X2 Crew – Luis

It all began one late night. Three of us sitting around that familiar and oh so comfortable couch. It was the hangout house… full of snacks, food, anything you could possibly want was within reach. As one of my buddies got up to get some ice cream, the P90X commercial came up.. He shouted “Does anyone want some?” I replied.. No, I want that! And I pointed at the tv.

A few days later we received our copy of P90X. I glued my eyes to the nutrition guide and to the fitness guide for a couple of days. We were on  full steam, anxious to get it done and become ripped like in the infomercial. It didn’t turn out that way though, a month passed and we had all given up. It was simply just too difficult to kick back years of habits in a snap.

Three attempts were made on my part… three times I failed. Whether it was by temptation or by injury from a bike accident, in the end it was the same conclusion: I failed. But in my head, failure isn’t what everyone makes it out to be. Failure is just a different way of saying “I tried and didn’t work so lets just try a different way.”  So I did. I began to research nutrition, I began to soak in as much information as I could about fitness. That’s when, just like probably all of us, typed in “P90X results” in YouTube and stumbled into Coach Wayne’s video. I began to soak even more information from his website. I learned how and why things worked. Finally, I made the choice of not looking at P90X as a 90 day program, but rather a weekly program. Week by week I knew I was just one week closer to my goal. Eventually that legendary 90th day came around along with those great results promised.

After finishing the “X” I wanted more…friends and family cheered on. There needed to be more of a challenge and so I entered Insanity the Asylum. My fitness shot through the roof! The amazing support from the “TeamRIPPED Asylum Crazies” was exactly what I needed in order to complete the program. I was proud of telling people what I was doing and the team I belonged to…but there was one person in particular that would have been impossible to finish the program without. That person was my amazing girlfriend, Yanna, who also did the program with me. Her perseverance and her will to push hard everyday fueled me even more in those moments of exhaustion.

Along with great comments and support came criticism. People started judging me for taking fitness so seriously and they even used the word “obsessed.” People weren’t really used to seeing me so skinny since I was always that “fat kid.” I heard comments like “Are they feeding you at home?” or “You are way too skinny” and eventually those comments got to me… I left P90X and Asylum altogether. I caved in to a burger here and there and eventually started caving into old habits…all to please people and to stop the comments.

Eventually, I noticed that these habits were once again affecting my health and the great results I had once enjoyed were slowly drifting away. I decided to do something about it again. Thankfully, this was around the time P90X2 was debuting and immediately my girlfriend and I knew that we were just about to begin a journey like no other.

90 days later, many new friends  and tons of help from my fellow X2Crew…these are my results. It is hard to describe what a journey this has been. All I can say is that it would have been nearly impossible without the help of all of the X2CREW, TeamRIPPED, and of course, without my greatest workout buddy, my girlfriend, Yanna.