I’ll admit it I fell into the trap of “I’ve been doing P90X for awhile and I know what I’m doing” so that I felt I could just do some workouts and not others.

It all started about four or five weeks ago when I started to travel again for work and I was having to work extra hard on my nutrition. When I am at home controlling my daily nutrition it has become fairly easy to make sure I am getting the right amounts of the right kind of foods as I have all the control of buying, cooking, and preparing from my own kitchen. However that amount of control is gone when you travel. Don’t get me wrong I still did very well as I have written about it in the past, but my overall daily calorie intake went up slightly so to deal with that I went on an Insanity kick and worked really hard at burning as many calories as I could in each workout.

What happened when I got back home as I had been doing so much cardio that all I wanted to do was lift weights, now that I was back in my home gym with my lovely Bowflex Select Techs and other gym gear. It never occurred to me that I was sacrificing something by just doing all this cardio and lifting.

Then my son had his elbow injury and we developed a hybrid workout that had a lot of core and cardio, but it also had a lot of stretching. I could not believe how stiff and inflexible I was when we did the first yoga workout.

Remember I have done multiple rounds of P90X and One on Ones and these of course have a regular schedule of stretching and working on balance and flexibility. I started out with the first “swan dive” and to my surprise I could not touch the floor. Now we all know what we can do in these workouts and for me to go from putting my hands on the floor when I bent over to not even being able to touch the floor shocked me.

This pattern continued as I when through the workout in almost every stretch and contorting body move. The level of flexibility and strength that I was use to was just no longer there. After the workout I started to think about whether I just had one of those “bad workouts” that we all have from time to time and decided that was not it.

What had happened is that I had been concentrating on just my cardio and strength workouts and had neglected to continue to work on my flexibility. It of course is not bad, but I have definitely lost the level of flexibility I had just a month and a half ago.

So what I am going to take away from this is that if you are going to neglect or skip out on one of the main areas of fitness be it flexibility, balance, cardio, or strength then you are going to lose out on the benefit of being truly fit. You can bet that I will be making sure that I add back in my yoga and stretching workouts because if I am losing my flexibility then I will not be able to make the gains and goals I have set for myself.