Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
P90X Critique Part 3A, Alternatives: to P90X's Diet Plan (or any 12 week diet, really)
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In part 2 of this critique of P90x we saw that Body comp change is about diet first, exercise second. We also detailed the specifics and limitations of the P90X diet. Since diet is SO fundamental to fat shedding (& getting ripped), here in Part three where we finally consider alternatives to P90X itself, we're going to consider alternative nutrition/diet first (this post, part A). In part B (the next, post) we'll look at alternative workouts.
Changing Habits and ANY "diet" Plan (not just P90X's)
Getting diet right though is about more than eating less. For lots of us it also means neurological rewiring to support new dietary practices, not just for 12 weeks, but BEYOND - the place that P90X will not go. So we need our alternatives to include support to plan for success. In the following, therefore, we're going to look at two things - diet or what we actually eat - but also, especially, what's rarely discussed, where habit and change come into play to ensure WHATEVER diet we undertake works for more than the diet period. So we'll start with how habit and diet need to go together for successful and lasting body comp change. We'll look at some programs that support change in nutrition practice, and a way of assessing any diet plan to make sure it works for you.
Who is this article for?
If we're considering a 12 week program like P90X it's usually because we have some goal where we think that following such a program will let us accomplish. And if we're looking at a 12 week program, it's likely that we don't feel sufficiently knowledgeable about fitness to design a program for ourselves. Or we've tried something else, didn't feel it worked, and are looking for a brand new solution.
So in this article, i'm going to assume that someone is, like the P90X client, a person who once perhaps worked out, played on a team and so on, but feels that they are "out of shape" and also wants to "loose weight" and "get back in shape." Or maybe some folks do not have a previous atheletic background, but want to get healthy now, or have simply been trying stuff recently and it hasn't seemed to work.
And if you're here, i'm also thinking that you may too be wondering if there's other, better or just different ways to get what P90X (or related approaches) promises to deliver.
So how do we even begin to think about whether a plan is appropriate?
In a well rounded health program to deliver on body comp, we'd look at three components:
Deliverables: by the end of this article,
Nutrition When Fat Burning/Fat Loss is the Goal
From part 2, we killed the myth that exercise is the number 1 factor in a fat loss program. For a review, here's a discussion of a couple references.
So, the fundamental requirement for fat loss is: fewer calories in than needed for maintenance.
The result of caloric restriction will always be weight loss. More than exercise, diet makes the difference.
Consider this: 20 mins of HARD intervals on a bike burns about 200 calories.
That's
Change one Thing that = 20 mins of Sweat: If any of the above items are part of your daily regimen, cutting just one of them - like cutting juice or coke or a beer - and suddenly you've done the equivalent of 20 mins of an exhausting work out. This approach of change one thing is described in detail at iamgeekfit.
Any Diet will Do - if you just want to lose fat. On that basis you can use any diet you like: Mediteranian, so called Paleo, Atkins. Anything. Just eat less than you need for your energy requirements.
Research has shown over the past two years (example 1; example 2)with studies lasting way more than 12 weeks (some 2 years) that after about 12 weeks, it doesn't matter what diet you're on, weight loss levels out to the same - based pretty much on predicted caloric deficit.
What Is "less" in eating less? Really: one one level, it's that simple. Here it is: eat less - consistently. How much less can be predicted quite closely, too so that you're burning what's available to burn and not going into starvation mode where, initially, weight loss will stall out and start eating muscle rather than fat. So eat less, but the right less.
You can use the above and start your sensible fat burning (as opposed to weight loss) journey today. Bon Voyage.
Individual Responses and Habits of a Lifetime.
For some people, the above simple prescription is ample to set off on a fat loss journey of success. For the rest of us, the principles make sense, the physics is reasonable, but we still struggle with burning fat. And then we look at exercise programs cuz that must be it rather than looking a little more deeply at our eating practices.
We are complex, multi-facetted, amazing organisms, don't you think? all the stuff going on all the time inside us, reacting to our environment, regulating our heart rate, body temperature, digestion, movement, nutrient flow. Awesomely complex.
Who are we with respect to food? So while the principle of "eat less" is righteous in its truth, sometimes, what less when and how can
be important. If we're working out, in order to keep working out, we may find that we get our best efforts out of ourselves if we have some yogurt, half an apple and a coffee forty minutes before we work out. Some folks find a coffee after dinner helps them relax; others it perks right up. Some of us just don't know whether eating breakfast or not in the morning makes a difference to how we feel during the day because we've never tried it for a sufficient period to be able to say.
In other words, before heading into a diet of any kind, it might be useful for us to set aside some period of time in which we get to know ourselves and our responses to food a bit better. This doesn't mean we won't burn fat in the process. But if the emphasis is on learning about ourselves and our responses to food first, then we'll have the knowledge to take into those diet phases of caloric restriction.
I'll talk about an approach in a minute that supports that kind of investigation, but let's take a look at one other issue that informs the perceived success or failure: habits
Change is Pain. "Going on a Diet" often involve significant and sudden revisions to the
way we are used to do doing things. And when we do something by rote, we generally refer to such practices as habits - practice that has become an unconscious, reflexive response to a situation.
We practice habits for instance when we train for a sport. In learning, this has been described at a very basic level as a three stage process where we go from very conscious practice of an activity - best done with instruction and guidance to refine technique, to a second level where we know enough to be able to correct ourselves, but still not proficient, to a third level where the behaviour becomes reflexive, automatic.
Reflexive responses are habituated response to a stimulus where we no longer have to think about its performance. That reflexive response could be a backhand swing in tennis, setting up an amplifier for a gig, filing messages from phone calls, or getting up at 7am each morning and putting the kettle on for tea, or snacking while watching TV. Effortless, thought-less activites. Habits.
When we seek to change these habits we are ripping out connections that have been made one way, and re-growing them another way. Ouch. Change in itself can cause headaches: the brain is a sugar feind: it uses a lot of the carbs we ingest to keep going. When it's working harder to process new stuff, it's not just muscularly fatiguing; it's mentally fatiguing. Eating right (not pigging out) for our brains is important when we're going through change. So how great do you think going from lots of starchy carbs/crap food to no crap food would be for the initial transition? We get wired for what we do, even when what we do is crappy.
Habits are Wired In. Really. Neurologically, science is showing increasingly that we build up patterns of responses in our brains that manifest in our bodies: neurological actions are triggered in the chemical-physical soup that is us, so there are strong connections between our brains and bodies. We really do get *used* to doing something a particular way; doing something - like eating or not eating under particular conditions - if we do it for many repetitions - becomes wired into our very chemistry.
Eating = Habits. Increasingly, cool research in eating is also
showing that eating is habit/behaviourally based. Our habits reinforce our neurological responses to food. For instance if we regularly eat in the morning, we will feel hungry in the morning if we don't eat. This is in part down to ghrelin telling us we're supposed to get food now, and if it's in the AM, that means carbs now please. We can change our behaviours and affect that physiological response. But changing habits means patience and planning for successful, enduring change. That takes practice. Lots of reps. With conscious attention to the new practices.
So, big point, we need to be gentle with ourselves in this retraining - as we would be with anyone we were teaching a very challenging new skill. Consider that most people do not learn how to play an instrument with proficiency over night. There are techniques to master; skills to learn.
Likewise the nutritional care and feeding of our very complex selves requires this kind of patience. In thinking about alternatives to P90X, the challenge becomes, do you want to try to get to your body comp goal with another 12 week approach? or do you want to get there where 12 weeks is part of a lifelong success story?
What i've seen have tremendous value and longer lasting benefit than just "going on a diet" or "doing a fitness program" for 12 weeks, are approaches that let us
This focus shift in itself may be challenging for some folks who want that lean body NOW. The good news is that starting out thinking about spending some quality time learning about responses to food and developing more habits also goes hand in hand with burning fat, if that's the goal. What it means is that the effects will endure past 12 weeks. For this to work, as more psychologists who work with dieters state, we need to plan for success. Generally that means we have to plan to reduce the brain strain of change (i like that alliteration).
How long does this loss/learning take? This process of fat burning while learning about ourselves and food intake takes time -6 weeks with a plan sort of at a minimum it seems but 16-24 is also reasonable. The difference is, we do see progress in the results we want, but we're gaining knowledge and habits to support that process.
Some Approaches to Consider
Precision Nutrition. Right now, one of the best approaches that brings together this kind of approach to learning about YOU and what works for YOU while getting into a groove with new habits to sustain this practice over the long haul is Precision Nutrition.
It's constructed around 10 habits: 7 about eating; 3 about food preparation practice. A first phase is to get to 90% compliance with the core eating habits for a month.
1) that means you've had time to practice success with these habits many times a day for 30 days.
One of these habits is to get veggies/greens with every meal; another is get protein with every feeding. - IF one is eating 6 times a day, that's 240 perfect practices or 216 at 90%. over say 540 waking hours. If learning theory is correct, we likely need 5 times that to develop this practice as a habit rather than a conscious effort.
2) that's also 2 microcycles of consistent adaptation to a food plan.
A general heuristic in working with food is when we want to make a change and see if that change is having the desired effect - like dropping 250 kcals a day - folks generally use a two week period to factor out other effects that could be bringing about results in a shorter period. If we have consistency for a month, that's two cycles, and we have a great baseline then from which to start to tweak one thing at a time.
And tweaking once the baseline is established is just what Precision Nutrition supports in it's Individualization plan that considers a whack of variables, from body type to workout type to carb tolerance to get you able to dial in your reality.
And unlike P90X and other programs, PN actually provides the tools one needs to be able to measure body comp progress, including illustrated guides for girth measurements AND 7 site caliper readings for calculating body fat % as well as how frequently to take them, calculations used, etc. Nothing's left to chance. Here's a two part review that details the programs very closely: what's in it; how/when individualization kicks in.
Also you can check out the free PN PDF and see what you think.
Likewise in contrast to P90X, check out some real transformations over 16 weeks of real people with great but realistic transformations.
Working Out and Diet. Another one of the reasons i really like PN is that it's also normal person to athlete tested. It's approach is designed to support nutritional needs around working out - all kinds of workouts. Not all diet books relate to folks for whom movement/workouts are a part of their practice, and physiological needs.
In this case, learning about how eat right to optimize workouts' effects for lean tissue building is a useful thing to know.
If you already have a diet you want to try, plan for successful change/rewiring
Now, i think P90X is fabulous because of the resources it provides (detailed in this review). One of those resources is the online forum which has a wealth of workout options and lots of experts on the site who have done these workout programs while doing PN - lots of trainers who use PN with their clients; lots of gals who lift heavy; guys who run. You want experts and many Folks Like You, PN has both. It also keeps tabs on the latest nutrition research, with expert commentary that's accessible and usable. You just cannot get stuck with PN or the PN community.
That said, you may already have a diet you think would be just great. OK.
Then as said, a huge factor in anyone's success in a diet and MAINTAINING the results of the diet is planning for the diet, and the habits around it: planning for before, during and especially after in that all important and critical maintenance phase.
This model of planning for successful CHANGE has been studied now in psychology for about 15 years. It's been studied in big change areas like smoking, alcohol consumption and diet. Again and again, the big issue for successful changing is planning - and having a reasonable plan.
Now, PN is all about developing new habits, and it says you can take each one in turn: get comfy with one, then move onto the next until you have all 7 under your belt (taking fish oil capsules with each meal seems so easy for me, and yet i know some people who struggle with getting down a bottle. So how plan for success?
My big struggle for adaptation was starchy carbs only after a workout, whereas i know other folks who didn't give that a second thought. Take on the ones that work first; use that success to build on the others. And THEN with that base, swing into individualization (which may just bring back some starchy carbs for other non-post-workout times, once what's known as my own carb-tolerance is understood).
Saying that, some folks find picking up habits like those in PN easy peasy; others struggle - their wiring may be further away from PN's than someone who's already been eating in a PN'ish kind of way.
Deliberate Support for Habit Change.
For support in developing new habits around food and eating, there are two fabulous books that are based on that psychological model for successful habit changing. One is called the Beck Diet, and the other is the Four Day Win. More than anything else you do for yourself, no matter what diet you choose, consider either of these books. Do the "look inside" thing at amazon (linked below) and see which one resonates better with you. These guides are some of the best ways to PLAN for successful change and to maintain that change as the new habit.
The Beck Diet: Train your brain to think like a thin person (US || UK), Judith Beck. Despite its title, is not about Diet at all. It's about how to build up the strategies one needs to make a success of that diet. A lot of it is about providing strategies that will support the rewiring of old eating habits and the development of new habits.
