Pilates is my new thing. This particular exercise is hard-as-hell too... but it builds up your core muscles so efficiently, it makes other exercises look like welfare cases.



Check out more exercises at http://www.motleyfitness.com or the MotleyFitness YouTube channel...

Last week, my high school buddy Sean Vigue, of MotelyFitness.com, came home for a visit and did some filming in our home town of West Salem, WI.

This video briefly shows our neighborhood (well, all of West Salem was our neighborhood, as it is a town of under 7,000 people) and our old high school. The workout is awesome too. Try it out.

I prefer this workout (for many reasons).

Yeah, they're friends.

Thought I'd share this here, since this is a fitness-related thread...

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/jeff-de ... dreams.htm

This guy's transformation is pretty amazing... bronzer excluded. He went from 268.5 lbs to 174.4 lbs in one year.

Here's another good one.

http://www.teenbodybuilding.com/teen-tr ... oberts.htm

Darin, do you have abs now? A "washboard stomach"?

Not yet. Working on that. I just started this stuff a month ago... while keeping my caloric intake under 1500 a day. I'm down about 11 lbs so far.

The P90X system is also getting some pretty good results for people as well...

I lost 24 pounds with it.

I'm on my last week of P90X. I've lost almost 20 pounds without even trying (I was only 160 when I started), and for the first time in 41 years I actually have visible muscles. The veins are starting to pop out of my arms, the slight outlines of six-pack abs are starting to show...just awesome. The program works!

I've lost 47 pounds by doing my own diet and exercise program over the last 4 months. I went from totally sedentary and a fast food junkie to fairly active and a healthy eater (mostly), so the early pounds came off really quickly. Now it's slowed down as I approach my goal, and I'm more interested in toning up while continuing to lose a little more weight, so a program like this might be useful.

I admire your perseverance, Jeff. I don't think I could have done it on my own -- I need to be able to pop in a DVD and have someone tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. I've never been particularly athletic, save some basic martial arts training, so I would never have known where to begin.

Now I'm debating whether to simply start a second round of P90X Classic, try to incorporate the P90X+ routines, or (now that I'm a little more educated) create my own arrangement of the workouts to focus more on areas I want to develop.

Congratulations, Jeff! Bet you feel a lot better too.

How long have you been doing it, Ven? Once you started losing weight, how long did it take for you to start seeing the muscle definition you mentioned?

And yes, Daphne, it does feel so much better.

I'm on day 87. It's hard to say exactly when I started noticing the muscles -- it's been a gradual change. For the first couple of weeks I tried to follow the P90X diet plan to the letter, but it didn't work for me. So then I just started consuming as much protein as possible and as little carbs and fat as possible (no easy task for a vegetarian). That's when my weight really plummeted. My "day 0" and "day 30" pics don't look all that different, but my "day 30" and "day 60" pics are like night and day to me, and it's only gotten better from there.

Still, I think I'll have to do 4 or 5 rounds of P90X before I start looking like the guys in the photos above...if my body is even capable of that kind of development.

Lots and lots of beans, I guess?

beans

Well, maybe not lots of beans (sorry, John!). Lots of fake meat products, though -- Morningstar Farms, Quorn, Tofurky, Yves, etc. Some beans and tofu, too. And loads of protein powder.

I kind of call shannenigans on some of those transformations. P90X is awesome at burning fat, but not so much at creating muscle. No matter how many push-ups you make, it won't create the same kind of muscle as benchpressing 200lbs.

But it does work. It may not be miraculous, but it's one hell of a workout. None of the crap that promises you an sculpted body using some silly contraption for 5 minutes three days a week.

If only it were so simple.