I just completed the P90X2 Shoulders and Arms workout.  Man, what a workout!  My arms feel shredded, and I can already tell my shoulders are going to be sore in the morning.  This work is much more effective than the original P90X Shoulders & Arms workout.

In the original Shoulders and Arms workout, you focused on performing triple sets of shoulders, biceps, triceps, then immediately repeating that sequence, with a short break after the repeat to prep for the next series.  You performed this 5 times, with a 6th bonus round if you felt up to it.  While I enjoyed this workout, I felt that your arms almost were overtrained at times.  After a while, or a few sessions through P90X, you’d be ready to move to heavier weight, however with the sheer number of exercises, this became cumbersome at times, and enlongated an already long workout.

The Workout

The workout begins with the typical warmup found in P90X2.  You begin with some stability ball warmup moves to loosen up your muscles, followed by the foam roller we’ve come to love in P90X2.  The foam roller is fantastic at helping to loosen your tight muscles and workout any knots you may have gotten from other workouts.

Here’s an outline of the warmup exercises:

• Stability Ball Twist
• Stability Ball Squat
• Stability Ball Side Stretch
• Alternating Back Lunge with Stability Ball
• Atlas with Stability Ball
• Foam Rolling
• Roller Angel
• Roller Sphinx
• Worlds Greatest Stretch
• Inch Worm
• Table

After a short rest, we move into the main workout for P90x2 Shoulders and Arms.  Many of the moves in the workout you may have seen or done before, while a couple caught me totally off guard.  While the workout may not seem as hard as the previous workout, you will be sadly mistaken.  While there are only 7 moves, you repeat the entire sequence 3 times in quick succession.  In addition, several of the moves, such as the Y-T press and Six Direction Shoulder Flys were extremely surprising in how little weight I was able to do.

Even more, each move is notched up in difficulty over the previous workout by performing it on one leg, or on the stability ball.  Like all workouts in the P90X2 series, your core is involved in every aspect of the workout.  This adds quite a bit of complexity to the workout, and causes you to sweat like no other.  This causes you to engage your core and increase the intensity which yields greater, total body strength improvements. You will likely need to use a lower weight than you are normally accustomed to, which is good news for a lot of folks that don’t want to buy heavier weights.

Another move I found difficult was the addition of Crazy Eights.  This move is just like Static Arm Curls from P90X, however you are now doing 8 reps per side, instead of 4, and you are balancing on one leg…..CRAZY!  After doing this set alone, I had to drop my weight down 5 lbs from 30’s to 25lb dumbbells.

• Balance Curls
• Alternating Arnold Press
• Overhead Tricep Pull
• Six Direction Shoulder Fly
• Crazy Eight
• Y – T Press
• Rocket Launcher Tricep Kickback

Then you will repeat these exercises two more times in quick succession!

Overall, the P90X2 workout is an excellent workout.  It is a great improvement over the original P90X Shoulders and Arms workout.  While adding in the complexity of standing on one leg, this workout is a world-class Shoulders & Arm workout.

Here’s a preview of the P90X2 Shoulders and Arms: