My Review of P90x Plus

Have you been doing P90x for a while and you're getting bored, or you feel like your progress has plateaued, but you're not ready to try one of the more advanced P90x workouts like P90x 2 or P90x 3? Luckily Beachbody has created a supplemental program for P90x, called P90x Plus. These workouts use the same equipment as P90x - weights or bands and a chin-up bar - but provide some different types of exercises. In this hub I'll discuss the three workouts in P90x Plus, as well as the advantages of the P90x Plus workouts.

P90x has three different upper body workouts - Chest and Back, Back and Biceps, and Chest, Shoulders and Triceps. P90x Plus just has Upper Plus, which has synergistic moves in it that force all of your upper body muscles to work at the same time. Some of these moves include Double Double Dip 'll do Ya, 2-Direction Circle Flies, Lunge Curls, and L Chin-Ups, among others. By the time you're finished with this 40 minute workout, you will have worked your entire upper body.

This ab workout is a little longer than Ab Ripper X - 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes. However, instead of using just mat exercises to strengthen your abs, Abs/Core Plus uses a variety of different types of equipment to strengthen your abs and core. Some of the exercises in this workout include hanging toe tap knee raises, where you hang from the chin-up bar and use your abs to bring your knees up; Scissor Climbers, which is a combination of Fifer Scissors and Leg Climbs from the P90x Ab Ripper X workout; Banana Mason, which is a combination of banana rolls (from the Core Synergistics workout) and Mason twists; and Wood Choppers, which is an exercise where you take a weight in one hand and squat down with it on one side, and then come up and bring the weight to the opposite side.

Total Body Plus is the P90x Plus version of Core Synergistics - it's the longest workout in the series, at 45 minutes. The exercises in this workout work your entire body. They include Pull-Up Crunches, where you do a pull-up and then crunch your knees to your abs, Hindu Pike Push-Ups, which are a combination between a pike push up and a dive bomber push-up - you start with a pike pushup and then go from the pike position into cobra or upward dog, and 3&3, which is a circuit of three push-ups, three pull-ups and three squats, among many other exercises.

If you liked the Kenpo X workout in P90x but felt it didn't include enough cardio moves, you'll love Kenpo Cardio Plus. Kenpo Cardio Plus has much more cardio in it, including a lot of moves that combine both jumping and kicking (if you're having hard time jumping and kicking at the same time, just stick to doing a stationary kick. It's much easier). Kenpo Cardio Plus also includes a lot of combinations you wouldn't expect to see, such as a jab followed by an upper cut. These are hard to do at first (at least they were hard for me at first) but you'll get used to them after a while. In all this workout is much more pumped up than Kenpo X, and is perfect for those who have masted Kenpo X and are looking for a kickboxing workout that provides more of a cardio workout. It's also only 40 minutes, where the original Kenpo X workout is almost an hour.

As you might have guessed, Interval X Plus is an interval training workout. The intervals that you'll do in this workout are cardio intervals that start out low impact (or in the recovery phase) for a few seconds, then move up to medium impact, then the last 20 seconds (or 10 seconds depending on if you're doing a workout that uses one side of the body at a time) you'll be going as hard as you can. This workout only has 12 exercises, but you go through the circuit twice - the second time you do the exercises in reverse order, so you start with the last exercise you did and work your way back down. You'll recognize a lot of the exercises in this program, because they're similar to exercises in P90x.

The one thing I like the most about P90x plus is that most of the workouts are shorter. Most workouts in P90x take an hour, or close to it, plus the Ab Ripper X workout which is included after the strength workouts is another 15 minutes. While these workouts are great, since the P90x Plus Workouts are more synergistic, they don't have to be as long, so they're better for people who don't have as much time to work out.

The only thing I don't like about P90x Plus is that it doesn't contain any kind of leg or lower body workout, so I ended up doing the Legs and Back workout from P90x. There was a little bit of leg work in Total Body Plus, but that was it. I would have liked to see a leg and lower body workout in this workout as well.