Insanity – Insane

I have been meaning to go to Insanity exercise classes forever!!! I first heard about Insanity when I was in LA on Honeymoon. I was watching an ad and thought this looked right up my street. I had however, just torn my knee cartilage and little did I know I would be doing no high intensity exercise for about another 2 years.

A lot of you must have heard of Insanity workouts. It can be done at home (though I attended a class at the gym). You need no equipment, weights or anything. You use your own body weight for any of the exercises. You then complete max interval training, which involves working really hard for a set period of time, with rests in between.

If you are following the program you exercise for 6 days a week for 30-60 minutes for 60 days. The program changes each week.

I had a nose around online online at some thoughts and one site (Web MD) basically said it was a workout for those who were already fit and not for a exercise newbie. If you are not in a class, you will not be shown how to do the moves properly which could lead to injury.  A family member of mine did this for a while (until he injured his shoulder!) and the weight just fell off him. High intensity training like this, does burn fat and increase your aerobic fitness.

So being an exercise nut I decided to go this week (and drag the husband) for a 45 minute session down the gym.

The Verdict

I thought the warm up was hard!!! It involved a lot of jumping up and down which is a killer. I was puffing like loon and staring at the clock, thinking how had only 5 minutes passed?!

The class progressed with 4 x 30 second sets of exercises which were repeated 3 times with rests in between.  The first set was always not too bad but as the workout progressed I started to struggle.

Insanity does work every part of your body and it’s not often I am in physical discomfort in my muscles from jumping so high or having to quit before the end of a 30 second stint, as I physically cannot do the exercise anymore.  I couldn’t breathe hard enough! This was happening a lot but it was good! There is no point just exercising and finding it easy. Workouts need to be hard and even though I have a love/hate relationship with that kind of exercise, I always feel so much better afterwards.  You are not going to get fitter or stronger repeating the same exercises day in, day out. So Insanity was brilliant for that!

So would I recommend Insanity? 

Not if you are starting out an exercise routine. You need to have some basic physical fitness so there is no way that would have been the first class I would have gone to after having the gremlin. Start slow, feel fitter and then give it a try.

Yes if you are already exercising regularly and fancy a challenge, something to push you to the next level!

Well they don’t call it Insanity for no reason do they?