In the Four Day Win: your guide to thinner peace (US || UK) the author (another
Beck, Martha Beck, not related) takes the concept of building up both an understanding of what's happening psychologically and physiologically inside a person when just dieting without knowledge about the process (enter the Wild Child and the Disciplinarian, for instance: important characters within to get to know, acknowledge and deal with). This Beck suggests four day micro cycles of practices to build new habits for success. The book is both an awesome, fun read, and some great ideas for practice.
The Instinct Diet
Fascinating work by Susan Roberts of Tufts around the ways we seem to be wired almost instinctively to go for just the kinds of foods that, when there's an abundance of 'um, they become "bad" foods, but at just about any other time than now, really they are survival smart: energy dense, familiar, available, satisfy hunger, and even variety rich.
The research is a cool way to undesrstand more about why we do what we do when making food choices - especially under stress.
Delving into Other Territory: wilder diets
If you're into P90X and working out - or want to be there, at some point you're going to hear about all sorts of diets that are supposed to optimize getting ripped and building mass and doing amazing things.
For this experimentation, Lyle McDonald (b2d article about his approach) is fabulous. McDonald has written perhaps the best reference on Ketogenic dieting out there. And it is a reference. It's about ten or so years old now, but it's fabulous. For folks who have heard about high fat diets and want to give them a go WHILE training - you really owe it to yourself, your health and your well being to read this book.
McDonald has lots of other great books, but the other two to think about are the Ultimate Diet 2.0, and Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. RFL is a revision of something known as protein sparing. and the other is about cycling intake to get off the last bit of fat *if you're already way low body fat %*
Both of these are i'd say largely for folks who are close to or are actually lean, and have already built up the habits of clean eating. If you haven't these books are jumping prematurely into the deep end. I mention them here at all so that you'll have a sense of when they might be most appropriate.
Indeed, Precision Nutrition has with it something called the Get Shredded Diet and the Get Unshredded Diet (it takes time to come down from a lean gets leaner program and NOT put back on a lot of fat) - both approaches for once you have arrived at a really low leanness and would just like to get at that super lean place for whatever reason.
What i really like about McDonald's books is that in each he presents the pros and cons of any approach, for whom they're useful, when, and how to go about running them. Personally, i like them more for what i learn about what's happening physiologically than for the actual diets (that take up about 5% of the texts).
Intermittent Fasting
A few of my Z-Health and even PN colleagues say that they have found themselves moving into cycles of Intermittent Fasting. Human research has lagged behind on the health benefits of IF, because most of them have focused on longevity, and that's harder to measure in humans than in rats in terms of data collection. But it seems some new physiological effects seem to be showing benefits of intermittently, intermittently fasting. So far it seems none of the physiological effects are unique to fasting; they are replicated with good diet and exercise, as this research review shows. BUT, affect is important, too. Some folks report getting mean and nasty with some forms of IF, while other report feeling better.
Happily, these same colleagues suggest IF as an advanced technique - and by advanced i think we all mean, that doing something like PN first let's a person get to know a lot about how we respond best to food under different types of conditions: when working out really hard; not so hard; not at all, and so on. With that knowledge, hitting IF can be a really intriguing process, and i'd say "real" IF as opposed to faux IF. A fast can be any time we're not eating, but physiologically effects seem to show up at 16 hours - some folks stop eating early in the evening and then wait till lunch to eat on their IF'ish days.
Getting into IF detail is beyond the scope of this article. Colleagues recommend Eat Stop Eat as a good template. My suggestion again would be get to know your food self and
then check out IF if that makes sense. Especially if you're looking at working out, challenging yourself with fasting and effort can get counter productive fast. This doesn't mean that it mayn't be possible to combine both; it's just it may be asking a lot of your body to pick up a lot of new habits, and new reactions. For some this may be great, but for many it's a combination that initially can retard progress rather than help it. Why?
Surprisingly you may find that to lose weight, if you've already been chronically under eating and working out and not seeing the scales change, you need to EAT MORE to start to burn fat. Adding IF to that can cause some issues. Now, cycling your calories is a cool technique and PN gets into this in the individualization phase for sure. But again, it's everything in its place: plan for success. You have all the time in the world to try everything under the sun. So give yourself a chance to succeed.
Aside: The Lucky Bastards who Need to Gain Weight
If you're a skinny bastard and you want to get not just ripped but built, this book is for you. Why? it has both an eating plan and a workout plan that will take you there. It's been tested; it works. You'll find lots of people on the Precision Nutrition site doing Scrawny to Brawny (US || UK) - there's a forum there for the S2B clan, and it's great. Skinny Bastards can need habit help, too, so do consider either Beck or Beck for support.
Summing Up Part 3A on Alternatives to P90X Diet:
Life Is Longer than 90X days. Learning to Eat better for all of them is a plan.
I haven't gone through a detailed critique of P90X's diet here. That's more or less in part 2, but the main thing is that as part of a 12 week program, it's limited in how well it can actually support what a person is doing or wants to achieve. As we saw, if you're in the first two energy levels, you can count on losing 0-6 pounds in the 90days if you stick to the plan.
A person may learn something about portion size and eating "clean" over that period, and that's great. But it's not great if that 90 days has been a study in deprivation that gets derailed post program.
Template for Assessing Nutrition Plans
This post isn't exhaustive. It's giving some examples of approaches that i can recommend based on my experience of them both for myself and folks i work with, as well as from the results of colleagues and their clients - where i trust their reports.
So what's a template for assessing a nutrition approach that you might be interested in?
First what do we know about making changes to our body comp (fat mass to lean mass ratio):
Based on the above some practices an effective nutrition program will support:
With these heuristics, you can assess any diet, where it may have shortcomings that you'd want to supplement from somewhere else, perhaps, and what you may need to make a success of the effort.
The biggest shift that this part of the Alternatives discussion foregrounds relative to P90X is the primacy of nutrition over any workout program.
Saying that, a physical practice does have physiological effects that enhance calorie burning and lean tissue building. Physical practice can also decrease inflammation, improve energy levels, make recovery from injury easier, and slow down aging.
SO just because we can cut 200 cals by giving up those 29 almonds (i love almonds and raisins. dang), doesn't mean that workingout out doesn't have huge value. In fact what it means is there are more better and other reasons to work out than fat burning. Some fat burning is just a nice side effect of building a more cardio efficient, more muscular you which only takes 6 mins. Really.
So now that we have nutrition front and center, and hammered down, in Part3 b we're going to look at some alternatives to P90X workouts to get to that more effective, efficient - even ripped, muscular - you, and how to assess workout alternatives to P90X to work for you and for your goals.
Preview of Workout Alterntatives:
The complete article (part 3b) is now up on assessing/choosing workout alternatives. In that piece, we review that P90X is about endurance strength. We look at other parts of strength and skill for a general physical preparedness program where getting lean is the goal.
The end goal is - if you decide you want to do P90X you do so cuz you know what it's offering is what you want based on what you know it's doing. But if you'd like to work those other systems that are also a part of us, well, some help on finding alternatives, too.
does any of this help you decide on a program? please let me know your thoughts.
thanks for reading.
mc
Related Posts/Resources:
In part 2 of this critique of P90x we saw that Body comp change is about diet first, exercise second. We also detailed the specifics and limitations of the P90X diet. Since diet is SO fundamental to fat shedding (& getting ripped), here in Part three where we finally consider alternatives to P90X itself, we're going to consider alternative nutrition/diet first (this post, part A). In part B (the next, post) we'll look at alternative workouts.Changing Habits and ANY "diet" Plan (not just P90X's)
Getting diet right though is about more than eating less. For lots of us it also means neurological rewiring to support new dietary practices, not just for 12 weeks, but BEYOND - the place that P90X will not go. So we need our alternatives to include support to plan for success. In the following, therefore, we're going to look at two things - diet or what we actually eat - but also, especially, what's rarely discussed, where habit and change come into play to ensure WHATEVER diet we undertake works for more than the diet period. So we'll start with how habit and diet need to go together for successful and lasting body comp change. We'll look at some programs that support change in nutrition practice, and a way of assessing any diet plan to make sure it works for you.
Who is this article for?
If we're considering a 12 week program like P90X it's usually because we have some goal where we think that following such a program will let us accomplish. And if we're looking at a 12 week program, it's likely that we don't feel sufficiently knowledgeable about fitness to design a program for ourselves. Or we've tried something else, didn't feel it worked, and are looking for a brand new solution.
So in this article, i'm going to assume that someone is, like the P90X client, a person who once perhaps worked out, played on a team and so on, but feels that they are "out of shape" and also wants to "loose weight" and "get back in shape." Or maybe some folks do not have a previous atheletic background, but want to get healthy now, or have simply been trying stuff recently and it hasn't seemed to work.
And if you're here, i'm also thinking that you may too be wondering if there's other, better or just different ways to get what P90X (or related approaches) promises to deliver.
So how do we even begin to think about whether a plan is appropriate?
In a well rounded health program to deliver on body comp, we'd look at three components:
- - a nutrition program to support the work being undertaken - that's first.
- - a resistance program not only to develop strength, but also for the associated health benefits of lifting heavy. Lifting heavy also has benefits for bone building as well as fat burning too.
- - an endurance/cardio program to improve work capacity which actually means improving fat burning capacity. This endurance program can be further broken down into a couple of parts - interval work and steady state cardio work. We'll come back to that
Deliverables: by the end of this article,
- you'll have a set of options/alternatives to P90X and other diet plan nutrition approaches that will sustain you during and beyond 90X days of moving to better health, wellbeing and leanness (or bulkness).
- You'll also have a set of heuristics against which you can assess any diet plan you may be considering to see how well it will support your goals
Nutrition When Fat Burning/Fat Loss is the Goal
From part 2, we killed the myth that exercise is the number 1 factor in a fat loss program. For a review, here's a discussion of a couple references.
So, the fundamental requirement for fat loss is: fewer calories in than needed for maintenance.
The result of caloric restriction will always be weight loss. More than exercise, diet makes the difference.
Consider this: 20 mins of HARD intervals on a bike burns about 200 calories.
That's
- two pieces of whole wheat bread - nothing on them.
- or 29 almonds
- or a doughnut
- or less than two 8oz glasses of apple juice
- or not quite a pint of guiness
- or 1.5 cans of coke
- or two cans of red bull
Change one Thing that = 20 mins of Sweat: If any of the above items are part of your daily regimen, cutting just one of them - like cutting juice or coke or a beer - and suddenly you've done the equivalent of 20 mins of an exhausting work out. This approach of change one thing is described in detail at iamgeekfit.
Any Diet will Do - if you just want to lose fat. On that basis you can use any diet you like: Mediteranian, so called Paleo, Atkins. Anything. Just eat less than you need for your energy requirements.
Research has shown over the past two years (example 1; example 2)with studies lasting way more than 12 weeks (some 2 years) that after about 12 weeks, it doesn't matter what diet you're on, weight loss levels out to the same - based pretty much on predicted caloric deficit.
What Is "less" in eating less? Really: one one level, it's that simple. Here it is: eat less - consistently. How much less can be predicted quite closely, too so that you're burning what's available to burn and not going into starvation mode where, initially, weight loss will stall out and start eating muscle rather than fat. So eat less, but the right less.
You can use the above and start your sensible fat burning (as opposed to weight loss) journey today. Bon Voyage.
Individual Responses and Habits of a Lifetime.
For some people, the above simple prescription is ample to set off on a fat loss journey of success. For the rest of us, the principles make sense, the physics is reasonable, but we still struggle with burning fat. And then we look at exercise programs cuz that must be it rather than looking a little more deeply at our eating practices.
We are complex, multi-facetted, amazing organisms, don't you think? all the stuff going on all the time inside us, reacting to our environment, regulating our heart rate, body temperature, digestion, movement, nutrient flow. Awesomely complex.
Who are we with respect to food? So while the principle of "eat less" is righteous in its truth, sometimes, what less when and how can
be important. If we're working out, in order to keep working out, we may find that we get our best efforts out of ourselves if we have some yogurt, half an apple and a coffee forty minutes before we work out. Some folks find a coffee after dinner helps them relax; others it perks right up. Some of us just don't know whether eating breakfast or not in the morning makes a difference to how we feel during the day because we've never tried it for a sufficient period to be able to say.In other words, before heading into a diet of any kind, it might be useful for us to set aside some period of time in which we get to know ourselves and our responses to food a bit better. This doesn't mean we won't burn fat in the process. But if the emphasis is on learning about ourselves and our responses to food first, then we'll have the knowledge to take into those diet phases of caloric restriction.
