Before You Buy P90X2, You Need to Understand the Common Thread of the Negative Reviews

There is no denying that P90X took the home fitness world by storm in the mid-2000s.  Not unlike any blockbuster movie, the sequel program was always been  as inevitable.

Like we unfortunately see many times with the movie sequel, there are so many factors both in substance and perception that effect critical and commercial success. 

P90X2 was rumored/confirmed to be in research and development for basically two years prior to the  late-2011 product launch. The anticipation grew to an excitement torrent, especially among P90X graduates. The reason was simple: P90X was popular and many graduates had done it multiple times. The early teasers for P90X2 promised an evolution and a vehicle for increasing your overall fitness.

The online forum chatter was pretty uniform. What the P90X veterans wanted was new and fresh to liven up their home workout, hard work, and even better results.

What has happened since the release is case-study in how rare it is to achieve awesome P90X-level success in the fickle home workout market place. After using the product and looking closer at nearly 100 online reviews, I believe P90X2 represents a lively change, demands hard work, and gets results.  These are the very things the audience said they wanted during the years and months spent awaiting their P90X2.

Instead the overall reviews have been decent to good with great peppered in to the mix. P90X, by contrast, achieved a good to great rating on nearly every reputable review site I could find.  

Even in the good ratings, there have been many complaints about P90X2 not working people hard enough but at the same time requiring the user to engage in moves (mostly poses) that would be considered a radical departure from what people were accustomed to in P90X. Basically, P90X2 attempts to be a total body workout and sticks to that that credo in basically every workout. 

The science behind P90X2 is still based predominantly in the idea of creating muscle confusion, but the approach is radically different than P90X. In my judgment, this is really undercutting customer support.  I have seen it written that P90X was popular not only because it brought great results, but because it met the user’s expectation on a workout to workout basis. 

This appears to be a hole in P90X2. The people who  are buying it don’t rightly know what to expect due to a marketing message that is definitely unfocused. Sure people are getting results, but if it doesn’t feel right each time, you create a situation where the user feels divorced from the community that is happening on the tv screen.  Review after review reveals that many people aren’t believing in what they are doing. This is 180 degrees out from the general experience for P90X users.  

Does this mean P90X2 is doomed? No. For the person who may be thinking about buying the program, beware that this is a different approach with a whole lot of different exercises. You have to place your trust in the people behind the creation and really judge the workout free of expectations and memories of the prior program.