P90X3 Day 36 – Eccentric Upper

Today, was my second time completing Eccentric Upper, as part of Block 2 of P90X3. Last week, this was my first workout coming back from a neck strain, so I played it safe and went conservative with my dumbbell choices. This time however, I pushed myself and got a lot out of this routine. I was able to increase my weight on all the weighed exercises, except Pterodactyl Flys and Lateral/Anterior Raises, because my shoulders were completely cooked about half way through the routine. Also, last time I was a little concerned that 10 push-ups was not enough per set, so this time I joined the gang by keeping one leg off the ground during the Military Push-Ups and that really turned up the heat. Next week, I will try and keep one leg off the ground for all the push-ups, except the Plyo.

One thing I did notice during the workout, was that my counting started to speed up towards the ends of sets. If you are not familiar with this workout, the premise is to take 3 full seconds on the negative or eccentric part of the movement and then explode through the concentric part of the movement in one second. So, to stop myself from speeding up I went back to the old school Mississippi way of counting and everything became so much tougher. So, please make sure you don’t just speed count your way through this routine. Focus on counting properly, so that you get all that you can out of this upper body blaster.

P90X3 Day 29 – Eccentric Upper

Today, I started Block 2 of P90X3 with Eccentric Upper. This is actually the second time I attempted this workout,. Unfortunately, I strained my neck the first time, while doing V Pull-Ups. I am pretty sure it happened because I did not warm up enough before hand. Which, brings me back to something I have been saying since I started the program, don’t make the same mistake I did, make sure that you stay safe and do some sort of extra warm-up before pressing play on your main workout. At the very least do some foam rolling, if you have a roller. Especially, with a resistance routine like Eccentric Upper, it is really important to get blood flowing in the muscles before going full force, and the 2 or 3 minute warm-ups at the start of the video are not always enough in my opinion. That is why Cold Start is included with this program, if you don’t want to improvise a warm-up on your own, please do it.

Now that I am finished with the cautionary message, I can get down to the nitty gritty of Eccentric Upper. The workout is designed to increase your time under tension, on the eccentric (or negative) part of the movement. If you have done the Tempo workouts from Body Beast than you are familiar with the concept and how it helps increase strength and size. Putting all the science aside, what the means as far as the workout goes is that you take 3 seconds to do the eccentric part of each rep and 1 second to do the concentric. So, using pull-ups as an example you are focusing on lowering yourself from the top for 3 seconds and then coming back up in 1.

The exercises themselves are a good mix of upper body exercises, with a focus on Tony’s favorites, push-ups and pull-ups. There are also shoulder presses / raises, tricep kickbacks and bicep curls thrown in for good measure. All in all there are 19 exercises with a burnout at the end. The burnout is basically the same as the burnout in The Challenge and has you alternating between a push-up and a pull-up. For each of the 19 exercises you are aiming for 10 reps, with the 1/3 tempo, except for the Lateral/Anterior Raise where you do 12 reps total. None of the exercises are outside the box type exercises, like we saw in P90X2, but the tempo aspect of it does add an interesting wrinkle.

Because of the 1/3 tempo, you will likely find that you can use less weight and do less reps throughout this routine. However, since we are only shooting for 10 reps on all the exercises I was able to get them all in, but the pull-ups were definitely a challenge. That being said I did not find this workout as difficult as The Challenge or the Tempo workouts in Body Beast. Especially, with the push-ups I did not think 10 was enough, even with the tempo change. For reference I worked up to 25 reps per set in The Challenge. But, I still really enjoyed this workout and got a great pump in my entire upper body. Looking forward, I am excited to try out Triometrics for the first time tomorrow, and am hopeful that it will be like Plyo X. But, I guess I will just have to wait and see.