Insanity Max: 30 – Day 1

I did it.  I finished day 1.  It may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but getting through the first day is key because now I know I can do it, and push myself much harder than I ever thought I could.  In the previous Insanity program, I pushed myself to what I thought was my max.  When I was tired, I rested.  I completed the workouts each day, and I felt great.  But was I really pushing to my max?  Short of having Terry Crews standing next to you yelling at you to keep going, it’s tough to really know if you can REALLY keep going or it you’re spent.

The premise of Insanity Max: 30 is that you push yourself as hard as you can and then you take a quick break and get back into it.  And this program does a great job of pushing you further without having someone next to you.  And it’s just a timer.  The previous workouts that I’ve done all count down.  They are counting down to zero; to completion.  Insanity Max counts up.  You start at 0:00 and you just keep going.  And when you’ve gone as far as you can, when you have no more energy or when your muscles can’t go on, you write down your time.  Today I made it 6 minutes and 37 seconds, before I really felt like I couldn’t go on, and it’s because my legs gave out during one of the moves.

The motivation here is, can I extend my time.  6 1/2 minutes is not a long time under usual circumstances.  And there were a few times when I felt like I was maxed out, but I asked myself can I go more.  I look at that number and think…I KNOW I can do better.  Tomorrow is a new exercise, so my time today can’t compare to it.  But the next time this exercise comes around, I’ll have that 6 1/2 minutes in my head.  And I know I can do it; I can go longer.

Honestly I thought the whole write down your time thing was just going to be a gimmick, but it does provide that extra little motivation to push just a little longer.  That said, I probably wouldn’t do it for the second time through.  I’m not going to post any of my statistics or pictures yet.  I’ll wait until the end for that.  However, I was comparing pictures from last night to those from 7 weeks ago when I first started working out, and my wife said she can definitely see a difference.  So we’ll see how this one does.

I’ll probably do a blog post every day for the next couple weeks, but I might drop off a bit after that.  We’ll see.