I'll talk about an approach in a minute that supports that kind of investigation, but let's take a look at one other issue that informs the perceived success or failure: habits
Change is Pain. "Going on a Diet" often involve significant and sudden revisions to the
way we are used to do doing things. And when we do something by rote, we generally refer to such practices as habits - practice that has become an unconscious, reflexive response to a situation.We practice habits for instance when we train for a sport. In learning, this has been described at a very basic level as a three stage process where we go from very conscious practice of an activity - best done with instruction and guidance to refine technique, to a second level where we know enough to be able to correct ourselves, but still not proficient, to a third level where the behaviour becomes reflexive, automatic.
Reflexive responses are habituated response to a stimulus where we no longer have to think about its performance. That reflexive response could be a backhand swing in tennis, setting up an amplifier for a gig, filing messages from phone calls, or getting up at 7am each morning and putting the kettle on for tea, or snacking while watching TV. Effortless, thought-less activites. Habits.
When we seek to change these habits we are ripping out connections that have been made one way, and re-growing them another way. Ouch. Change in itself can cause headaches: the brain is a sugar feind: it uses a lot of the carbs we ingest to keep going. When it's working harder to process new stuff, it's not just muscularly fatiguing; it's mentally fatiguing. Eating right (not pigging out) for our brains is important when we're going through change. So how great do you think going from lots of starchy carbs/crap food to no crap food would be for the initial transition? We get wired for what we do, even when what we do is crappy.
Habits are Wired In. Really. Neurologically, science is showing increasingly that we build up patterns of responses in our brains that manifest in our bodies: neurological actions are triggered in the chemical-physical soup that is us, so there are strong connections between our brains and bodies. We really do get *used* to doing something a particular way; doing something - like eating or not eating under particular conditions - if we do it for many repetitions - becomes wired into our very chemistry.
Eating = Habits. Increasingly, cool research in eating is also
showing that eating is habit/behaviourally based. Our habits reinforce our neurological responses to food. For instance if we regularly eat in the morning, we will feel hungry in the morning if we don't eat. This is in part down to ghrelin telling us we're supposed to get food now, and if it's in the AM, that means carbs now please. We can change our behaviours and affect that physiological response. But changing habits means patience and planning for successful, enduring change. That takes practice. Lots of reps. With conscious attention to the new practices.So, big point, we need to be gentle with ourselves in this retraining - as we would be with anyone we were teaching a very challenging new skill. Consider that most people do not learn how to play an instrument with proficiency over night. There are techniques to master; skills to learn.
Likewise the nutritional care and feeding of our very complex selves requires this kind of patience. In thinking about alternatives to P90X, the challenge becomes, do you want to try to get to your body comp goal with another 12 week approach? or do you want to get there where 12 weeks is part of a lifelong success story?
What i've seen have tremendous value and longer lasting benefit than just "going on a diet" or "doing a fitness program" for 12 weeks, are approaches that let us
- a) learn about what works for us in eating and
- b) helps to adjust our wiring (habits) around eating to plan for and support ongoing success.
This focus shift in itself may be challenging for some folks who want that lean body NOW. The good news is that starting out thinking about spending some quality time learning about responses to food and developing more habits also goes hand in hand with burning fat, if that's the goal. What it means is that the effects will endure past 12 weeks. For this to work, as more psychologists who work with dieters state, we need to plan for success. Generally that means we have to plan to reduce the brain strain of change (i like that alliteration).
How long does this loss/learning take? This process of fat burning while learning about ourselves and food intake takes time -6 weeks with a plan sort of at a minimum it seems but 16-24 is also reasonable. The difference is, we do see progress in the results we want, but we're gaining knowledge and habits to support that process.
Some Approaches to Consider
Precision Nutrition. Right now, one of the best approaches that brings together this kind of approach to learning about YOU and what works for YOU while getting into a groove with new habits to sustain this practice over the long haul is Precision Nutrition.It's constructed around 10 habits: 7 about eating; 3 about food preparation practice. A first phase is to get to 90% compliance with the core eating habits for a month.
1) that means you've had time to practice success with these habits many times a day for 30 days.
One of these habits is to get veggies/greens with every meal; another is get protein with every feeding. - IF one is eating 6 times a day, that's 240 perfect practices or 216 at 90%. over say 540 waking hours. If learning theory is correct, we likely need 5 times that to develop this practice as a habit rather than a conscious effort.
2) that's also 2 microcycles of consistent adaptation to a food plan.
A general heuristic in working with food is when we want to make a change and see if that change is having the desired effect - like dropping 250 kcals a day - folks generally use a two week period to factor out other effects that could be bringing about results in a shorter period. If we have consistency for a month, that's two cycles, and we have a great baseline then from which to start to tweak one thing at a time.
And tweaking once the baseline is established is just what Precision Nutrition supports in it's Individualization plan that considers a whack of variables, from body type to workout type to carb tolerance to get you able to dial in your reality.
And unlike P90X and other programs, PN actually provides the tools one needs to be able to measure body comp progress, including illustrated guides for girth measurements AND 7 site caliper readings for calculating body fat % as well as how frequently to take them, calculations used, etc. Nothing's left to chance. Here's a two part review that details the programs very closely: what's in it; how/when individualization kicks in.
Also you can check out the free PN PDF and see what you think.
Likewise in contrast to P90X, check out some real transformations over 16 weeks of real people with great but realistic transformations.
Working Out and Diet. Another one of the reasons i really like PN is that it's also normal person to athlete tested. It's approach is designed to support nutritional needs around working out - all kinds of workouts. Not all diet books relate to folks for whom movement/workouts are a part of their practice, and physiological needs.
In this case, learning about how eat right to optimize workouts' effects for lean tissue building is a useful thing to know.
If you already have a diet you want to try, plan for successful change/rewiring
Now, i think P90X is fabulous because of the resources it provides (detailed in this review). One of those resources is the online forum which has a wealth of workout options and lots of experts on the site who have done these workout programs while doing PN - lots of trainers who use PN with their clients; lots of gals who lift heavy; guys who run. You want experts and many Folks Like You, PN has both. It also keeps tabs on the latest nutrition research, with expert commentary that's accessible and usable. You just cannot get stuck with PN or the PN community.
That said, you may already have a diet you think would be just great. OK.
Then as said, a huge factor in anyone's success in a diet and MAINTAINING the results of the diet is planning for the diet, and the habits around it: planning for before, during and especially after in that all important and critical maintenance phase.
This model of planning for successful CHANGE has been studied now in psychology for about 15 years. It's been studied in big change areas like smoking, alcohol consumption and diet. Again and again, the big issue for successful changing is planning - and having a reasonable plan.
Now, PN is all about developing new habits, and it says you can take each one in turn: get comfy with one, then move onto the next until you have all 7 under your belt (taking fish oil capsules with each meal seems so easy for me, and yet i know some people who struggle with getting down a bottle. So how plan for success?
My big struggle for adaptation was starchy carbs only after a workout, whereas i know other folks who didn't give that a second thought. Take on the ones that work first; use that success to build on the others. And THEN with that base, swing into individualization (which may just bring back some starchy carbs for other non-post-workout times, once what's known as my own carb-tolerance is understood).
Saying that, some folks find picking up habits like those in PN easy peasy; others struggle - their wiring may be further away from PN's than someone who's already been eating in a PN'ish kind of way.
Deliberate Support for Habit Change.
For support in developing new habits around food and eating, there are two fabulous books that are based on that psychological model for successful habit changing. One is called the Beck Diet, and the other is the Four Day Win. More than anything else you do for yourself, no matter what diet you choose, consider either of these books. Do the "look inside" thing at amazon (linked below) and see which one resonates better with you. These guides are some of the best ways to PLAN for successful change and to maintain that change as the new habit.
The Beck Diet: Train your brain to think like a thin person (US || UK), Judith Beck. Despite its title, is not about Diet at all. It's about how to build up the strategies one needs to make a success of that diet. A lot of it is about providing strategies that will support the rewiring of old eating habits and the development of new habits.In the Four Day Win: your guide to thinner peace (US || UK) the author (another
Beck, Martha Beck, not related) takes the concept of building up both an understanding of what's happening psychologically and physiologically inside a person when just dieting without knowledge about the process (enter the Wild Child and the Disciplinarian, for instance: important characters within to get to know, acknowledge and deal with). This Beck suggests four day micro cycles of practices to build new habits for success. The book is both an awesome, fun read, and some great ideas for practice.The Instinct Diet Fascinating work by Susan Roberts of Tufts around the ways we seem to be wired almost instinctively to go for just the kinds of foods that, when there's an abundance of 'um, they become "bad" foods, but at just about any other time than now, really they are survival smart: energy dense, familiar, available, satisfy hunger, and even variety rich.The research is a cool way to undesrstand more about why we do what we do when making food choices - especially under stress.
Delving into Other Territory: wilder diets
If you're into P90X and working out - or want to be there, at some point you're going to hear about all sorts of diets that are supposed to optimize getting ripped and building mass and doing amazing things.
- Idea one: get the basics down first - learn about yourself and what works. then
- Idea two: by all means, experiment.
- Idea three: experiment THEN with the best information possible.
For this experimentation, Lyle McDonald (b2d article about his approach) is fabulous. McDonald has written perhaps the best reference on Ketogenic dieting out there. And it is a reference. It's about ten or so years old now, but it's fabulous. For folks who have heard about high fat diets and want to give them a go WHILE training - you really owe it to yourself, your health and your well being to read this book.McDonald has lots of other great books, but the other two to think about are the Ultimate Diet 2.0, and Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. RFL is a revision of something known as protein sparing. and the other is about cycling intake to get off the last bit of fat *if you're already way low body fat %*
Both of these are i'd say largely for folks who are close to or are actually lean, and have already built up the habits of clean eating. If you haven't these books are jumping prematurely into the deep end. I mention them here at all so that you'll have a sense of when they might be most appropriate.
Indeed, Precision Nutrition has with it something called the Get Shredded Diet and the Get Unshredded Diet (it takes time to come down from a lean gets leaner program and NOT put back on a lot of fat) - both approaches for once you have arrived at a really low leanness and would just like to get at that super lean place for whatever reason.
What i really like about McDonald's books is that in each he presents the pros and cons of any approach, for whom they're useful, when, and how to go about running them. Personally, i like them more for what i learn about what's happening physiologically than for the actual diets (that take up about 5% of the texts).
Intermittent Fasting
A few of my Z-Health and even PN colleagues say that they have found themselves moving into cycles of Intermittent Fasting. Human research has lagged behind on the health benefits of IF, because most of them have focused on longevity, and that's harder to measure in humans than in rats in terms of data collection. But it seems some new physiological effects seem to be showing benefits of intermittently, intermittently fasting. So far it seems none of the physiological effects are unique to fasting; they are replicated with good diet and exercise, as this research review shows. BUT, affect is important, too. Some folks report getting mean and nasty with some forms of IF, while other report feeling better.
Happily, these same colleagues suggest IF as an advanced technique - and by advanced i think we all mean, that doing something like PN first let's a person get to know a lot about how we respond best to food under different types of conditions: when working out really hard; not so hard; not at all, and so on. With that knowledge, hitting IF can be a really intriguing process, and i'd say "real" IF as opposed to faux IF. A fast can be any time we're not eating, but physiologically effects seem to show up at 16 hours - some folks stop eating early in the evening and then wait till lunch to eat on their IF'ish days.
Getting into IF detail is beyond the scope of this article. Colleagues recommend Eat Stop Eat as a good template. My suggestion again would be get to know your food self and
then check out IF if that makes sense. Especially if you're looking at working out, challenging yourself with fasting and effort can get counter productive fast. This doesn't mean that it mayn't be possible to combine both; it's just it may be asking a lot of your body to pick up a lot of new habits, and new reactions. For some this may be great, but for many it's a combination that initially can retard progress rather than help it. Why?Surprisingly you may find that to lose weight, if you've already been chronically under eating and working out and not seeing the scales change, you need to EAT MORE to start to burn fat. Adding IF to that can cause some issues. Now, cycling your calories is a cool technique and PN gets into this in the individualization phase for sure. But again, it's everything in its place: plan for success. You have all the time in the world to try everything under the sun. So give yourself a chance to succeed.
Aside: The Lucky Bastards who Need to Gain Weight
If you're a skinny bastard and you want to get not just ripped but built, this book is for you. Why? it has both an eating plan and a workout plan that will take you there. It's been tested; it works. You'll find lots of people on the Precision Nutrition site doing Scrawny to Brawny (US || UK) - there's a forum there for the S2B clan, and it's great. Skinny Bastards can need habit help, too, so do consider either Beck or Beck for support.Summing Up Part 3A on Alternatives to P90X Diet:
Life Is Longer than 90X days. Learning to Eat better for all of them is a plan.
