Supreme 90 Review Series

This spring I woke up to find my self 5 years in the past and I ended up doing this really cool fad workout called P90X.  After finishing / surviving my second marathon in December I was taking a break from running.  I had developed Pavlov’s Dog Leg where every time I saw a running shoe my knees automatically started aching.  P90X was good fun and I look a lot more muscular now and the best part was that I did it for 90 days without getting injured.  I did have plenty of 3-day-aches in all my muscles, but I’ll take that over a hobbled Achilles tendon.

Ninety days ended up being a huge commitment, I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but I definitely plan on doing individual work outs here and there.

A few weeks ago I was wandering through Fry’s and I came across a program called Supreme 90 Day.  It’s like a super budget version of P90X for only $20 (P90X is $140).  $20 is a sweet spot for pricing because it’s worth a try even if it turns out to be terrible.  So I thought I’d give it a try and I plan on posting a short review of each work out as I do them for the first time.  I shall style Supreme 90 as S90 since it’s such a clone of P90X it might as well have the same snappy short hand.

First Impressions:

First and foremost S90 is an imitation.  The way I view it going in the absolute best S90 could be is equally as good as P90X.  It’s not fair and if you don’t like it leave a comment and a link to your blog (you might be able to get your last name as a domain name unless your name could be construed in any way as a porn reference).

I didn’t do the P90X diet, but I read through it and it is pretty much a framework for a diet.  It breaks the foods you eat into categories, gives examples of each and for each phase of the diet tells you how many to eat at each meal.  For example phase 1 day 1 eat 5 proteins, 2 dairy, 1 fruit, etc…  There are also sample recipes and a shopping list to take to the grocery store.  It’s complete, it’s a framework, it’s flexible.  The S90 diet is a little pamphlet that has 30 days of recipes.  Not very flexible, not equivalent in any way.  Since I’m not doing the diet it’s not a big deal but it’s a harbinger of things to come.  P90X is 7X more expensive for a reason.

The most telling thing about the opening the box impression is that there is an insert for a cubic zirconium ring offer on the inside.  I guess the market research by Telebrands came to the conclusion that people who work out also buy costume jewelry.

Major differences from P90X:

• No pull up bar.  If you don’t like pull ups I guess this is good news.  I love pull ups.  P90X got me a T-shirt from the Marines booth at an expo because I could do 15 dead hang pull ups.
• Yes exercise ball.  If you like your work out moves to feel even more like they are simulating sex (already have the sweating and grunting, why not add some hip gyrations in there).  I’m actually looking forward to this as I bought a ball years ago and haven’t used it very much.
• Shorter work outs.  I cheated here, I’ve looked ahead at all the workouts to see their length.  With P90X you are doing at least 60 minutes a day.  Some days you do 20 minutes of abs after that and yoga days are 90 minutes.  That was a big time commitment.  I’m talking about getting up at 5:30 AM to do Sun Salutations before the sun has even risen.  S90 workouts are 30 – 40 minutes.  Much easier to stick to.