For Yoga X tonight, I’m listening to Chris @schlarb’s beautiful album Twilight & Ghost Stories, Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble, Violin Phase, and Octet, and Philip Glass’s The Grid from Koyaanisqatsi as performed by his ensemble and the LA Philharmonic last summer. Download that last one here.
IT’S AMAZING!!Stream the new LCD Soundsystem record.
I really like it.
It’s been a full week since I blogged here. I’ve been doing alright this week on workouts and food. Except for yesterday—it was a hectic day with very little sleep the night before or after. I didn’t get my workout in and didn’t have much control over my meals (though even when food choices were mine to make I ate terribly). I made it through a similarly crazy day today (had a good breakfast, at least!) so I decided to end today by doing X Stretch [in place of Yoga X—see last post] with my wife.
X Stretch is amazing. To a certain extent, it’s just a compilation of the stretches Tony has you do at the beginnings and ends of the P90X workouts. In X Stretch, he groups them together so you’re doing several different stretches to focus on one area at a time. You’ll do three or four stretches for your glutes, then three or four for your hamstrings, and so on. It’s easily the most strenuous stretching I’ve done, and I was sweating more than a little by the end.
I chose a couple of albums to listen to during X Stretch—I wanted to keep it mellow but not completely dead. First we listened to e*vax’s smooth ambient/not-ambient album Parking Lot Music, which is available as a stream from last.fm. Second we listened to an early singles collection from jazzy French band Air, which is available for listening above. The music worked really well with the stretches, and we felt really relaxed after a crazy couple of days.
Today for Arms & Shoulders, I went for some mellow, mechanical music with a solid beat that I could synchronize my movements to.
One thing I learned yesterday during my first P90X workout is that the music, well, sucks. I’m a former college radio DJ and I’ve been called a “music snob” more times than I care to admit. So today, for Plyometrics, I put the DVD on no music and blasted this fantastic mix from my laptop speakers.
Cut Copy is an electro-rock band from Australia and they released this mix in 2007, a few months before they released their brilliant second album, So Haunted. It’s well-paced, and worked perfectly for my beginner take on Plyometrics. Click the link up top to download it free and legal! The tracklist is here.