I haven't gone through a detailed critique of P90X's diet here. That's more or less in part 2, but the main thing is that as part of a 12 week program, it's limited in how well it can actually support what a person is doing or wants to achieve. As we saw, if you're in the first two energy levels, you can count on losing 0-6 pounds in the 90days if you stick to the plan.
A person may learn something about portion size and eating "clean" over that period, and that's great. But it's not great if that 90 days has been a study in deprivation that gets derailed post program.
Template for Assessing Nutrition Plans
This post isn't exhaustive. It's giving some examples of approaches that i can recommend based on my experience of them both for myself and folks i work with, as well as from the results of colleagues and their clients - where i trust their reports.
So what's a template for assessing a nutrition approach that you might be interested in?
First what do we know about making changes to our body comp (fat mass to lean mass ratio):
- eating is the fundamental biggest affecter in body comp change, whether burning fat or putting on mass
- our eating practices are largely habit based
- changing habits and wiring in new ones has psychological and initial neurological cost
- the better we support ourselves for successful change with nutrition approaches that enhance change while supporting our activities, the better we do over the duration.
- any diet works for fat loss as long as there's caloric restriction, though some foods/combinations may work better or worse for some people (in terms of energy, well being, results), at some times, pending goals/activities.
- when adding workouts, there are physiological effects so good to have an approach that is sensitive to these factors and provides for them (until a person knows how to do that for themselves
- a huge part of diet success of any kind is to develop practices to support the requirements of the diet. the post diet rebound of regaining more than the weight lost is most often the result of not having that support.
Based on the above some practices an effective nutrition program will support:
- learning about one's own responses to food, amount of less food amount of more food that one needs when working out or not
- providing practices to support successful and ongoing change in practice - till that change becomes the new habit.
- with the above two parts, being able to determine a successful plan to support athletic practice or body comp goals.
With these heuristics, you can assess any diet, where it may have shortcomings that you'd want to supplement from somewhere else, perhaps, and what you may need to make a success of the effort.
The biggest shift that this part of the Alternatives discussion foregrounds relative to P90X is the primacy of nutrition over any workout program.
Saying that, a physical practice does have physiological effects that enhance calorie burning and lean tissue building. Physical practice can also decrease inflammation, improve energy levels, make recovery from injury easier, and slow down aging.
SO just because we can cut 200 cals by giving up those 29 almonds (i love almonds and raisins. dang), doesn't mean that workingout out doesn't have huge value. In fact what it means is there are more better and other reasons to work out than fat burning. Some fat burning is just a nice side effect of building a more cardio efficient, more muscular you which only takes 6 mins. Really.
So now that we have nutrition front and center, and hammered down, in Part3 b we're going to look at some alternatives to P90X workouts to get to that more effective, efficient - even ripped, muscular - you, and how to assess workout alternatives to P90X to work for you and for your goals.
Preview of Workout Alterntatives:
The complete article (part 3b) is now up on assessing/choosing workout alternatives. In that piece, we review that P90X is about endurance strength. We look at other parts of strength and skill for a general physical preparedness program where getting lean is the goal.
- We consider our other energy systems - besides fat burning which P90X privileges - and why that might be important
- we look at our other systems like joints, tendons and bones, and think about how a program works those or not
- we look at our neural responses to reps and how rep quality is really important.
- we also take a look at a few other p90x concepts like reps to failure and the pump and put them in context.
The end goal is - if you decide you want to do P90X you do so cuz you know what it's offering is what you want based on what you know it's doing. But if you'd like to work those other systems that are also a part of us, well, some help on finding alternatives, too.
does any of this help you decide on a program? please let me know your thoughts.
thanks for reading.
mc
Related Posts/Resources:
- P90X critique part 1: muscle confusion confusing?
- P90X critique part 2: will p90x really get you ripped?
- P90X critique part 3b: workout alternatives and why consider 'em
- Athletic bodies: what do elite amateurs and sports pros look like under their shirts?
- Respect the Fat: an overview of Fat Burning Goodness.
- about repetitions to become habit: how many reps should i do?
- A minute with Mike: the whey window
- another minute with mike: whey, bcaa's leucine, what gives?
- supplements: creatine, beta alanine, citruline malate.
- protein or carbs before bed? do you want to sleep?
- set point theory: what it is and why it's crap
- other sups: green tea
- and quality of sups: is what's on the label in the tin?
- beyond nutrition: what the heck is sustance?
- fat burning: six minutes to better oxidative you?
- ryan andrews: what's your four pounds a day made of?
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Tuesday, September 1, 2009
P90X Critique Part 2 0f 3 - WIll you really "get ripped"?
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Does P90x work - when measured against its own claimes: does P90x get one "ripped" in 90 days? This article reviews the exercise and diet plan of P90X to get at that question - but really it's about providing a way to assess any "body transformation" or "12 week" program to see (a) if what's on the label is what's in the tin and (b) if what's in the tin matches what your goals for a program. You'll find criteria about two key components of such programs, diet, and nutrition, and how to assess the degree to which each of these components is likely to deliver the claims a program promises to deliver, and for whom.
The following therefore is more or less a worked example of applying/deriving this assessment via a critique of P90x - a program billed as an "extreme" workout (+ diet) specifically designed for practitioners to 'get ripped.' It's pretty detailed, so long. It looks at the exercise program first and then the nutrition program in the context of its promised results.
Context
In Part 1 of this reflection/critique of P90x we looked at the core P90x concept of "muscle confusion". We also poked at the rationale behind a few of the "bring it" program's routines within this "muscle confusion" context. The conclusion was, based on what's known about physiological adaptations that occur in a 12 week program by novices/deconditioned athletes - P90X's target market - muscle confusion is basically a marketing gimmick.
In this second of this three part series, i'd like to look at the concept of "getting ripped" that is a key part of the P90X delivery promise.
In Part 3 we'll look at alternatives to the two core parts of P90X, but in the right order (a) diet (from places one doesn't usually think about diet - it's not just about the food) and (b) workout practices (they're both practices)
As i said in part 1 and will say so again here, there's nothing wrong with anyone wanting to do - or actually doing - P90X or similar- the routines are "not considered harmful," to draw on a computer science trope (at least not too harmful - we'll see more in part 3b).
What we might ask about P90X is does it deliver what's on the tin? Will anyone who passes the P90X fit test and is therefore deemed "ready" to do P90X "get ripped"? - and in P90X's definition, that pretty much means, at a minimum, have a six pack.
P90X suggests that if you follow it's program, you will be "transformed" from "regular to ripped" in 90 days. That's its formula: do the workouts; follow the diet. So we're going to look at each part of that formula against some objective criteria for ripped-ness.
Basic necessities of Getting Ripped by which to assess P90X capacity to deliver:
There are fortunately only two things involved in getting ripped, level of importance listed here:
RECIPE/FORMULA ASIDE for 6 Pack
If you want to skip the rest of the article here's the recipe for 6 pack abs:
As to why this is the recipe, well that's in the rest of this article.
Results from this article:
First, there are tons of 12 week programs out there, all promising grand things. Where do we get our information about what works in these programs? Usually from the programs themselves. But we saw in the first part of this series that P90X's key concept "muscle confusion" is more marketing than fact, especially in the context of deconditioned or novice trainees. So are the before and after shots for P90X's amazing transformations that seem to be portrayed also a gimmick? How can we make this assessment.
Second, i'm guessing that folks who choose to do P90X or other 12 week transformations may know about as much about how fat loss and hypertrophy really work as i did when i started the program: less than i thought i did, and so pretty accepting of the way P90X presents each of these: exercise first, diet second, bf% is just a measure of progress.
The reality, as we'll see, is very much different: diet has to be first, exercise is second and bf% is, in the context of "getting ripped" a very specific target, and one that can be reasonably calculated to determine the length and intensity of a program to deliver desired results.
So to begin, let's begin with where P90X puts its energy first: exercise.
o Muscle Building Very Basic Basics.
P90X doesn't come out and say that it's a muscle building program - and that's good, cuz it's not (more on that in a moment) - but most of us think that the term "getting ripped" implies building muscle.
Likewise, those men's before and after pictures in P90X (like the ones fo JonC, left) seem to imply that muscle mass will accompany the program. Hmm.
There's a lot we don't know about how muscle growth works, but there's a couple of things we do know: to build muscle we need two things: caloric surplus and appropriate muscular stimulation to force an adaptation. In this case, that adaptation means laying down new muscle fiber and so getting some muscle growth. Muscle growth also pretty much requires eating more rather than less: we want more body mass - in these case muscle tissue - the resources for that tissue have to come from somewhere. For us, that's the right nutrients - i.e. food.
Muscle in Two Parts:
That said, here's a factoid from Christian Thibaudeau's excellent and recommended discussion of mass building: with someone (read male in this case) totally committed to muscle building, getting diet and workouts just so, the range of muscle building to expect is .25 to .5lbs of *dry* muscle per week. In the real world that non-fat weight would show up with an additional 40% from additional water/gylcogen. So ten pounds of muscle shows up more like 14lbs on the scale. But whether 10 or 14 pounds of fat free mass let's call it, at .5+ pounds a week, 2 pounds a month, that also means five to ten perfect months to get that 14 pounds.
Here's another factoid from that article - a person sitting at say 120lbs of lean mass (weight minus fat) would need to eat 2440 calories a day to start growing mass with those optimized workouts.
Even before we get to the type of workouts, a basic question we might ask is, is the diet in the program one of caloric surplus or caloric deficit? So whether you gain muscle on P90X or not will largely depend on how much of a caloric deficit - or not - you're in during the program. That discussion is below.
Generally, P90X aims to have a person in caloric deficit - without which fat loss will not occur. Period. So here's a potential contradiction, not unique to P90X, but certainly rather brushed under the carpet in this case: if muscle mass building requires caloric surplus, but the program keeps someone in caloric deficit throughout, how can muscle be built? This isn't a Zen Koan. The inverse may help: if one is eating enough for muscle building, what kind of caloric deficit is going on and what kind of fat loss is occurring?
Another question: if P90X runs a person into caloric deficit, how explain those before and after pictures that *seem* to show more muscle mass at the end of 90 days?We'll come back to these questions. First, let's look at how we might understand what kinds of muscular adaptations P90X promotes.
Kind of Strength Foregrounds Kind of Muscle
Another part of the muscle building adaptation is type of load, rest, volume and recovery. As we said above, to get new muscle fibers to be laid down, there has to be a demand for that kind of growth. As we saw in part 1, also, the type of adaptation in the first 8 - 12 weeks of a resistance program for a neophyte is mainly neurological. That means muscle that already exists is learning how to support the loads. Only once the challenge goes beyond that initial adaptation, effectively, does new muscle get laid down IF the challenge requires that adaptation. Does P90X require that hypertrophy adaptation?
o P90X: endurance training disguised with weights.
In the P90X program, 3 out of the 6 days a week are "resistance" oriented workouts (the other three are "cardio" oriented). But what kind of resistance training are we talking about? Turns out they're something known as circuits.
Circuits in general are usually about putting several exercises together, doing one set of each exercise with little rest between moves. The weights used in each of these sets has to be sufficiently light to be able to move between exercises with limited rest.
Indeed, in P90X resistance workouts, the rep ranges are anywhere from 7 to 12. The only instruction on how to pick a weight is so that one will "feel the burn" in the last couple of reps.
Based on the above template, we get the following in the resistance routines: 20+ minute circuits, 1 set per move, mid to high reps, critically: no rest between sets. At most, there is 60 seconds active recovery between circuits 2-3 circuits.
We've said these workouts are circuits but when rest between sets is taken out of the equation for this kind of period, we're looking at endurance or stamina training rather than muscular strength.
Let's look at how "strong" is used as a term in P90X. "Stronger" throughout the P90X program is largely defined by being able to endure, keep up, do as many reps of a move as Horton and Co perform with as little rest as possible over the course of the hour. That's endurance strength. The adaptations developed in the muscles are mainly aerobic in nature, which means that the muscles get,
Foundational. Basic. Upping oxidative capacity. Not building mass, but improving the muscle's capacity to use oxygen which means greater work capacity for longer. That sounds great for health but doesn't sound like a "getting ripped" program, though, does it? And saying that, are circuits the best way to build this capacity?
