I really wanted to post before and after photos of myself during this challenge, truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable posting photos of myself like that online. Though I did take some before shots and I’m happy with the difference.

The Power 90 program by Tony Horton is a 90 day fitness program where you exercise 6 days a week following their videos.

It’s designed for beginners in mind and throughout the program, Tony encourages you to press pause until you’re ready again multiple times.

The program I did was the old version from 2004, there is a new version that was made last year that is very similar but has updated workouts.

There are two levels you can do:

2 phases:

This has level 1-2 for 45 days, then level 3-4 for the final 45 days.

3 Phases:

This has level 1-2 for 30 days, level 3-4 for 30 days and then level 5-6 from the P90 Master’s Series for the final 30 days.

The Master’s series is a follow on program sold separately, so you need to get that to do the three phase version.

I chose to do the three phase version because I didn’t want to get bored of the workouts.

The week looks like this:

Monday: Sculpt, a weights workout.
Tuesday: Sweat, a cardio workout and Ab Ripper – an ab workout.
Wednesday: Sculpt.
Thursday: Sweat and Ab Ripper
Friday: Sculpt.
Saturday: Sweat and Ab Ripper.
Sunday: Rest.

I used my chalkboard is a daily planner of the workouts so I could tick them off as I completed each one.

Here’s how I found each phase.

Phase 1-2.

Sculpt:

This lasted around 30 minutes and had 5 minute warm up. The weight exercises had 3-4 sets in each round, then some lunges or squats, then back into another round. There’s three rounds all together then a cool down.

Some of the exercises I hated were swimmers press and back scratch. They were so painful to get through but are start of the workout thankfully.

I did find that it got easier and I stopped dreading them so much near the end of the 30 days.

Sweat:

I hated the cardio workout, sweat, so much to start with. Doing jumping jacks and putting your arms in the air is really painful.

The workout is about 35 minutes. It involves 4 minute warm up and then 5 minutes of power yoga.

This 5 minute power yoga session is what gave me the love for yoga, it showed me how it can give you a fantastic workout. I found it so painful at first and seeing the different between how easy it feels now is one of the biggest indicators of how my fitness has improved.

The exercises that required me to lift my arms up and down took a while to get used to and I found it hard to get through them all without modifying for a few seconds keeping them still and down.

There’s 3 rounds in this and the last one was kick boxing, which I liked the best, probably because it was the easiest part!

I found it boring repeating it every day and read on the Beach Body forum that it’s okay to substitute it for another cardio workout of equal length. Because I was finding it hard to do this program and run, I often ran instead.

Ab Ripper 100.

The Ab Ripper is a 5 minute ab program that’s planned in after Sweat. It’s 10 ab moves you do 10 times to get to 100.

I couldn’t do a full body crunch the first few weeks, but now I can. So that’s a win.

My dread for this never left through. I hate ab work!

Phase 3-4

So I got to day 30 and decided to move up to the next level. I didn’t find it much harder to be honest, just longer.

Sculpt 3-4

This was 38 minutes, so longer than the previous level.

A lot of the moves were similar to 1-2, the 4 rounds instead of 3. There were also some moves were you had to max out, like do as many pushups until you couldn’t do anymore which was different. I like different.

Sweat 3-4.

This was 40 minutes long.

The moves were similar, again, but you did 3 sets of each circuit instead of 2.

I was getting bored of the repetition by now, as it’s very similar to the first phase. I was starting to do other cardio in it’s place more and more.

Towards the end of this phase, I was looking into cardio routines online for variety.

Ab Ripper 200.

This was thee same as 100, but you did 20 reps of each move instead of 10.

Phase 5-6.

Woo, onto the next phase! I was feeling pretty good by this point and feeling like I might actually do this. I’m sure many people start the Power 90 but never complete it and I was sure I’d be one of them.

These workouts are from the Masters Series.

Sculpt 5-6

45 minutes long, This was my favourite of all the workouts. I started using 2 different weights in this one for the different exercises.

The warm up and cool down was quicker and it had a nice mix of great and challenging moves. I think by this point I was used to working out so had a more positive attitude to the harder moves that I would have previously hated.

Sweat 5-6

Again, 45 minutes and again, much more enjoyable than the previous rounds. I think it’s because the moves were a lot different. The only thing to watch with this is that with a lot of the moves, you could easily slack and not put your all in. This means you won’t burn as many calories.

That’s the catch with at home workouts though.. But this one seemed to have a lot of moves that you could easily modify to make easier, or throw your weight into it for maximum burn.

I did this a few times before substituting for other cardio work to stop me from getting bored.

Other exercise:

I was doing yoga regularly throughout. I also didn’t have rest days, I wanted to stay active snd even if I did just 15 minutes of light yoga, I wanted to do something.

Diet:

Diet wise, I ate healthy throughout. Lot’s of fruit, veg and salad. I don’t count calories because I don’t like to restrict myself. As muscle tone was my main goal rather than weight loss, I wasn’t too bothered about monitoring my diet. To see what I eat in a typical day, you can read my What I Ate Wednesday posts.

Power 90 Results:

Weight Loss Total: 12lbs

I lost most of the weight in the first 3 weeks, then stayed the same until the last few weeks when I lost the final 3.

I’m happy with the weight I’m at and it’s about the amount I wanted to lose.

Inches: 6 inches lost.

I lost an inch from each area. Thighs, arms, waist and hips. I was hoping for a little more on my hips but hopefully that will come with time as I carry on exercising.

I love the structure of this and like the idea of working out daily, alternating with cardio and strength training. This is something I’d like to carry on doing in the future and I’ve been following a similar pattern now, weather it’s finding a 30 minute weight program on YouTube, doing one of the Power 90 Sculpt videos or weights at the gym.

I’ll probably never do the cardio workouts from the Power 90 again as they were too boring and my least favourite thing about the program.

It seems like a big commitment to workout every day, but by planning my time I’m proud to say I’ve done it and only missed 4-5 workouts, some of which were over Christmas or when I had plans that made it impossible to workout.

So where now? I’m currently doing the 40 day fitness challenge with DW Fitness, then I’ll be focusing on training for a half marathon in May.

I would like to do the Power 90 masters series and P90x and P90x3 at some point!