Yet another rotation question

[KellieM]

Hi,

Like so many others, I have been monitoring this forum for several months and found it extremely useful and informative.

I started using Cathe's tapes in May and was hooked right away. I have the 6 pack, Cardio Kicks, Circuit Max, MIS, MIC, BodyMax, Interval Max and just ordered Step Heat and Step Works. I had been using Kathy Smith and Jane Fonda tapes for years prior to trying Cathe's (and I don't plan to go back to them)and had never done advanced workouts until now.

My question is (finally) how do you know when it's time to change your rotation and do something different? See, I figured that I should do the Xpress set (which I love) until I got all the moves down pat and could really put maximum effort into my workouts. Also, I'm not very strong and although I did start with a 10 lb barbell, I'm up to 25 lbs now and feel that I'm just getting "into the groove".

I'm into my 7th rotation of the Xpress set and I'm really liking it. I'm still comfortably (?) sore the next day and feel I've done a good workout each day. Is it really time to change and move on to something else? How often should I change?

Thanks for listening! You've got a great web page!

Kellie
(an East Coast Canadian Cathe fan!)

 

[Lex411]

My two cents

Ok, I always have to chime in with my two cents, so here I go!

What has worked really well for me has been to change my rotation completely or even just to "tweak" it a little every 4-6 weeks, depending on what I'm doing. Everybody is different and every person't body will respond differently. Some people adapt really quickly to what they're doing and do best to change to another rotation every 4 weeks, some people can change every 6-8 weeks and not hit a plateau. When you say you've completed your 7th rotaion I'm assuming that means you've been doing Xtrain (which I just got and absolutely love myself) for 7 weeks?

You might want to chnage to something totally different now, using Cathe's tapes, or sometimes even just changing the order of a workout can be enough to shock your body. I like to go back and forth with the order, doing weights before cardio for a while and then switching it back the other way. I find even just doing that makes a big difference. But you do have a nice variety of workouts and you can play with the Xtrain workouts quite a bit to shuffle things around and make up your own workouts. Maybe for a while go back to using MIS or Bodymax's upper body work, doing it first, followed by cardio. The switch from one body part per day to doing 2 or more in addition to the switch of doing weights before cardio would probably really confuse your body.

But if you really love the Xtrain segments you can still move them around so you can keep using them and still get that variety. Mix up the cardio sections, do 2 body parts per day instead of one so you hit them each 2 times per week... I think the new series is so great because of that ability to shake things up.

But anyway, my original point was that you'll probably still see some decent results continuing what you're doing for a while but you get the most accelerated results (just in my own experience) from changing every 4-6 weeks.

Hope that helped some! Take care.

 

[KellieM]

RE: My two cents

Thanks so much for your input.

I'm thinking I'll finish up this rotation of the Xtrain series and try to put together a new rotation.

My concern is that I don't know the tapes well enough to put together a good, all around workout rotation. Don't want to overwork or underwork any parts - that's one of the things I especially like about the CTX series.

Probably a dumb question but...how do you manage to rearrange parts of the workout tapes to create your own workout? Doesn't that involve a lot of fastforward and rewinding? I can certainly see the benefits of DVDs. Maybe someday...

Thanks again,

Kellie