Heading to the Asylum

Good Evening,

Today, I had a gift left at my front door from the mail man. I was getting ready to do INSANITY Upper Body Weight Resistance when my dogs started barking. Come to find a box from Beachbody outside with INSANITY: The Asylum in it. Big thanks to them for getting it out quickly and getting it here before the 25th as expected from fedex online.

Over the next 30 days, I'll be logging my experience with this program and the routines, along with how they effect my others activities, such as hockey, officiating, working, and sports activities. I spent a bit of time reading on Steve Edward's blog about the program, the routines, and what to expect. When he said something about this program being much harder than the original INSANITY, I was like, "How can Shaun T make a program that's even harder than the original?" Now that I have it, I can already tell that its raised the bar to a new level!

I started by reviewing the manual, wall calendar (which btw is really awesome, it has the Asylum schedule for the first month, and then hybrid calendars for both P90X and INSANITY on the other side), and meal plan. The meal plan I'll come back to at another time because I'm excited by it and can't wait to try some of the dishes within it. A nice thing about the program is that all of the DVD's have instructions for how to use the new tools that are needed for the workouts. In the original INSANITY, it was all you. This time, Shaun T incorporates some tools to use to force you to increase your overall performance, such as the agility ladder, speed rope, a few bands or dumbbells, and pull-up bar. A good plyo mat or yoga mat comes in handy for "relief," a stretch and recovery workout that I'm reviewing before I start the program tomorrow.

I managed to make it through the Athletic Performance Assessment (aka Fit Test) today, my results were not as good as I hoped, however, getting used to the ladder takes time even with the intro videos. My results don't include the numerous times that I hit the ladder and knocked it half-way across the room. All moves are 1 minute in the assessment.

Day 1 performance results:
   Agility Heisman:                           5 reps
   In & Out Ab Progression:             21 reps
   Pull-Ups/Lat Push-Ups:               12 reps
   Mountain Climber Switch Kicks:   35 reps
   Agility Shoulder Taps:                  4 reps
   X Jumps:                                    27 reps
   Moving Push-Ups:                       3.5 reps
   Agility Lateral Shuffle:                  8 reps
   Agility Bear Crawl:                       4 reps

Tomorrow starts the regular workouts, Speed & Agility, which looks tough, but as the motto for Asylum goes, "In it to win it!"

Push through, Dig Deep!