Why Doesn’t INSANITY Target the Muscle Group I Want to Target?

A: INSANITY uses floor movements in a way where all of the upper body muscles are stressed–but it’s not a muscle building program per se. It’s a muscle strengthening program, especially static strength that comes from floor work, but there is no targeted hypertrophy like you get in Tony Horton’s programs. It’s cardio based, meaning that it targets various energy systems (VO2/mas, lactate threshold, anaerobic and aerobic efficiency). It never targets muscle hypertrophy over the eight weeks, though there is an “extra” weight training workout that you can use as an option. But the test group did not do this, so it’s not part of the Insanity schedule. Depending on your goals, you may want to keep doing some P90X upper body work. For most of us, and eight week cycle that leaves hypertrophy out of the equation will be fine as we’ll improve our base fitness, increase our workload capacity for further rounds of hypertrophy.