Day 7 - Rest Day

I wasn't sure if I was going to post anything on Fridays, but I thought that today at least I could post a summary of how week one of the Insanity/Asylum/Asylum 2 hybrid workout went, and how it compares to the standalone workouts.

Straight off, I'd say week 1 of the hybrid is far easier than any of the other three.  That's not a bad thing, as I'm expecting week 2 to be incredibly tough.

To really see how they compare, I grabbed the data recorded by my Polar heart rate monitor for each of the workouts that I completed, and noted the weekly total workout duration and calories burned during the workouts (yes I know that the calorie burn continues after the workout, but I don't wear the monitor all day).

Firstly, lets look at the total duration of week one of each of the four workouts;

There's not much to choose between the two Asylum workouts and the hybrid, as they're within 12 minutes of each other.  Insanity week 1 however was almost 20 minutes shorter than the hybrid.

Now we look at the calorie burn for each of the programmes;

This initially surprised me.  Insanity, the shortest of the four workouts had the highest initial calorie burn.

Now if we combine the two graphs to look at the calorie burn per minute, we get a better idea of what's going on;

Insanity week 1 is pretty much all high intensity cardio, designed to break you down, whereas both the Asylum workouts have more of a focus on strength and building your body up.  The hybrid week 1 has nothing to do with either of these, and just wants to put your body in a place that's ready for a combination of those two contradicting goals.  It's a nice gentle warm up for what is to come.

Is this data definitive?  Absolutely not.  It's based on a single person, completing the workouts at his own pace.  I had a one day break between finishing Asylum and starting Asylum 2, and expect that to have affected the Asylum 2 figures for better or worse.  However, as I continue through the next few weeks, and get both fitter, and more tired at the same time, the numbers will hopefully paint a more realistic picture of how the hybrid compares.

Please don't use this data to decide whether to jump straight into the hybrid.  You should absolutely start with Insanity, progress to Asylum, and then move onto Asylum 2 before proceeding to any combination of those.  I am hoping that this, and future data will help people who have already completed all three programmes decide whether to do this hybrid, redo one of these workouts, or look for something different depending on their own goals.

I'll do another weigh-in, and set of measurements tomorrow, not that I'm expecting much to have changed this week.

I appreciate that this wasn't an overly exciting post, so here are some awesome people doing awesome things;