Here's an assessment of the kinds of circuits P90X uses for training:
The above Goal 3 Sounds like P90X's "resistnace" workouts (and all the other P90X workouts, too, for that matter). That latter point then is as close as P90X comes to having an effect, and it's not strength per se or muscle building. It's endurance: keep the movement going to keep the heart rate up for periods longer than 4 minutes; improve oxidative capacity (ability to burn fat).
Recap on P90X Circuits
SO what have we learned? Circuits are, at best, novice routines, or for sick or rehabbing, or obese. THis doesn't sound like the deconditioned x-jock population P90X is supposedly targeting. So, P90X, as point 3 above, has tuned the workouts for what? Fat burning. Not muscle building.
Our question at this point might be, are these kinds of circuits the best way to burn fat for a deconditioned jock AND add "lean muscle" that the diet guide says will make up for not seeing much of a change on the scale?
Consider this: in a 24 week program study designed specifically to look at the effects of single set style circuit training vs periodized multi-set program, the lean mass changes for women were 2% lean mass gain over that 6 month period vs 8% gain with the alternative protocol. Likewise percentage body fat went down by 10% in 6 months (eg, someone at 24% went to 21.6%) vs 25% with the alternative protocol (that 24% person wend to 18%).
So, these workouts are *mainly* fat burners/endurance builders, and don't seem to be necessarily the best approach to optimize fat burning or lean mass building. In part 3 we'll look at some of these alternatives in more detail.
Aside: P90X+ Let me cue up here that the P90X+ program is very similar in kind to P90X: 5 more P90X style workouts, but with fewer people on the set. These workouts are to mix into P90X. So one effectively re-does P90X, swapping out some P90X routines for the new ones. So, once more into the breach: more circuits, more little rest between moves. So, effectively, more of the P90X endurance same.
P90X - resisting muscle growth?
We now have a sense of what it takes to build muscle: caloric surplus - we need more to build more; and we need specific types of load/recovery/volume for muscles to grow. In looking at P90X, we see that the type of strength it's geared to building is endurance, not hypertrophy. The muscular adaptations are around fuel consumption - better oxidative/fat burning capacity - rather than mass building.
In sum, based on their design, P90X workouts - including the "resistance" workouts - are circuits, tuned for fat burning rather than muscle building.
Questions a person considering P90X might have at this point are therefore
Another question might be "but what about getting ripped? doesn't P90X deliver at least on that?"
At the top of this article we looked at getting ripped as body fat percentage first and muscle growth second. Ok, it's not delivering on muscle growth per se, so time to look at the diet side of P90X and we'll come back to its fat burning disguised as resistance training.
o The simple formula for a 6 pack? Body Fat Percentage
While i don't think he coined the term, colleague Rannoch Donald of Simple Strength may often be heard to say "there are no secrets." So here's a big non-secret to 6 pack abs: body fat percentage.
What P90X does not come out and say ever, anywhere, is that for a guy to begin to see his abs, he has to be at about 10% BF (in my experience of the guys i've worked with, it's actually below 10%); for gals, we have to be at about 15% or less. It's really that simple.
I wish i had known this at the time i was doing P90X. Rather than focusing on dropping 10 pounds, i might have looked into how feasible/healthy it would be to drop 10% body fat in 90 days, and how to optimize that. That *might* have helped me figure out right there if Kenpo-X and Plyo-X were the best ways to achieve that goal, or if maybe looking into diet-x might have been more profitable.
Indeed, what more and more research shows is that the only way to get to that ripped level BF% is calorie restriction. Calorie restriction (ie, diet) comes first; exercise is second. P90X of course doesn't say this fact either. It's selling "muscle confusion" first; nutrition way second.
o P90X Diet Math
This is not to say that PN doesn't get diet. PN has a diet book. And it's a corker.
What the Nutrition Plan for P90X says about the role of nutrition in getting ripped is as follows:
Please let me note again that one can gain lean mass while in caloric deficit. It's just not a lot. If one is gaining .25 lbs by eating for gain, and working out for muscular growth, how much fiber can be built when eating for loss and doing endurance not hypertrophy workouts? It's a real challenge.
So what's the P90X diet advice?
IT's amazing. Every 4 weeks, the macronutrient ratio changes - to match the demands of this incredible program:
Phase I: Fat Shredder - Days 1-28
Phase II: Energy Booster - Days 29-56
Phase III: Endurance Maximizer - Days 57-90
The above phases map to the following macronutrient ratios:
Macronutrient Goals in Each Phase
Phase I - Protein 50%, Carbs 30%, Fat 20%
Phase II - Protein 40%, Carbs 40%, Fat 20%
Phase III - Protein 20%, Carbs 60%, Fat 20%
How are these ratios achieved? By one of two ways: either follow the portion suggestions of how many portions of each type of macro nutrient to have, or by following the meal plans so even less to think about. Just eat exactly what it in the book, when it says to eat it.
Indeed, the portion approach is not unique to P90X but it is complex: Have X portions from the Protein group; Y portions from the Carbs and Z from fats.
This number of portions approach is to help avoid calorie counting. But the result also means that there are only three "sizes" of menu to fit everyone. Not exactly optimized for fat loss. Consider the following.
Calories Per Day - Three Sizes fits All
Here's how a person determines how many calories they're going to eat a day - what their Total X+Y+Z portions will equal.
Nutrition Level Chart
EA = 1800-2399 = Level I 1800 calories per day
EA = 2400-2999 = Level II 2400 calories per day
EA = 3000+ = Level III 3000 calories per day
Who is losing anything here and by how much? Hmm. This means someone who requires 2399 calories for maintenance in Level 1 will suddenly be on a 600 calorie a day deficit. In 6 days of workouts, that's 3600 calories - a little better than a fat pound. Someone who's closer to 1800 cals for maintenance will be losing far less in that week. Maybe nothing following this meal plan. And indeed, there's a real potential Achilles heal to this approach. IT's how one's Level is calculated: it assumes that ALL P90X workouts burn 600 calories.
Let's look quickly at how one figures out their energy level.
Determining Your Nutrition Level
1. Calculate your RMR
Your Body Weight x 10 = RMR
2. Calculate your Daily Activity Burn
RMR x 20% = DAB
3. Calculate your Energy Amount
RMR + DAB +600 CALS for p90x workouts = EA
Now, RMR stands for resting metabolic rate, and i have yet to find anywhere where it is simplified to body weight times 10, since it regularly takes into account height and other constants, etc, but let's set that aside and just go with this formula.
Here's an example:
1. a 140 lb gal of unknown height has an "RMR" of 1400
2. 20% is 280
3. 1400 + 280 + 600 = 2280 calories.
So that puts the person in EA of Level 1, 1800 calories a day. That would be, all things being equal, a 480 calorie a day deficit, which over 6 days, is 2880 calories, not quite a pound.
A gal at 130 is also in EA Level 1, and also told to eat 1800 calories, and that's only
1300+260+600= 2160, a difference of 360 cals a day, which in 6 days is 2160 - even further away from a pound a week.
A smaller gal at 120, 1200+240+600 = 2040 calories now at 1800, is eating only a 200 calorie a day deficit.
That's 1200 in a week, three weeks to lose a pound.
And that's IF those workouts are really 600kcals a piece. They are not. Or let's put it this way: it depends. Yoga X at about 80-90 mins is 200 calories; Kenpo-X, at 45 mins, is maybe 275 - 435. If you're totally "bringing it" maybe a bit more. So your heart rate is pushing it's aerobic envelop.
This math begins to explain the 6 pounds total i took off during my religious observation of P90X doubles - where i was keenly going for 600 cals a day from double workouts.
Special Case:
If someone is in the EA Level 3 of "3000+" of course potentially coming down from say 4250 a day to 3000, the possibility is that, all things being equal, one will be losing 2.5 ish pounds a week, 30 pounds over the 12 weeks.
o Body Fat X
P90X says that weight of course is "relatively meaningless" since a better measure is body fat percentage. Why? P90X doesn't explain in this guide why body fat percentage is more important than what's on the scale. We're simply told body fat % is the measure of progress.
So how does P90X use body fat %?
In the "relatively meaningless" way one uses weight? that it goes down? That's pretty much it. With one sweetener. It provides three body fat ranges for folks to feel really successful after completing the program:
But there's no correlation between Body Fat % and ripped. It does not come out and say that unless you hit that "Elite Athlete" bf% range, you will not be seeing that 6 pack. It's that simple.
BF% - supposedly important to P90X, but based on who and what army? A few questions a person may have at this point about a program claiming that bf% change is critical may be:
Other than just maybe/maybe not caloric restriction, the P90X diet guide seems to reflect Nutrition Confusion, perhaps to match the exercise program's muscle confusion, discussed in part 1. Over the course of 12 weeks, as said, the macronutrient ratio of the program changes 3 times. There are arguments in the data about why a person would want to start with higher protein and lower carbs and then by the end of the program invert this, but not really.
Here, the idea seems to be (it's not explicit), is that to kick starting the diet, bringing up protein and reducing carbs, will fire up fat loss. Hmm. But after that first month, because people will have been working so hard, they'll need to keep brining up the carb level to have the energy to survive it. There's a few notices about extending a given phase if one wishes, but the guidance is pretty much stick to the plan, stan.
Haven't seen the studies to support this kind of short term mix-it-up. Nutrition is complex. But a higher level fact we do have the resources to say is that fat loss happens with caloric deficit. Is that really achieved in the P90X diet plan?
And let's look at those figures again: the predicted weight loss on this program is 6-12 pounds. A half pound to a full pound a week. That's it. Unless you're in the 3000+ a day with a serious + a day. Honey, i can get you on a diet tomorrow with NO exercise involved that will guarantee to meet or double those numbers. No sweat. Literally. So what is someone doing on P90X if the goal is to get lean, to "get ripped"?
o Is What's on the Label What's in the Tin? Is this a Getting Ripped Diet?
P90X promises "getting ripped" as part of its objective.
If we can accept the premise that caloric deficit is required to reduce fat in order to see one's 6 pack, a key part of the "getting ripped" concept, we have to ask if P90X will really deliver this result?
Based on looking at the differences in caloric deficits to be achieved of just a few points of the Level I scale, for instance, it's pretty clear that the amount of caloric deficit to be achieved in following this program is likely to be highly variable, and likely at most about a pound a week for the people at the outside of the Level, and likely considerably less given that the caloric burn calculated for each workout is exaggerated.
Who will get Ripped on P90X?
Knowing that we need to get to a low body fat % to get the "get ripped" look, and knowing how much caloric deficit we need to burn FAT (as opposed to just lose weight), and knowing that there's such variation of caloric deficit with P90X and that at the most it's calculated to drop about a pound a week of fat for anyone who starts at eating 2999kcals a day, AT BEST, what does this tell us about the likelihood of getting ripped on P90X?
IF all the person needs to lose is 6-12 pounds to achieve the ripeed body fat percentage, then it's possible to get to the Ripped Place in the 90 days.
Otherwise, how can it happen?
Now, we know that *if* one gains lean mass and doesn't lose ANY body fat, their BF% goes down. True enough. But how much lean mass can one reasonably gain in 12 weeks with P90X such that it will effectively overwhelm X% of fat? So let's just put that one to bed.
Effectively, unless you're already close to that goal percentage can P90X deliver "ripped" or just the "getting" part of getting ripped?
And if the best it can deliver for the majority is the "getting" towards ripped, again, a person might ask, is P90X the best way to do it?
o Those Before and After Pictures
Given everything we've looked at above, let's come back to a few of those before and after pictures.
For Women, let's take Amanda for example.
We don't know her stats. That is we don't know her starting BF% or her final one, but what's changed in this photo? What don't we see? A six pack. The abs are angled. Is there less fat? yes. Is there more definition. Yes. Does it look like she's lost more than the 6-12 pounds? No. Has anything else, beside the expression on her face, and the sucking in of the gut changed visibly? No.
Then there is KatieV. Again, what's changed?
IS katie sucking in her gut in the day 1 photo? How about on day 90? Is she already pretty lean? Look at the waist circumference at the hips. Much change? So while the photo looks really cool, the *actual* change is not incredible. And since the arms haven't seemed to have changed, i'm guessing weight loss, a good base of fitness already, and with three days a week of endurance abs on top of all the rest of the workouts, the abs will show. Congratulations! This participant hit the sweet spot.
Is this result what any gal who passes the P90X fit test can expect? As we've seen, realistically, that would depend on a number of factors, particularly starting BF% and realistic expectation of caloric deficit over the 12 weeks. If one starts at 24% bodyfat, will P90X take a person to 14%? No. Remember in the research above 6 months of a slightly more intense workout regimen than P90X net 2% lean mass improvement, 10% bf% reduction. That's 21.4% in 24 weeks, not 12.
