P90X Day 5/90: Legs and Back; diet: Y

**Just a quick diet update: Following the portion approach nutrition plan for P90X has been so much easier than I thought! When I first bought P90X back in December and looked it over, I thought it was crazy... but after doing it for 5 days now, it's so simple. Granted I can't make a complete meal because I wouldn't know what to count all the ingredients as, but this portion approach is really easy. If it says I can have one cup of brown rice, I just split that up for lunch and dinner. 2 cups of dairy, split that up as 1/2 a cup soy milk in the morning and evening and 1/2 a cup with my twice daily protein shakes, etc. etc. I love it!**

On to today's exercise: Legs and Back. I'm not sure how I like this workout yet. My legs are pretty defined for a "fat" person and they have always been my strongest/most defined muscle group in my body so I didn't know what to expect. I was able to keep up Tony and the group on EVERY SINGLE exercise so that shocked me! This being my first time doing this exercise, I was so surprised that I could hang with the wall-squat (yea me!) I used to do a ton of these when I played basketball and the way we had to make sure our quads were parallel to the floor was keep a basketball in our laps while we did the wall squat so that's what I did this time too... just so I know I was doing it correct. Another reason why I'm not too sure about the leg exercises is because after I worked out my knees were sore. Now I'm a stickler when it comes to form especially on leg exercises, but I noticed you were almost forced out of proper formation on some of the moves. For example, the deadlift squats. For me personally, it's near impossible to keep my knees over my ankles when I'm trying to squat low enough to touch the ground so I had to modify and not touch the ground. And any jump move from a squat position was pretty hard on my knees. From my understanding, a proper squat shifts your weight to your heels and takes almost all the weight off of your toes, but in order to go from a squat to a jump movement, your weight has to quickly shift from your heels to your toes and it cramped up my feet. This is just me and I think it has a lot to do with my muscles/joints not being used to moving that quickly or in that direction so I'm hoping with time and more P90X, I'll get it down pain-free.

As far as the back exercises, still don't have my pull-up bar yet so still using the resistance bands. The 50# band works great and I can totally feel it everywhere, but it's most sore in my shoulders. Because it seems to be working the wrong muscles, I took it down to the 30# band and that made such a huge difference! With the 30# band, I still had awesome form and I could totally feel it in my back muscles. Gotta love that.

Tomorrow is my rest day and I am looking forward to it. Actually I have to do ARX since I missed it on Saturday and had to do it yesterday therefore I couldn't do it tonight. Anyway, totally looking forward to relaxing tomorrow and starting my second week of P90X later this week! :)