What Is The Best Beachbody Workout (Final)

It took over 6 months but the final results of the Beachbody Bracket are in.  How did your favorite workouts fare against the others?

What Is The Best Beachbody Workout (Part 1)

What Is The Best Beachbody Workout (Part 2)

What Is The Best Beachbody Workout (Part 3)

Complete Bracket and HRM Database

For anyone who has not been following along at home, I combined 77 different Beachbody routines from 8 different programs into a single elimination bracket to see for myself what the “Best Beachbody Workouts” are.  The programs involved were:

1. P90X
2. P90X2
3. P90X3
4. Insanity
5. Focus T25
6. Rev Abs
7. Les Mills Combat
8. Tony Horton’s One-on-One Series

The Criteria

What makes one workout “better” than another?  These are the general criteria I used to compare similar programs:

• Level of Exertion:  I wore a heart rate monitor for all workouts and recorded average HR, peak HR, total calories burned, and calories burned per hour.
• Difficulty:  A subjective estimate on how hard a workout is, measured by how many breaks I needed to take, what percentage of reps I completed, etc.
• Enjoyment:  Who wants to do a workout that they dread?  Some workouts are so enjoyable that I couldn’t wait to get started, while others I couldn’t wait to finish.

The Brackets

Originally I intended to whittle the 77 workouts down to one overall winner, but in the end I realized it would be almost impossible to compare an upper body workout with something very different such as an ab routine.  At the end I established one winner in each of the following categories:

• Upper Body
• Lower Body
• Total Body
• Cardio (including Martial Arts and Plyometrics)
• Abs
• Stretch/Yoga

One change I made mid-stream was to insert the three P90X3 Elite DVD workouts into the brackets–Complex Upper, Complex Lower, and X3 Ab Ripper.

Best Upper Body Workout

The big winner of the Upper Body bracket is P90X3 Incinerator.  IMO you just can’t beat the efficiency of the P90X3 workouts and Incinerator hits your whole upper body in one fast paced 30 minute workout.  A close runner-up is The Challenge–if you push yourself in this new version of “Chest & Back” you could be sore for a week.

Best Lower Body Workout

I’m glad I picked up the X3 Elite Series because Complex Lower was good enough to win the Lower Body bracket, narrowly beating P90X Legs & Back.  Complex Lower is inspired by X2’s Post Activation Potentiation concept which is designed to develop athletic power.  Complex Lower is 30 minutes of unrelenting leg work.  Legs & Back was certainly good enough to win but my HR and calorie results are obscured by all the pullups that are included in L&B.

Best Total Body Workout

This was the most difficult bracket to establish winners IMO because there are so many good total body workouts among the programs.  But in the end T25’s Total Body Circuit lived up to what I like to call the “hardest workout in the entire T25 program”.   I was pleasantly surprised by P90X2 Balance & Power which I had only done once before, and Insanity’s Cardio Power & Resistance gets an honorable mention.

Best Cardio Workout

I threw alot into the Cardio bracket including several martial arts routines as well as several versions of plyometrics.  The overall Cardio Bracket winner is Insanity Pure Cardio which is hands down my favorite Insanity routine.  Once you strip out the 9 minute warmup, the 7 minute stretch and 5 minute cooldown you are left with 16 of the most intense non-stop minutes Shaun T has ever put together including T25.  Sixteen moves, all 1 minute each with no scheduled breaks makes for a great short workout.  In the MMA sub-bracket an honorable mention goes to Les Mills Combat 60 which came out ahead of both Kenpo X and MMX.  And in the Plyometric sub-bracket the winner was Insanity Max Interval Plyo.

Best Abs Workout

I inserted the new X3 Ab Ripper into this bracket mid-way through the schedule and I’m glad I did as it tops the other seven ab routines for the best ab workout.  The moves in X3 AR are compound moves and performed more slowly than in the original ARX which minimizes the effect of momentum.  Looking back on this bracket, however, you can’t go wrong with any of the 9 options listed here.

Best Stretch/Yoga Workout

Last but not least is the relaxing Stretch/Yoga bracket.  It was certainly difficult to pick winners here because I couldn’t rely on calorie burn and heart rate data as much as in the other brackets.  A lot of my evaluation came down to the enjoyment factor, so that left P90X3 Dynamix as the most enjoyable Stretch workout.  I did gain a new appreciation for foam rolling from P90X2 Recovery & Mobility, and I still perform many of the stretches from the original X Stretch. Every routine here will make you feel better and looser, so you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

Final Standings

Here is how the 8 programs finished in terms of head-to-head wins and losses.  Near the top of the list are P90X3 and Focus T25 because of their efficiency in getting the job done in 30 minutes or less, and of course Insanity which lives up to its nickname as the “hardest workout program ever put on disk”.

Top 10 Lists

Since I am a data junkie and spreadsheet jockey I thought I would summarize some of the heart rate data I collected (my complete HRM database can be viewed here).  These rankings are based only on the first time that I did each routine, and not an average of all the times I did them.

[NOTE on Heart Rate:  One estimate for your theoretical maximum heart rate is to subtract your age in years from the number 220.  Since I am 51 years old, an estimate of my maximum HR is 220 – 51 = 169 BPM.  If my heart rate monitor reads 140 that means I am exercising at 83% of my maximum heart rate.  This is useful if you want to compare your own heart rate data to mine–normalize yours to percent of maximum.]

Top 10 by Average Heart Rate

No surprise this list is all Shaun T, the master of cardio.  To get the most out of T25 and Insanity workouts and burn the most fat I expect my average heart rate to exceed 80% of my theoretical maximum heart rate.  Your level may differ depending on the condition of your heart but this is where you will burn the most fat calories.

Top 10 by Peak Heart Rate

I routinely see a Peak Heart Rate in the high 160’s.

Top 10 by Total Calorie Burn

An hour of Insanity allows me to burn a whopping 800 calories!  Note you don’t see any T25 or P90X3 workouts on this list because they are just too short to burn as many calories as you would in a longer workout (that doesn’t mean they are not effective, they just don’t burn as many calories).   Don’t be surprised to see P90X Chest & Back as well as Legs & Back on this list–by working the large muscles of your body back to back these two workouts can almost be labeled “cardio” workouts.

Final Words

After a few starts and stops along the way and 6 months of head to head matchups I am ready to move on to my next program which will be Body Beast.  I’m glad I did the bracket because it allowed me to go back and dust off some workouts that I otherwise might have never seen again.  For example Rev Abs actually has a few great routines that I had forgotten about, and it beat both X3 Agility and X3 Total Synergistics in their matchups.  Who knows, maybe down the road I’ll take the results here and create a multi-program hybrid.

If you agree or disagree on any of my results or want to hear more about any one matchup, let me know in the comments section below.