And with the guys?
What about their before and after photos?
Really look at the photos. From angle, to lighting, to mass, what's going on? Mainly body fat changes?
Without having access to the actual measurements from before an after we don't really have anything concrete to go on about the degree of change. What we can see is that most of the guys posted as P90X success stories already have some muscular definition in their before shots, even though pose and lighting is not optimized to show this before aspect. Look at the second gentleman in the picture above. He's plainly experienced at workouts and is already at a lower body fat %; he will likely be building lean mass out of the gate, and trimming body fat by the little he needs for the lighting in the after photo to create an effect. Nice lat flare.
The above photo crit is not to take away from anyone's accomplishments on P90X, but to put the results - and expected results - in context, and to look at these photos with a greater reality lens, based on the little detail we actually have.
Not that there aren't some rather wild whoppers on the P90x site.
"Lost 30% body fat" sounds fabulous in this picture, doesn't it? But let's put it in context. We can see some of DavidC's abs - so there's a fat level of 10% or a bit less. That means that a guy who is already skinny, as he seems to be - say at 12% minus 30% of that = 8.4 percent. Definitely in ab-seeing zone. That seems like a very high result to me for someone who's already skinny, but let's take it as true. The point is that he begins the program already close to a Ripped bf%. All the guys in the success stories seem to do so. Well they have to, don't they?
So what's going on with his shoulders that do look bigger? Gotta love all those pull ups.
As we've seen, based on what we know about muscle building, it usually requires caloric surplus AND it requires a program designed to facilitate muscle building adaptation and P90X is mainly an endurance program with a wee bit of hypertrophy-oriented training thrown in.
Since what we see is mainly in the shoulder and arms, and some fat off the waist, well, the diet might also just be at that right place where the caloric deficit was minimal to support muscular growth from the most repeated moves in the "resistance" section: pull ups and push ups (we'll come back to this in part 3). Again, well done. Unusual, but well done. Why do we so rarely see people's legs in these shots, hmm?
In general, what we do know, when we really look at these photos is that we are not seeing people make super weight loss changes OR muscle mass changes. These are relatively close to lean people, getting more lean.
Another question might be: if one is in this happy position of being within sight of lean-ness, is P90x the best way to get there?
o Summing Up: P90X and getting Ripped.
If we start with the simple premise that the main ingredient of of "getting ripped" - signified by 6 pack abs - is first to achieve a particular bodyfat% and second to have some hypertrophy of muscles to show through the skin, then we can assess P90X.
We've seen that P90X is *primarily* a circuit training program that's been tuned for fat burning, not hypertrophy - even it's Ab Ripper X program is endurance rather than hypertrophy. As such, despite the X and extreme labels, P90X workouts are conservative: rehab, novice, obese friendly. Surprising, isn't it? The very stuff of fat fit boot camps.
We've also seen that its diet plan is *very* conservative in terms of weight loss. 6-12 pounds total in 12 weeks.
Thus, we might ask,
To the first question we already have the answer: people already close to that target body fat percentage.
To the second question, we've already had some sense that P90X may not be the best way to get the results in promises. Part three will look at alternatives, which will include nutrition alternatives, as the short answer is yes, there are other what one may even call more balanced alternatives to P90X.
To the third question, well, answer two does here as well.
So what do we have?
Program assessments:
My hope is that with the above information, folks are better able not only to assess the claims and supposed results of P90X with a critical eye, but ANY workout program.
So, next time an infomercial promises you'll lose fat in just a few weeks and it's promoting a device or an exercise routine, look at where the diet plan is hiding. It's usually something like "combined with diet and rest" or something similar.
If the device or program promises muscle gains, again, look for the diet plan AND look at the type of routines being promoted. Are they hypertophy inducing, strength and power or are they, like P90X, safe, novice, fat burners, dressed up as hypertrophy or strength or power?
o Alternatives?
At the end of the day, while P90X is fine for what it is - a novice boot camp type endurance/foundation workout - it's a 12 week program. It's a package that uses bells and whistles around marketing illusions like muscle confusion, nutrition confusion, lots of moves, lots of workouts, and lots of diet changes. It seems it's got all these components to keep us busy, entertained, and hooked enough to buy the product: there's a lot of stuff in here; it must be great.
And then if we actually use the program (most people buy health dvds and don't use them, apparently), that variety is there, perhaps not only to keep us engaged but again to think we must be doing something great to achieve our goals.
As we've seen however, P90X, despite all the hoopla, is actually a conservative program. Circuits are safe; the nutrition program is safe. No major changes; no law suits from health risks. Is it the optimla approach to achieve "getting ripped" - safely?
Let's put it this way, if after looking at what's on the label and comparing it with what's in the tin, and you decide you might not want to do P90X but you still want to get lean, add some muscle, get strong etc, you may want to consider some alternatives.
In part three, i'll go over a few examples of programs and approaches both for workouts (part 3b) and nutrition (part 3a let me know what you think of this one - i'm kinda happy about it) so again, a person looking for an approach will have more information with which to assess whether a program is right for them.
See ya next time.
Related Posts:
The following therefore is more or less a worked example of applying/deriving this assessment via a critique of P90x - a program billed as an "extreme" workout (+ diet) specifically designed for practitioners to 'get ripped.' It's pretty detailed, so long. It looks at the exercise program first and then the nutrition program in the context of its promised results.
ContextIn Part 1 of this reflection/critique of P90x we looked at the core P90x concept of "muscle confusion". We also poked at the rationale behind a few of the "bring it" program's routines within this "muscle confusion" context. The conclusion was, based on what's known about physiological adaptations that occur in a 12 week program by novices/deconditioned athletes - P90X's target market - muscle confusion is basically a marketing gimmick.
In this second of this three part series, i'd like to look at the concept of "getting ripped" that is a key part of the P90X delivery promise.
In Part 3 we'll look at alternatives to the two core parts of P90X, but in the right order (a) diet (from places one doesn't usually think about diet - it's not just about the food) and (b) workout practices (they're both practices)
As i said in part 1 and will say so again here, there's nothing wrong with anyone wanting to do - or actually doing - P90X or similar- the routines are "not considered harmful," to draw on a computer science trope (at least not too harmful - we'll see more in part 3b).
What we might ask about P90X is does it deliver what's on the tin? Will anyone who passes the P90X fit test and is therefore deemed "ready" to do P90X "get ripped"? - and in P90X's definition, that pretty much means, at a minimum, have a six pack.
P90X suggests that if you follow it's program, you will be "transformed" from "regular to ripped" in 90 days. That's its formula: do the workouts; follow the diet. So we're going to look at each part of that formula against some objective criteria for ripped-ness.
Basic necessities of Getting Ripped by which to assess P90X capacity to deliver:
There are fortunately only two things involved in getting ripped, level of importance listed here:
- bodyfat percentage - known bf% level for being able to see muscle definition
- muscle density/mass - what will be seen beneath the skin once at that bf%
RECIPE/FORMULA ASIDE for 6 Pack
If you want to skip the rest of the article here's the recipe for 6 pack abs:
- Get a diet that will get you below 10% body fat if a guy and below 15% if you're a gal. See part 3a for nutrition approach suggestions
- Do either this abs hypertrophy routine as prescribed, or get this book, bullet proof abs, and do its routines. Both have been tested. But NOTHING will show without getting down to that bodyfat %.
As to why this is the recipe, well that's in the rest of this article.
Results from this article:
- Based on this assessment criteria, at the end of this article a person will have some tools with which to assess the claims of an exercise / diet program to deliver the promised results.
- With these tools the person will be able to make an informed choice about whether that program suits their goals.
First, there are tons of 12 week programs out there, all promising grand things. Where do we get our information about what works in these programs? Usually from the programs themselves. But we saw in the first part of this series that P90X's key concept "muscle confusion" is more marketing than fact, especially in the context of deconditioned or novice trainees. So are the before and after shots for P90X's amazing transformations that seem to be portrayed also a gimmick? How can we make this assessment.
Second, i'm guessing that folks who choose to do P90X or other 12 week transformations may know about as much about how fat loss and hypertrophy really work as i did when i started the program: less than i thought i did, and so pretty accepting of the way P90X presents each of these: exercise first, diet second, bf% is just a measure of progress.
The reality, as we'll see, is very much different: diet has to be first, exercise is second and bf% is, in the context of "getting ripped" a very specific target, and one that can be reasonably calculated to determine the length and intensity of a program to deliver desired results.
So to begin, let's begin with where P90X puts its energy first: exercise.
o Muscle Building Very Basic Basics.
P90X doesn't come out and say that it's a muscle building program - and that's good, cuz it's not (more on that in a moment) - but most of us think that the term "getting ripped" implies building muscle.Likewise, those men's before and after pictures in P90X (like the ones fo JonC, left) seem to imply that muscle mass will accompany the program. Hmm.
There's a lot we don't know about how muscle growth works, but there's a couple of things we do know: to build muscle we need two things: caloric surplus and appropriate muscular stimulation to force an adaptation. In this case, that adaptation means laying down new muscle fiber and so getting some muscle growth. Muscle growth also pretty much requires eating more rather than less: we want more body mass - in these case muscle tissue - the resources for that tissue have to come from somewhere. For us, that's the right nutrients - i.e. food.
Muscle in Two Parts:
- We create a demand for adaptation (more myofibrils) by the right type of stimulus: hypertrophy inducing effort.
- We then need to provide the the building blocks to support the adaptation.
- we can eat all we want to support muscular adaptation, but if we're not pushing our muscles appropriately to adapt, then they have no reason to change (grow/get bigger). The result is we'd just get fat.
- The converse is also true: even with the best hypertrophy program going, if we're not providing the right material to feed the growth, muscle building will be stymied.
That said, here's a factoid from Christian Thibaudeau's excellent and recommended discussion of mass building: with someone (read male in this case) totally committed to muscle building, getting diet and workouts just so, the range of muscle building to expect is .25 to .5lbs of *dry* muscle per week. In the real world that non-fat weight would show up with an additional 40% from additional water/gylcogen. So ten pounds of muscle shows up more like 14lbs on the scale. But whether 10 or 14 pounds of fat free mass let's call it, at .5+ pounds a week, 2 pounds a month, that also means five to ten perfect months to get that 14 pounds.
Here's another factoid from that article - a person sitting at say 120lbs of lean mass (weight minus fat) would need to eat 2440 calories a day to start growing mass with those optimized workouts.
UPDATE Sept 28 '09 - Dustin in the comments below asks why does one have to be in caloric surplus? Let me bring the reply up here. First, read Thibadeau's article above with the reference to a construction analogy for how muscle gets built.Assuming that P90X was designed to promote muscle mass gains (it isn't), at the best, a normal guy would put on 3-6 lbs of muscle plus another 1-2 ish of water/glycogen. So 5-8'ish pounds. And that's in a program where one is eating to GAIN mass combined with workouts to produce mass. Is that P90X? No.
Again, a lot about muscle building is still being worked out, but there are some basics: doing sufficient work to cause hypertrophy of whatever kind means that muscle fiber is getting damaged - torn down in the body building lexicon. That damage triggers muscle cells to signal to related cells to say we need to expand the capacity of some of these muscle fibers cuz they're being asked to do more. Without the right fuel in the system for that growth to happen, it doesn't happen. So let me continue Thibaudeau's analogy now:
Perhaps you just decide you want a bigger garage, so step 1, you knock down a wall of your garage (like what workouts do to muscle - they really do wreak havoc with muscle fibers). Now what? Perhaps that wasn't the best first step, but now you need more bricks (protein) and you need some funds (carbs) to hire workers and expertise to get the space rebuilt.
Turns out, perhaps without the best planning, you only have a set amount of bricks to do do the job - and you only have a set amount of cash right now to pay for the labour.
So effectively, you're short on cash and your short on bricks, so your project manager says "this is the best i can do" and rebuilds the wall more or less to its former level and gives you a bit more room at one end of the shed with clever use of storage and a few extra bricks it was able to scrounge.
Please NOTE. I'm not saying one can't build SOME muscle in caloric deficit. I'm saying it's NOT OPTIMAL. All things being equal it is sometimes possible to build lean mass when in a caloric deficit but it is really sub optimal.
Why should be clearer now: if our focus is to burn fat, we're going into caloric deficit, and our system is working to maintain energy levels and keep systems going. It's not going to have the resource to give over to a big construction job at the same time, when a lot of those resources that would in surplus be used for building are being used for maintenance and fuel.
