Insanity

Okay, I mentioned getting fit again after having gotten badly out of shape. I will go into more details in the future, and really talk about it. But I figured that for now I would just mention one thing.

I started (my wife and I did, actually) Shaun T’s Insanity on Monday. Insanity is a 60 day program, 6 days a week, based on the concept of max interval training and plyometrics. Regular interval training has you doing 2-3 minutes of moderate exercise followed by a peak of 30-60 seconds of maximum effort, then back to moderate exercise. Max interval training reverses that. You work at maximum effort for 3 minutes, followed by a 30 second rest, and so on.

Day 1 is a fitness test. It consists of 8 different fairly demanding exercises, like push-up jacks and plank obliques. You do as many as you can in one minute, then rest for 60-90 seconds, then on to the next exercise. You take the fitness test every two weeks (Day 1, 15, etc).

The program consists of 4 weeks of “interval training”, followed by a recovery week, followed by 4 weeks of “max interval training”.

This morning I did Day 2 – Cardio Circuit. It’s 42 very intense minutes. You start with about 4 minutes of warm-up, 6 minutes worth of stretching, 25 or so minutes of cardio interval (football drills, prime drills, in/out abs, etc.) and then 7 minutes of cool down and stretching. At the end of it, I was completely done. It is a brutal workout. I had to lengthen some of my breaks beyond 30 seconds and couldn’t stay at Shaun T’s pace either.

This thing is very, very tough. If you don’t have a basic level of conditioning established, this should not be the workout you take on. Start off with running and calisthenics or something like Power 90 and get that under your belt.

Bottom line — Insanity is insane, but I can tell it will work if you stick with it. It’s going to burn tons of calories, burn off fat, increase cardio dramatically …. and yes, it will build muscle too.