By Steve Edwards, Director of Results
With hundreds of thousands of people running marathons and triathlons across the country, there’s a very good chance that some of your customers are going to be endurance athletes. And while it may benefit you economically to recommend P90X ®, you’re likely to have better results with these athletes if you can improve their event times. To do this, you’re going to need to understand how to incorporate Beachbody ® workout programs with the training they are already doing.
Most of your customers are going to want to improve their performance. As good a workout as it is, doing “Back & Biceps” isn’t going to improve anybody’s time in the 10K. And doing any week of P90X and then racing on Saturday is a recipe for disaster. The first question I ask anyone training for a competition is, “When is your event?” The next is, “How well do you want to do?”
The second question is vital because some people do these events only to improve their fitness. In these cases, they should just get after their Beachbody program (of choice, it doesn’t matter which one) because it will do more for changing their body composition than their sport, as that’s what our programs are designed for.
The tricky customer is the one who wants to set a personal record. In these cases, you’ll want to recommend that they begin their Beachbody program in the off-season.
Endurance athletes may not want to do it, but almost every one of them would benefit from a period each year where they stop (or mostly stop) their sports-specific training and did a good fitness program. This is especially true if they need to lose weight or have weakness because it’s likely that their fitness results have hit a plateau after a long season where they did the same things over and over.
Your next assessment has to be made per individual. It’s basically whether you should recommend the program as designed or some abridged form, such as whether to recommend Lean or Classic P90X. Each customer will be a different case, and he or she will likely lead you to the correct recommendation. Here are some examples.
An overweight person who has a high percentage of body fat:
Recommend a classic program with a lot of resistance training, as gaining muscle is the quickest way to slim down, which is what they need more than any other type of training.
A fit person with a lot of muscle mass:
Recommend a lean-style program. They will still benefit from strength training and explosive cardio (which put different stress loads on the body than running, riding, and swimming) but don’t want to add more mass because strength-to-weight ratio is paramount in endurance sports.
Someone in between the above examples:
Recommend a program that begins with classic weight training and transitions to more of a lean-style program.
The last example could also be used for anyone who is closer to their race program and still wants to try some outside training. In these cases, P90X could start with its Classic routine for a phase (or so, time dictates this) then transitions to Lean for a phase, and then perhaps transitions to a customized schedule to accommodate the customer’s sports-specific training needs.
Serious endurance athletes have different needs than your average customer and can greatly benefit from some creative thinking on your part as to which workouts they should do. There’s a very good chance that their ability to transition quickly through our line of cardio workouts will exceed your other customers’. This means that you may be able to recommend intense cardio workouts like INSANITY ® or One on One with Tony Horton sooner than you would with other people.
In fact, no matter what their base Beachbody program is, you might find that adding some advanced cardio could help their results even if they are struggling with the resistance aspect of their program.
