any P90X, but I want to do the first one soon, I have a question (for Charlotte, or anyone else that has done the workout series). I don’t have any weights at home and would prefer to keep any weights I get to do the p90X program minimal. What do I really need to be able to get the full benefits of the workout? Thank you!
And I love yoga! It’s awesome.
You do need some weights and a chin up bar to properly do the workouts but they also offer adaptations using just resistence bands and they’re good about showing you the options to modify! So if you wanted to do it the cheapest way possible, all you’d really need is a good set of resistance bands (20$ -25$ at most stores). Having used both the bands and the weights/bar I have to say I prefer the latter (no amount of band use approximates a real pull-up) but you’ll still get an awesome workout with the bands! Let me know what you end up doing!
Exercise for me is very important and I always have it even in the simplest ways as long as I am doing it right to make me healthy and fit..
When I was younger & newer at lifting, I did follow the standard rule. The longer I was at it, the more I did my own thing based on which body parts were better responders & not so that I work the muscle groups that don’t respond as well first even if they are a smaller body part. For me, creating a program based on what I learn each day & year about my bod works best for me. For example, I don’t work chest as hard as other body parts – I am not a guy. 😉 I hot it hard 1 day & do lots of push-ups but it is not as big a focus as say my legs or another body part.
Thx for the review on the P90 series. I don’t have room to do at home anyway plus I just love my lifting.. but never say never. 😉
As a trainer I too believed the exercise order was of grave importance.
It is important, but there are different reasons for every order. There are reasons to do curls before pull ups and pull ups before curls.
I get confused with all of the different ways so the way I go about exercise order is to use a particular order if you have a need for that order. Otherwise I keep changing things up just to keep things feeling more fresh.
Charlotte, I’ve only been reading your blog for a few months, and haven’t read all the archives, so forgive me if I missed this experience, but have you done Lou Schuler’s and Alwyn Cosgrove’s New Rules of Lifting series? Their books are great, and New Rules of Lifting (called The Original by us fans), and NROL For Women may give you more information about the large muscle/small muscle debate. I am in the process of completing NROL for Abs now, and their fourth book, NROL for Life is due out this week. I’m excited to read the new one. Alwyn Cosgrove (Rachel’s husband) designs the workouts for them, and they are TORTURE! :-)) (After NROL for Abs, I’m going to do Rachel’s FBB.)
Exercise order matters lot. Its good to have Phase III of P90X which is all about the order of the exercises which will benefit to get better results.
I do think that order matters to some degree – like doing large muscle movements first, smaller muscle movements second, and doing more difficult exercises first so you don’t get hurt .I’m sure there is some scientific reasoning, but for the average person I’m not sure that it really matters that much otherwise. But if people believe that and need it stay motivated, then great.
i believe that exercise order matters more for the more advanced you become. For instance:
Beginner – not much
intermediate – yes exercise order does matter
advanced – a whole lot
As P90X2 is meant for people of advanced fitness levels exercise order does matter.