P90X is an intense, in-home fitness program endorsed by fitness celebrity Tony Horton. This 90-day fitness routine is designed for those who are already at an intermediate or advanced fitness level. The 12 DVDs include strength, cardio and stretching routines. The shoulders and arms workout focuses on strength exercises for these two areas of your upper body.
Muscles Worked
The P90X shoulders and arms workout targets your deltoids, or shoulder muscles; your biceps, the muscles on the front of your upper arms; and your triceps, the muscles on the back of your upper arms. The workout includes mostly single-joint isolation exercises that target one muscle group at a time, such as bicep curls and triceps kickbacks. It does not include large, compound exercises that also target your chest or back, such as push-ups or pull-ups. These exercises are included in a separate workout.
Design
P90X mixes up the 12 workouts so you don't perform them in any pattern or order. The shoulders and arms workout is scheduled in weeks one, two, three, nine and 11. You do two rounds of each exercise, a round typically being either 30 seconds or 60 seconds long. The exercises are all variations of common strength-training movements. For example, the shoulders and arms workout includes three styles of kickbacks and extensions for the triceps: one done standing, one lying and one with a twist on the standard grip.
Exercises
The main portion of the shoulders and arms workout includes 12 exercises. The bicep exercises include in and out bicep curls, full supination concentration curls, static arm curls and crouching cohen curls. The triceps exercises include two-arm triceps kickbacks, chair dips, flip-grip twist tricep kickbacks and lying-down tricep extensions. The shoulder exercises include alternating shoulder presses, deep swimmer's presses, upright rows and two-angle shoulder flys. A bonus round includes one exercise for each muscle group: in-and-out straight-arm shoulder flys, congdon curls and side tri-rises.
Equipment
The P90X program doesn't require a lot of fancy gym equipment. For the shoulders and arms workout, you need either resistance bands or dumbbells. Whichever equipment you choose, you will need several different tensions or weights to challenge the different muscle groups. The P90X program includes a tracking worksheet. If you use resistance bands, you record the color of the band and the number of repetitions you completed. If you use dumbbells, you record the weight and the number of repetitions.
