Shoulders and Arms

This is a review of the Shoulders and Arms workout, part of the P90X program. To learn more about the program and see reviews of the other workouts in the program, click here.

The Shoulders and Arms workout seems to be designed to appeal to more traditional weight-lifters. Unlike many of the other workouts in the P90X program, you’re going to need a good variety of dumbbells or resistance bands if you want to get everything out of these exercises.

What you do

As you can imagine, this workout targets your shoulders and arms. In other words, you’ll be working your biceps, triceps, and deltoids pretty intensely over a 58 minute time frame.

The way this works is as follows: You will do a set of three exercises (one for the shoulders, one for the biceps, and one for the triceps) to the best of your ability. Then you get to repeat those three exercises. Following that, you get another set of three exercises, also to be repeated. In all, there are five sets of three exercises. As far as the types of exercises, you can count on a lot of shoulder presses, bicep curls, triceps extensions, and variations of those three. Pretty simple premise, really.

Impressions

Of all the workouts in the P90X program, I found this one to be the easiest to manage from a mental standpoint. While it is certainly tough to give it your all throughout the workout, you never really feel like you’re not going to make it. Everything in this workout feels pretty manageable (which is a nice change of pace after completing a workout like Plyo X).

Not to worry, though, you’ll definitely get a burn from this workout. And Tony makes sure to remind you what you’ll need to do to meet your goals. He’ll tell you repeatedly how many reps you should be doing to get lean muscle or big muscle and, as always, shows ways to modify moves for those who are struggling.

The results

In doing this program, there were two main areas where I saw big results: the number of pull-ups I could do and the weight I was able to lift during this workout. I always looked forward to this workout and think you will too.

Don’t forget to take a look at other workouts in the program.

Photo by Exolucere.