UrbanUpdate

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With just two weeks of workouts left in my P90X program, anxiety is setting in: what will I do once it’s all over? How will I maintain the INSANE (or, at least, mildly substantial) muscles I’ve gained since mid-August? It seems like I have three options:

**Plan A: Keep doing P90X.

**

Without skipping a beat, I continue the same routine with the determination of a warhorse. Each morning, I get up as the sun breaks over the horizon, wrap my arms around the pull up bar and knock out an hour’s worth of pain. Yeah. Fucking. Right. As much as I love having gone through this, and I really have loved it as much as I’ve hated it, there’s no reasonable way to keep this up.

**Plan B: Let myself go.

**

I’ll have just finished the most intense period of working out I’ve ever accomplished. And probably that I’ll ever do. I just did over 120 pull-ups and one billion squats last night. Who wants to maintain that? Not I, dear readers. It may be time to give into the gods of Sugar and Cholesterol and become as obese as humanly possible. I’m not talking Honey-Boo-Boo’s-mom obese. I’m talking Guinness-Book-of-World-Records-title-holder-for-Fattest-Man-Alive obese. Or maybe, with the holidays fast approaching, I’ll just lay out on my parents’ couch and shove day-old stuffing into my mouth washed down with a slug of gravy and transform into a close approximation of a human-size pile of mashed potatoes.

**Plan C: The middle path.

**

This is what I’ll actually do, as boring as it seems: continue performing the same P90X routine on a much less rigorous schedule. Whereas now I’m pumping iron and chopping through steel (that last part isn’t true), in a couple of weeks I’ll cut back to working out every other day. It’ll be P180X.

There’s also this golden nugget from the P90X Home Fitness Guide: "To maintain your muscle mass, you can do just the first round of the resistance programs, since you get 80 percent of the benefit in a resistance workout during the first set….This can cut the time of your resistance workouts to under 30 minutes…"

I’ll modify some of the more intense workouts so they’re not so intense. Do half-workouts if I feel like it. I’ll ercise three or four times a week. You know, like a normal person. And with all that extra time I can pick up a hobby, like playing the didgeridoo. Never really understood how those things work.

I probably won’t continue building muscle, but at least I’ll maintain the progress I’ve made so far. Guess I’ll give up my dreams of becoming a professional body builder like this dude and stick to editing (though doesn’t that nerd look like he could be a body builder AND an editor? My life can be his!).

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