I am trying this program with huge amounts of skepticism. This is my first week, yes I lost 5 lbs, but I found sculpt/cardio one and two to be just plain lame, so I went to 3/4. I was training for bodybuilding a while back just as a trainer's test case (hell it was free and I had the time). I was getting outstanding results, however, I was in the gym for hours on a given day. I find it hard to believe (although I am committed to the program) that this little <45 min workout 6 days a week will produce the results that you say it will. Now, that I haven't worked out for a while and let myself go to hell, I have plenty of fat surrounding my squishy muscles to lose. I will follow your program to the tee (1300 cal/day, 6 workouts a week), but I just cannot fathom that this will give better results than I had before when I spent many more hours in the gym. My expectations of the program was that it would be a lot more difficult, but for whatever reason, following the diet plan, calculating what I need for calories, I have not been hungry or had any cravings this week (which, quite frankly, is amazing in of itself).

My take on P90 is that it can be as difficult as you make it. You can go faster than Tony in the Sweat workouts and really keep your heart rate up. You can also increase your weights. I know when I used to go to a gym it took me a lot longer to lift weights, because I took longer breaks between sets, etc. With the P90, if you follow the tape, you get no break between exercises, therefore lessening the time it takes.

Yeah, true...I forgot about all the breaks I would take between sets. It does seem to be able to be adjusted to be as hard as you want it to be. I also am favoring the dumbells in the workout as opposed to all the free weights that had to be taken on and off. That alone seems to be a big time saver.

Your mindset for perceived need for a workout is definitely different than most people's. I'm like you in that I'm used to working out for hours on end. But I do sports that take hours on end to complete, so there is a reason for what I do (though I still tend to WANT to overtrain all the time). But weight training knowledge has probably changed a bit since you were lifting heavy and it's now fairly common practice for even the most dedicated bodybuilders to try and fit the bulk of their workout within a one-hour period. This is because your body only can store so much glycogen and once exhausted you need to replenish it. At a high enough level, you will extinguish your stores within an hour where further exercise will just cause excessive breakdown and hamper your body's ability to recover (there is a bit more to it than this but this is enough for this discussion). Further more, the more intensely you exercise the longer you need to recover and most skeletal muslces need 48 hours to recover from a hypertrohy-based session (moderate intensity) and much longer when high-intensity movements are used (like plyometrics). So an intense one hour session can do about as much damage as your body can recover from. Beyond this you are overtraining. (There are exceptions, of course, especially when you consider endurance training but we are not in this instance, and certain power training sessions where rest between sets is exceedingly long which is, again, out of our realm here). We are talking only about maximum efficiency for muscle growth (hypertrohy) to occur.

P90 is still an entry-level program and it's possible you'll do better with 90X, which has one-hour workouts. But since you say that you're out of shape than P90 is the place to start. Look at guys like Jon Congdon and Carl Daikeler (our founders). They are probably a lot like you, ex-athletes that were out of shape. They did pretty darn well in 40 minutes a day for 12 weeks. They also did very well in 90X but they needed to start somewhere, which is P90's position. I don't think you should expect to be in your best shape ever after P90, but you should be in good shape and have a great foundation to move on from there.