P90X2 Gets Risky in Abandoning the Winning P90X Approach

With about a six months of general release to go on, early returns from customers on P90X2 are decidedly mixed. What is most encouraging to the Beachbody company has to be the fact that many users are seeing results they are pleased with. 

In my rough research of the online reviews, I would conclude that P90X2 fulfills it’s promise to people to get them even fitter than they were with P90X.  What made P90X so difficult to create a suitable sequel from, was it was so widely popular. The program was popular on basically every level that matters when a producer sets out to put together a winning home fitness program. That’s rare to come up with something that versatile and that widely approved.

So if P90X2 is achieving great results for a lot of people why do the reviews seem so lukewarm?  I think you have to get deeper into the reviews themselves and study the words used to describe the dissatisfaction. My overall impression was that users believe that P90X2 too radically abandons the formula for getting great results that drove P90X.

By taking the approach that they did, Beachbody and Tony Horton may have overplayed the winning hand it had in the trust game. That is not to say that 90X2 reflects a violation of the trust relationship established with the user with P90X.  Rather, the users who have commented negatively about P90X2 on review sites, feel as though the program isn’t giving them a linear path to results.  Much of this has to do with P90X being so strong in the simplicity which it used to lead people through the growth process

Look closer at P90X.  Each workout was focused on a specific area of the body. During the course of each workout, you would work those areas to a level you likely hadn’t before using old fashioned moves like push-ups, pull-ups and basic dumb-bell moves. You would write down your repetition numbers and amount of weight. Then the next week you would likely notice improvements with those body parts in numbers and also in appearance.

P90X2takes a different path in that the workouts are geared towards more unconventional movements. These movements are lauded in the marketing materials as being based on cutting-edge science designed to achieve better improvements more rapidly.  The thing to recognize is that for the users who have seen the program to conclusion, P90X2 is mostly delivering. 

The problem is that the users who are critical of P90X2 don’t care about the science because they don’t seem to have confidence that the exercises are working.  They aren’t connecting with the process and this is so different from their experience with P90X, that many are gravitating back to the original workout and the comfort of that approach. 

The interesting thing to watch is how Beachbody goes about rectifying the message.  We may see a general acceptance that P90X2 will be a niche workout for the more open-minded and fittest of the P90X graduates. At this point, the future of the program has a general release commercial hit is very much undecided.