Enter the Asylum

A week after the last Tough Mudder I was still recovering from a knee injury and broken toe. A sane person would have rested and healed up but I just got Asylum in! Asylum is the bigger meaner brother of Insanity. I chose to go by the namesake, be a little crazy, and commit myself into the Asylum asap. April 17th I threw myself into the grinder.

The first thing I had to do was the brand new Athletic Assessment aka Fit Test. How bad could it be; I completed 2 rounds of Insanity, a round of P90X, a round of P90X Plus, and was currently doing a hybrid with all of the above including volume 3 of P90X one on one (workshop for the brand new P90X coming out fall 2011) right before the Mudder. That Fit Test was a huge wake up call. I actually found it tougher than some full workouts. In fact I nearly killed myself on the last test. Those 30sec-1min breaks in between exercises are a tease.

It's ok though because no matter how tough Asylum was it was a mere 30 days. Piece of cake. Wrong again. I expected Asylum to be tough but I didn't expect it to take me to the places it took me. The program introduces some new tools of destruction to the mix that really changed the game.

The first workout after the Fit Test was called "Speed and Agility" and made use of one of Asylums new tools; the agility ladder.  The ladder was great because it really helped with positioning and proper form. It was a great physical guide to foot and hand placement when performing movements like squat jumps from the floor, switch lunges, and full "long jumps". Also warm-ups are now jump rope drills which is why a speed rope was included with the package.

Another new tool introduced in Asylum are power bands; essentially giant rubber bands you put on your ankles and/or grip with you hands. I used to have a ton of trouble with power jumps but eventually I got to the point where I could bang out 40-50 in a minute with no problem (used to have trouble with 20-30 lol) and some more if I really pushed. These bands slapped me back into reality and showed me that power jumps could still be brutal.

In the Asylum workout "Vertical Plyo", the bands were used on your ankles to provide resistance as you attempted to jump from a squat position and tap knees to hands aka power jumps. The resistance by those bands as you tried to perform the movements was pretty ridiculous. Even your upper body got some special treatment as you would do things like "X jumps", where you would touch your toes then jump up with arms and legs wide forming an "X", while bands were on your ankles and death gripped in your hands. "Vertical Plyo" was a test in pure power with the intensity and pace that should be illegal while using the bands.  Too bad my band for your hands/wrists broke mid program.

Unlike Insanity, Asylum also included a resistance program aptly called "Strength". This workout included the use of dumbbells and the good old pullup bar. Unlike normal resistance workouts this one was paced aggressively and you end up sweating like you were doing a cardio routine. This workout actually was kind of like a cross-fit workout. The moves were all compound moves that required a lot of strength and it was all done in quick succession.

Probably my favorite of the new workouts is "Back to Core". "Back to Core" focused on, you guessed it, your back and your core. It isn't often that there are programs that specifically work the back band of your core in such a fine tuning manner. Most people think of your core as just your abdominals anyway, let alone work the rear kinetic chain. "Back to Core" is such a great tool to enhance your overall performance by focusing on parts of your body that you would normally neglect and often times is the reason we get injured.

At the end of about every week or so you build up to a workout called "Game Day". In "Game Day" you get to take your newly improved body "out for a spin". It is almost like a much longer Fit Test. "Game Day" includes movements from numerous sports and engages all your systems. To top it off at the end you get to do a bonus 10 minutes of hell called "Overtime". I had a friend who had completed Insanity try "Overtime" fresh and was getting killed. Now imagine a set of brutal movements like that stacked right after "Game Day". I used to do a P90X workout followed immediately by an Insanity workout back to back and even that was not as tough as "Game Day" plus "Overtime".

All in all Asylum was a ridiculously brutal and efficient program. You will burn fat, lean out, tone up, and improve performance overall. The gains in 30 days of Asylum have been better than gains I have seen in 60 or even 90 day programs. I am so glad I completed the other programs before Asylum; I don't know if I would have made it through Asylum had I not done so (at least not effectively). Can't wait to test the results of a few more rounds of Asylum at the next Tough Mudder! And now some more embarrassing "before and after" photos - this time comparing my oh so amazing pictures from before I started working out last April to current (May 2011)!