Even before we get to the type of workouts, a basic question we might ask is, is the diet in the program one of caloric surplus or caloric deficit? So whether you gain muscle on P90X or not will largely depend on how much of a caloric deficit - or not - you're in during the program. That discussion is below.
Generally, P90X aims to have a person in caloric deficit - without which fat loss will not occur. Period. So here's a potential contradiction, not unique to P90X, but certainly rather brushed under the carpet in this case: if muscle mass building requires caloric surplus, but the program keeps someone in caloric deficit throughout, how can muscle be built? This isn't a Zen Koan. The inverse may help: if one is eating enough for muscle building, what kind of caloric deficit is going on and what kind of fat loss is occurring?
Another question: if P90X runs a person into caloric deficit, how explain those before and after pictures that *seem* to show more muscle mass at the end of 90 days?We'll come back to these questions. First, let's look at how we might understand what kinds of muscular adaptations P90X promotes.
Kind of Strength Foregrounds Kind of Muscle
Another part of the muscle building adaptation is type of load, rest, volume and recovery. As we said above, to get new muscle fibers to be laid down, there has to be a demand for that kind of growth. As we saw in part 1, also, the type of adaptation in the first 8 - 12 weeks of a resistance program for a neophyte is mainly neurological. That means muscle that already exists is learning how to support the loads. Only once the challenge goes beyond that initial adaptation, effectively, does new muscle get laid down IF the challenge requires that adaptation. Does P90X require that hypertrophy adaptation?
o P90X: endurance training disguised with weights.
In the P90X program, 3 out of the 6 days a week are "resistance" oriented workouts (the other three are "cardio" oriented). But what kind of resistance training are we talking about? Turns out they're something known as circuits.
Circuits in general are usually about putting several exercises together, doing one set of each exercise with little rest between moves. The weights used in each of these sets has to be sufficiently light to be able to move between exercises with limited rest.
Indeed, in P90X resistance workouts, the rep ranges are anywhere from 7 to 12. The only instruction on how to pick a weight is so that one will "feel the burn" in the last couple of reps.
Based on the above template, we get the following in the resistance routines: 20+ minute circuits, 1 set per move, mid to high reps, critically: no rest between sets. At most, there is 60 seconds active recovery between circuits 2-3 circuits.
We've said these workouts are circuits but when rest between sets is taken out of the equation for this kind of period, we're looking at endurance or stamina training rather than muscular strength.
Let's look at how "strong" is used as a term in P90X. "Stronger" throughout the P90X program is largely defined by being able to endure, keep up, do as many reps of a move as Horton and Co perform with as little rest as possible over the course of the hour. That's endurance strength. The adaptations developed in the muscles are mainly aerobic in nature, which means that the muscles get,
Endurance is an important capacity for an athlete - the ability to keep going in an activity is pretty critical. Indeed, for someone just starting out on an exercise program, endurance strength is often the first phase of a program that will eventually get to other kinds of strength, like hypertrophy, speed and power. It's foundational.
* Increased aerobic enzymes
* Increased mitochondrial density
* Increased capillaries
* More efficient contractions
* Possible changes in fiber type (e.g., fast twitch to slow twitch.
Foundational. Basic. Upping oxidative capacity. Not building mass, but improving the muscle's capacity to use oxygen which means greater work capacity for longer. That sounds great for health but doesn't sound like a "getting ripped" program, though, does it? And saying that, are circuits the best way to build this capacity?
Here's an assessment of the kinds of circuits P90X uses for training:
We can draw several conclusions from the analysis of groups of individuals who have participated in studies involving prescribed circuit training for a prolonged period of time.
* Circuit training is not optimal for increasing cardiovascular fitness when compared to High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
* Circuit training is not optimal for increasing cardiovascular fitness when compared to cardiovascular training when the heart rate is at the target heart rate
* Circuit training is not optimal for forcing anaerobic adaptation when compared to a strength training program
* Circuit training is not optimal for forcing aerobic adaptation when compared to an aerobic training program
* Circuit training is not optimal for increasing muscle size when compared to a hypertrophy-based training program
* Circuit training is not optimal for increasing strength when compared to HIIT or a regular resistance training program
* Circuit training is useful for burning additional calories and stimulating blood flow to the limbs
* Circuit training is useful for squeezing lots of exercise into a short time frame
In light of everything you just read, can anyone actually benefit from circuit training? The answer is yes, but obviously the benefits are not optimal for experienced athletes. Subgroups of trainees such as the elderly, young, rehabbing, novice, or obese athletes might do well circuit training optimized in the following ways:...
# Goal #3: burning calories and fat.
Since we are not able to burn fat unless we are working aerobically, most circuit training programs will not suffice unless each exercise is performed for a duration of at least 4 minutes. In this case we can only hope to burn calories, and possibly a little fat, by moving rapidly to each exercise station and maintaining a steady rhythm. Ultimately the client will be exercising not at, but close to, the anaerobic threshold.
The above Goal 3 Sounds like P90X's "resistnace" workouts (and all the other P90X workouts, too, for that matter). That latter point then is as close as P90X comes to having an effect, and it's not strength per se or muscle building. It's endurance: keep the movement going to keep the heart rate up for periods longer than 4 minutes; improve oxidative capacity (ability to burn fat).
Recap on P90X Circuits
SO what have we learned? Circuits are, at best, novice routines, or for sick or rehabbing, or obese. THis doesn't sound like the deconditioned x-jock population P90X is supposedly targeting. So, P90X, as point 3 above, has tuned the workouts for what? Fat burning. Not muscle building.
Our question at this point might be, are these kinds of circuits the best way to burn fat for a deconditioned jock AND add "lean muscle" that the diet guide says will make up for not seeing much of a change on the scale?
Consider this: in a 24 week program study designed specifically to look at the effects of single set style circuit training vs periodized multi-set program, the lean mass changes for women were 2% lean mass gain over that 6 month period vs 8% gain with the alternative protocol. Likewise percentage body fat went down by 10% in 6 months (eg, someone at 24% went to 21.6%) vs 25% with the alternative protocol (that 24% person wend to 18%).
So, these workouts are *mainly* fat burners/endurance builders, and don't seem to be necessarily the best approach to optimize fat burning or lean mass building. In part 3 we'll look at some of these alternatives in more detail.
Aside: P90X+ Let me cue up here that the P90X+ program is very similar in kind to P90X: 5 more P90X style workouts, but with fewer people on the set. These workouts are to mix into P90X. So one effectively re-does P90X, swapping out some P90X routines for the new ones. So, once more into the breach: more circuits, more little rest between moves. So, effectively, more of the P90X endurance same.
P90X - resisting muscle growth?
We now have a sense of what it takes to build muscle: caloric surplus - we need more to build more; and we need specific types of load/recovery/volume for muscles to grow. In looking at P90X, we see that the type of strength it's geared to building is endurance, not hypertrophy. The muscular adaptations are around fuel consumption - better oxidative/fat burning capacity - rather than mass building.
In sum, based on their design, P90X workouts - including the "resistance" workouts - are circuits, tuned for fat burning rather than muscle building.
Questions a person considering P90X might have at this point are therefore
- a) does the P90X workout focus on fat burning match one's goals?
- b) if so, is the P90X circuit approach the best way to achieve these goals?
Another question might be "but what about getting ripped? doesn't P90X deliver at least on that?"
At the top of this article we looked at getting ripped as body fat percentage first and muscle growth second. Ok, it's not delivering on muscle growth per se, so time to look at the diet side of P90X and we'll come back to its fat burning disguised as resistance training.
o The simple formula for a 6 pack? Body Fat Percentage
While i don't think he coined the term, colleague Rannoch Donald of Simple Strength may often be heard to say "there are no secrets." So here's a big non-secret to 6 pack abs: body fat percentage.
What P90X does not come out and say ever, anywhere, is that for a guy to begin to see his abs, he has to be at about 10% BF (in my experience of the guys i've worked with, it's actually below 10%); for gals, we have to be at about 15% or less. It's really that simple.
I wish i had known this at the time i was doing P90X. Rather than focusing on dropping 10 pounds, i might have looked into how feasible/healthy it would be to drop 10% body fat in 90 days, and how to optimize that. That *might* have helped me figure out right there if Kenpo-X and Plyo-X were the best ways to achieve that goal, or if maybe looking into diet-x might have been more profitable.
Indeed, what more and more research shows is that the only way to get to that ripped level BF% is calorie restriction. Calorie restriction (ie, diet) comes first; exercise is second. P90X of course doesn't say this fact either. It's selling "muscle confusion" first; nutrition way second.
o P90X Diet Math
This is not to say that PN doesn't get diet. PN has a diet book. And it's a corker.
What the Nutrition Plan for P90X says about the role of nutrition in getting ripped is as follows:
Why Diet Matters P90X® Nutrition Plan A large body of scientific evidence shows that diet and exercise work hand-in-hand to promote fitness and physical performance. One reason for this symbiotic relationship is the energy equation. When you expend more calories than you consume, you burn body fat (aka "stored energy") and build lean body mass—but because you need energy to exercise, every calorie you eat must be of the highest quality to get you over the hump.:Well, as we've seen, ya don't always build lean body mass just because you're burning more calories than you consume; and as we've seen, ya don't always build lean body mass when you're working out and reducing caloric intake, either. .25 - .5 pounds a week if EATING to gain that muscle.
Please let me note again that one can gain lean mass while in caloric deficit. It's just not a lot. If one is gaining .25 lbs by eating for gain, and working out for muscular growth, how much fiber can be built when eating for loss and doing endurance not hypertrophy workouts? It's a real challenge.
So what's the P90X diet advice?
IT's amazing. Every 4 weeks, the macronutrient ratio changes - to match the demands of this incredible program:
Phase I: Fat Shredder - Days 1-28
Phase II: Energy Booster - Days 29-56
Phase III: Endurance Maximizer - Days 57-90
The above phases map to the following macronutrient ratios:
Macronutrient Goals in Each Phase
Phase I - Protein 50%, Carbs 30%, Fat 20%
Phase II - Protein 40%, Carbs 40%, Fat 20%
Phase III - Protein 20%, Carbs 60%, Fat 20%
How are these ratios achieved? By one of two ways: either follow the portion suggestions of how many portions of each type of macro nutrient to have, or by following the meal plans so even less to think about. Just eat exactly what it in the book, when it says to eat it.
Indeed, the portion approach is not unique to P90X but it is complex: Have X portions from the Protein group; Y portions from the Carbs and Z from fats.
This number of portions approach is to help avoid calorie counting. But the result also means that there are only three "sizes" of menu to fit everyone. Not exactly optimized for fat loss. Consider the following.
Calories Per Day - Three Sizes fits All
Here's how a person determines how many calories they're going to eat a day - what their Total X+Y+Z portions will equal.
Nutrition Level Chart
EA = 1800-2399 = Level I 1800 calories per day
EA = 2400-2999 = Level II 2400 calories per day
EA = 3000+ = Level III 3000 calories per day
Who is losing anything here and by how much? Hmm. This means someone who requires 2399 calories for maintenance in Level 1 will suddenly be on a 600 calorie a day deficit. In 6 days of workouts, that's 3600 calories - a little better than a fat pound. Someone who's closer to 1800 cals for maintenance will be losing far less in that week. Maybe nothing following this meal plan. And indeed, there's a real potential Achilles heal to this approach. IT's how one's Level is calculated: it assumes that ALL P90X workouts burn 600 calories.
Let's look quickly at how one figures out their energy level.
Determining Your Nutrition Level
1. Calculate your RMR
Your Body Weight x 10 = RMR
2. Calculate your Daily Activity Burn
RMR x 20% = DAB
3. Calculate your Energy Amount
RMR + DAB +600 CALS for p90x workouts = EA
Now, RMR stands for resting metabolic rate, and i have yet to find anywhere where it is simplified to body weight times 10, since it regularly takes into account height and other constants, etc, but let's set that aside and just go with this formula.
Here's an example:
1. a 140 lb gal of unknown height has an "RMR" of 1400
2. 20% is 280
3. 1400 + 280 + 600 = 2280 calories.
So that puts the person in EA of Level 1, 1800 calories a day. That would be, all things being equal, a 480 calorie a day deficit, which over 6 days, is 2880 calories, not quite a pound.
A gal at 130 is also in EA Level 1, and also told to eat 1800 calories, and that's only
1300+260+600= 2160, a difference of 360 cals a day, which in 6 days is 2160 - even further away from a pound a week.
A smaller gal at 120, 1200+240+600 = 2040 calories now at 1800, is eating only a 200 calorie a day deficit.
