My P90X Review, 11 Years Later: What 60 Days Actually Did For Me

Back in 2009, I made a video about finishing P90X. I say “finishing” generously. It is a 90 day program and I made it roughly 60 days in before I got sick of it and stopped. But it was the first fitness anything I had ever done in my life, and it worked well enough that I filmed a results video about it — complete with the cheesiest graphics 2009 had to offer, because I was apparently very trigger happy with the transitions back then.

That video has been sitting on an old channel with about ten subscribers for over a decade. Since there is actually fitness stuff going on here now, I pulled it down and re-uploaded it, and I figured it was worth writing up what I actually think about P90X with eleven years of distance from it. Some of it holds up better than I expected. Some of it explains exactly why I quit.

Table of Contents

• Where I Was Starting From
• What P90X Actually Was
• The Thing It Got Really Right
• Why I Quit at Day 60
• The Results I Actually Got
• What I Would Tell 2009 Me
• Does P90X Still Make Sense Today?
• Watch the 2009 Video

Where I Was Starting From

Zero. Not “I used to play sports in high school” zero. Actual zero. I had never followed a program, never lifted with any structure, never done anything you could reasonably call training. I was a complete beginner dipping my toes in, and the single biggest obstacle was not motivation. It was that I had no idea what to do.

That is a wildly underrated barrier. When people say they cannot get started, half the time what they mean is that the decision tree is paralyzing. How many days a week? Which exercises? How many sets? Do I do cardio? Before or after? Every one of those questions is a place to stall out, and beginners stall out at all of them simultaneously.

What P90X Actually Was

For anyone who missed the era: P90X was a boxed set of DVDs. You put one in every day, Tony Horton told you what to do, and you did it. Ninety days, different workouts in rotation — resistance days, plyometrics, yoga, a martial arts one, an ab routine tacked onto the end of most sessions. There was a calendar telling you which disc went in on which day.

Equipment-wise it was minimal by design. Some resistance bands or dumbbells and a pull-up bar covered most of it. That was a big part of the appeal — you did it in your living room, and nobody had to watch you be bad at it.

The Thing It Got Really Right

It told me exactly what to do every single day. That is the whole thing. That is why it worked for me and it is genuinely the part I still respect eleven years later.

There was no decision to make in the morning. There was no “what should I train today.” I looked at the calendar, I put the disc in, I pressed play. All the thinking had been done in advance by somebody else, and as a beginner that removed about ninety percent of the friction between me and actually working out.

I liked being told what to do and how to do it, and I do not think that is a weakness in a beginner. It is the correct thing to want. You do not have the experience yet to write your own program, and trying to means you will spend three weeks researching and zero weeks training. Handing that job to a structure — any reasonable structure — is how you get moving.

The other thing it got right was that it built the daily habit. Doing something physical every single day for two months rewires how you think about it. It stopped being an event I had to psych myself up for and started being a thing I just did, like brushing my teeth. That habit outlasted the program by a lot.

Why I Quit at Day 60

I got sick of it. That is the honest answer, and I want to be straight about it rather than dress it up.

Here is the problem with a fixed DVD program: it is the exact same workout every time. Not similar — identical. Same jokes, same cues, same order, same guy saying the same thing at the same minute mark. The first few weeks that is comforting because you know what is coming. By week eight you can recite it, and pressing play starts to feel like a chore in a way that the actual physical work never did.

The second issue is that progression was mostly on me. In a good lifting program the weight goes up on a schedule and you can see yourself getting stronger on paper. With P90X you are largely doing bodyweight and band work at whatever intensity you bring, so improvement is real but much harder to see. Around two months in I could not clearly point at what was better than last week, and that is a rough place to be when you are also bored.

Would finishing the last 30 days have gotten me a better before-and-after photo? Probably a bit. Did stopping at 60 undo everything? Not even close, which is the part I would want any beginner to hear.

The Results I Actually Got

Decent. Genuinely decent, especially considering I never made it to day 90. I had never done anything fitness related in my life, so my body had a lot of easy progress available to it, and P90X collected that progress efficiently. I got leaner, I got noticeably stronger relative to nothing, and I could do things at day 60 that would have been impossible at day one.

But the result that actually mattered was not physical. It was that I found out I could do this at all. Before 2009 I had a story in my head about being someone who does not work out. Sixty days of pressing play deleted that story, and everything I have done in the years since — the lifting, the home gym, the weight I have lost, this entire website — traces back to it.

A first program does not have to be optimal. It has to prove to you that you are a person who trains. P90X did that for me and I will always give it credit for it.

What I Would Tell 2009 Me

• Write down what you did. Reps, how it felt, anything. My biggest regret is having no log, because I could not see progress and that boredom got a lot easier to give in to.
• Do not treat quitting as failure. Getting bored at day 60 meant the program had run its course for me, not that I had. I should have rolled straight into something else instead of stopping cold.
• Pay attention to what you eat. I gave the workouts everything and the nutrition almost nothing. The workouts were the smaller lever and I did not know it yet.
• Nobody sees the living room. I was self-conscious about being a beginner. There was nothing to be self-conscious about.

Does P90X Still Make Sense Today?

As a specific product, it is a relic. It was built for a world where you bought a physical box of DVDs, and there is now an enormous amount of free and cheap structured programming available on your phone that updates, tracks your lifts, and does not require you to own a DVD player.

As an approach, it holds up completely. The formula was: follow a fixed plan, do something most days, keep the equipment requirements low, and do not make the beginner decide anything. That is still the right formula. You can get it now from a free app, a written program you print out, or a trainer. The delivery mechanism changed. The reason it works did not.

So if you are where I was in 2009, the takeaway is not “go find P90X.” It is: pick a structured program, any reasonable one, and stop researching. The program you actually start beats the perfect one you are still comparing.

Watch the 2009 Video

Here it is, cheesy graphics and all. Remember it was 2009 and I was very excited about transitions:

If you are somewhere near day one of your own version of this, that is the best place to be standing. Come check out the rest of Fizzness Shizzness for home gym reviews, programs, and a whole lot of learning things the hard way so you do not have to.