Insanity & Running

I would say that the answer to your question largely depends on your goals.

I have done a routine where I do a P90X + Insanity + Running hybrid. It generally worked like this: Monday: Chest/Back (morning) + 4-5 miles (afternoon); Tuesday: Insanity Workout (take your pick); Wednesday: Shoulders, Biceps, Triceps (morning) + 4-5 miles (afternoon); Thursday: Rest day (stretching and a 2 mile jog or easy Yoga); Friday: Insanity Workout (again take your pick); Saturday: Long run 6-10 miles or alternate KenpoX + Insanity Core workout (I alternated week to week); Sunday: rest - warm up and stretch only.

From week to week I would alternate Chest/Back and Shoulders/Arms with Chest/Shoulders and Back/Biceps respectively. That routine was fairly intense and it worked to tone muscle - but I lost some muscle mass, probably because I didn't balance the nutrition properly. The trick to making it work is proper nutrition including a lot of protein, carbs, and fat (in a 40/40/20 balance). Making sure to get adequate food to fuel the workouts. I learned a good lesson from that experience and will definitely eat a lot more food (nutritious balanced foods) the next time I do it.

For a scaled back version of that workout - I would alternate Insanity with running days and just be sure to give yourself 2 days of rest during the week, especially if you do longer, faster runs (and depending on your running experience - if you are an intermediate or better runner, you can give yourself less rest days).

Returning back to goals: tailor your workout to what you want by changing the balance of aerobic and anaerobic exercises. Tailor your diet as well (e.g. for fat loss, consume less carbs and more proteins up front [40-30-30] and then get back to that 40-40-20 balance over time).

I did insanity as fasted cardio like 3 days a week when I did it and did my usual workout in the afternoons. It worked, but I just couldn't get into running in place and jumping on my carpet. plus putting my nose in my carpet was a real turn off. lol

I was already running constantly everyday but i needed to do something really extreme to push my body out of the plateau it had hit so i started doing insanity. Let me tell you, it was NOT easy! I would run 4 miles in the morning and then when i got off work at night i would do insanity. I managed to keep this up for 3 weeks and i was eating right. By the time i was done, my body had gone from 175 to 165 but i looked MUCH MUCH smaller than i actually was. My family kept insisting that i'd lose 20lbs when really i had only lost 10. My guess is that the majority of it was a massive amount of fat.

Good luck with that tho! Your making a great decision. It helped my endurance skyrocket!