That's 1200 in a week, three weeks to lose a pound.
And that's IF those workouts are really 600kcals a piece. They are not. Or let's put it this way: it depends. Yoga X at about 80-90 mins is 200 calories; Kenpo-X, at 45 mins, is maybe 275 - 435. If you're totally "bringing it" maybe a bit more. So your heart rate is pushing it's aerobic envelop.
This math begins to explain the 6 pounds total i took off during my religious observation of P90X doubles - where i was keenly going for 600 cals a day from double workouts.
Special Case:
If someone is in the EA Level 3 of "3000+" of course potentially coming down from say 4250 a day to 3000, the possibility is that, all things being equal, one will be losing 2.5 ish pounds a week, 30 pounds over the 12 weeks.
o Body Fat X
P90X says that weight of course is "relatively meaningless" since a better measure is body fat percentage. Why? P90X doesn't explain in this guide why body fat percentage is more important than what's on the scale. We're simply told body fat % is the measure of progress.
So how does P90X use body fat %?
In the "relatively meaningless" way one uses weight? that it goes down? That's pretty much it. With one sweetener. It provides three body fat ranges for folks to feel really successful after completing the program:
Fit, Athlete, Elite Athlete.Nice correlation implied: if you have a BF% at the third level, maybe you're an "elite athlete" (No question asked of course that if you have that BF% and you're not an elite athlete what else might you be?)
But there's no correlation between Body Fat % and ripped. It does not come out and say that unless you hit that "Elite Athlete" bf% range, you will not be seeing that 6 pack. It's that simple.
BF% - supposedly important to P90X, but based on who and what army? A few questions a person may have at this point about a program claiming that bf% change is critical may be:
- If body fat percentage is so important, and the meaningful way to measure progress, what are the expected body fat % changes on this program for men and women?
- IF it is that important why is it so cavalier about how to take these measures? The guides don't actually tell anyone how to do this - the closest it comes is to say "get a caliper"from their web site.
Other than just maybe/maybe not caloric restriction, the P90X diet guide seems to reflect Nutrition Confusion, perhaps to match the exercise program's muscle confusion, discussed in part 1. Over the course of 12 weeks, as said, the macronutrient ratio of the program changes 3 times. There are arguments in the data about why a person would want to start with higher protein and lower carbs and then by the end of the program invert this, but not really.
- Fact: we know that if you're in caloric deficit, you will lose weight.
- Fact: we know that in short term programs (8-12 weeks) that higher protein diets *throughout* the program tend to have slightly faster higher initial weight loss than other programs, but that after that period, loses level out.
Here, the idea seems to be (it's not explicit), is that to kick starting the diet, bringing up protein and reducing carbs, will fire up fat loss. Hmm. But after that first month, because people will have been working so hard, they'll need to keep brining up the carb level to have the energy to survive it. There's a few notices about extending a given phase if one wishes, but the guidance is pretty much stick to the plan, stan.
Haven't seen the studies to support this kind of short term mix-it-up. Nutrition is complex. But a higher level fact we do have the resources to say is that fat loss happens with caloric deficit. Is that really achieved in the P90X diet plan?
And let's look at those figures again: the predicted weight loss on this program is 6-12 pounds. A half pound to a full pound a week. That's it. Unless you're in the 3000+ a day with a serious + a day. Honey, i can get you on a diet tomorrow with NO exercise involved that will guarantee to meet or double those numbers. No sweat. Literally. So what is someone doing on P90X if the goal is to get lean, to "get ripped"?
o Is What's on the Label What's in the Tin? Is this a Getting Ripped Diet?
P90X promises "getting ripped" as part of its objective.
If we can accept the premise that caloric deficit is required to reduce fat in order to see one's 6 pack, a key part of the "getting ripped" concept, we have to ask if P90X will really deliver this result?
Based on looking at the differences in caloric deficits to be achieved of just a few points of the Level I scale, for instance, it's pretty clear that the amount of caloric deficit to be achieved in following this program is likely to be highly variable, and likely at most about a pound a week for the people at the outside of the Level, and likely considerably less given that the caloric burn calculated for each workout is exaggerated.
Who will get Ripped on P90X?
Knowing that we need to get to a low body fat % to get the "get ripped" look, and knowing how much caloric deficit we need to burn FAT (as opposed to just lose weight), and knowing that there's such variation of caloric deficit with P90X and that at the most it's calculated to drop about a pound a week of fat for anyone who starts at eating 2999kcals a day, AT BEST, what does this tell us about the likelihood of getting ripped on P90X?
IF all the person needs to lose is 6-12 pounds to achieve the ripeed body fat percentage, then it's possible to get to the Ripped Place in the 90 days.
Otherwise, how can it happen?
Now, we know that *if* one gains lean mass and doesn't lose ANY body fat, their BF% goes down. True enough. But how much lean mass can one reasonably gain in 12 weeks with P90X such that it will effectively overwhelm X% of fat? So let's just put that one to bed.
Effectively, unless you're already close to that goal percentage can P90X deliver "ripped" or just the "getting" part of getting ripped?
And if the best it can deliver for the majority is the "getting" towards ripped, again, a person might ask, is P90X the best way to do it?
o Those Before and After Pictures
Given everything we've looked at above, let's come back to a few of those before and after pictures.
For Women, let's take Amanda for example.
We don't know her stats. That is we don't know her starting BF% or her final one, but what's changed in this photo? What don't we see? A six pack. The abs are angled. Is there less fat? yes. Is there more definition. Yes. Does it look like she's lost more than the 6-12 pounds? No. Has anything else, beside the expression on her face, and the sucking in of the gut changed visibly? No.
Then there is KatieV. Again, what's changed?
IS katie sucking in her gut in the day 1 photo? How about on day 90? Is she already pretty lean? Look at the waist circumference at the hips. Much change? So while the photo looks really cool, the *actual* change is not incredible. And since the arms haven't seemed to have changed, i'm guessing weight loss, a good base of fitness already, and with three days a week of endurance abs on top of all the rest of the workouts, the abs will show. Congratulations! This participant hit the sweet spot.Is this result what any gal who passes the P90X fit test can expect? As we've seen, realistically, that would depend on a number of factors, particularly starting BF% and realistic expectation of caloric deficit over the 12 weeks. If one starts at 24% bodyfat, will P90X take a person to 14%? No. Remember in the research above 6 months of a slightly more intense workout regimen than P90X net 2% lean mass improvement, 10% bf% reduction. That's 21.4% in 24 weeks, not 12.
And with the guys?
What about their before and after photos?
Really look at the photos. From angle, to lighting, to mass, what's going on? Mainly body fat changes?
Without having access to the actual measurements from before an after we don't really have anything concrete to go on about the degree of change. What we can see is that most of the guys posted as P90X success stories already have some muscular definition in their before shots, even though pose and lighting is not optimized to show this before aspect. Look at the second gentleman in the picture above. He's plainly experienced at workouts and is already at a lower body fat %; he will likely be building lean mass out of the gate, and trimming body fat by the little he needs for the lighting in the after photo to create an effect. Nice lat flare.
The above photo crit is not to take away from anyone's accomplishments on P90X, but to put the results - and expected results - in context, and to look at these photos with a greater reality lens, based on the little detail we actually have.
Not that there aren't some rather wild whoppers on the P90x site.
"Lost 30% body fat" sounds fabulous in this picture, doesn't it? But let's put it in context. We can see some of DavidC's abs - so there's a fat level of 10% or a bit less. That means that a guy who is already skinny, as he seems to be - say at 12% minus 30% of that = 8.4 percent. Definitely in ab-seeing zone. That seems like a very high result to me for someone who's already skinny, but let's take it as true. The point is that he begins the program already close to a Ripped bf%. All the guys in the success stories seem to do so. Well they have to, don't they?
So what's going on with his shoulders that do look bigger? Gotta love all those pull ups.
As we've seen, based on what we know about muscle building, it usually requires caloric surplus AND it requires a program designed to facilitate muscle building adaptation and P90X is mainly an endurance program with a wee bit of hypertrophy-oriented training thrown in.
Since what we see is mainly in the shoulder and arms, and some fat off the waist, well, the diet might also just be at that right place where the caloric deficit was minimal to support muscular growth from the most repeated moves in the "resistance" section: pull ups and push ups (we'll come back to this in part 3). Again, well done. Unusual, but well done. Why do we so rarely see people's legs in these shots, hmm?
In general, what we do know, when we really look at these photos is that we are not seeing people make super weight loss changes OR muscle mass changes. These are relatively close to lean people, getting more lean.
Another question might be: if one is in this happy position of being within sight of lean-ness, is P90x the best way to get there?
o Summing Up: P90X and getting Ripped.
If we start with the simple premise that the main ingredient of of "getting ripped" - signified by 6 pack abs - is first to achieve a particular bodyfat% and second to have some hypertrophy of muscles to show through the skin, then we can assess P90X.
We've seen that P90X is *primarily* a circuit training program that's been tuned for fat burning, not hypertrophy - even it's Ab Ripper X program is endurance rather than hypertrophy. As such, despite the X and extreme labels, P90X workouts are conservative: rehab, novice, obese friendly. Surprising, isn't it? The very stuff of fat fit boot camps.
We've also seen that its diet plan is *very* conservative in terms of weight loss. 6-12 pounds total in 12 weeks.
Thus, we might ask,
- for whom is P90X likely to be a "get ripped" success story?
- is P90X the best way to achieve this result for this group?
- what are other people supposed to do who want to 'get ripped'
To the first question we already have the answer: people already close to that target body fat percentage.
To the second question, we've already had some sense that P90X may not be the best way to get the results in promises. Part three will look at alternatives, which will include nutrition alternatives, as the short answer is yes, there are other what one may even call more balanced alternatives to P90X.
To the third question, well, answer two does here as well.
So what do we have?
Program assessments:
- - Where is the Diet plan? what are its predicted deliverables?
- - how is progress measured?
- - what are the predicted changes in these measures over what period?
- - what kind of workouts/rest periods are being presented? - endurance/power/hypertrophy
- - what kind of transformations are predicted from these workouts? what are the measures?
My hope is that with the above information, folks are better able not only to assess the claims and supposed results of P90X with a critical eye, but ANY workout program.
So, next time an infomercial promises you'll lose fat in just a few weeks and it's promoting a device or an exercise routine, look at where the diet plan is hiding. It's usually something like "combined with diet and rest" or something similar.
If the device or program promises muscle gains, again, look for the diet plan AND look at the type of routines being promoted. Are they hypertophy inducing, strength and power or are they, like P90X, safe, novice, fat burners, dressed up as hypertrophy or strength or power?
o Alternatives?
At the end of the day, while P90X is fine for what it is - a novice boot camp type endurance/foundation workout - it's a 12 week program. It's a package that uses bells and whistles around marketing illusions like muscle confusion, nutrition confusion, lots of moves, lots of workouts, and lots of diet changes. It seems it's got all these components to keep us busy, entertained, and hooked enough to buy the product: there's a lot of stuff in here; it must be great.
And then if we actually use the program (most people buy health dvds and don't use them, apparently), that variety is there, perhaps not only to keep us engaged but again to think we must be doing something great to achieve our goals.
As we've seen however, P90X, despite all the hoopla, is actually a conservative program. Circuits are safe; the nutrition program is safe. No major changes; no law suits from health risks. Is it the optimla approach to achieve "getting ripped" - safely?
Let's put it this way, if after looking at what's on the label and comparing it with what's in the tin, and you decide you might not want to do P90X but you still want to get lean, add some muscle, get strong etc, you may want to consider some alternatives.
In part three, i'll go over a few examples of programs and approaches both for workouts (part 3b) and nutrition (part 3a let me know what you think of this one - i'm kinda happy about it) so again, a person looking for an approach will have more information with which to assess whether a program is right for them.
See ya next time.
Related Posts:
- P90X critique, part 1: "muscle confusion" real? yoga-x or plyo-x to be x'd out?
- P90X alternatives: part 3a: nutrition for fat burning, ripping and building
- p90X alternatives: part 3b: workout alternatives for time, variety of systems and quality
- MAKE PULL UPS FUN - rings review - they're a gas
- Athletic Bodies: what do athletes in different sports look like under their shirts?
- Cardio and Strength work: research showing they complement each other.
- Nutrition: ten habits for better eating (pdf download)
- perfect reps: not exactly a P90X concept - but huge benefit from thinking about each rep
- shorter workouts: six minutes to fitness part 1 and part 2
- help putting it together? - online training/nutrition consulting available with mc
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