The X Factor
10 ways to think about "Ab Ripper X"
via imgflip.com
“Whoever succeeds at making the living room an effective place to get fit is going to be a billionaire” -Carl Daikeler
“Ab Ripper X, I hate it, but I love it.” -Tony Horton
I was 20 when I first tried “Ab Ripper X,” a brief but intense core workout video from P90X. It’s a sequence 12 different movements that takes just over 15 grueling minutes to complete. After finishing it for the first time, my abs didn’t look any more shredded, but felt like they’d recently met the business end of a cheese grater. This, I’d been told, was the point.
Ab Ripper X is about testing your mental toughness alongside your abdominals and obliques. Before we even started, host Tony Horton had sternly advised me that the movements are only as good as my intensity, encouraging me to “BRING IT.”
Perpetually extra Horton didn’t just teach during this class. He spent a surprising amount of time engaging with his fellow classmates. He demanded that Audra, the token woman on screen move her derrier towards the heavens while praising a male classmate for making contact between his elbows and his thighs, and encouraging shirtless Adam to stay strong, and presumably shirtless, forever.
I’d never seen a fitness personality like this. This was also 2010, long before peppy SoulCycle and Peleton coaches were ubiquitous. As an ominous coda during the sweaty cool down he’d said: “Tip of the day: Don’t do this everyday.” Noted.
But the people weren’t listening. By 2011 it felt like everyone I knew was doing “Ab Ripper X.” Friends from my college’s ultimate frisbee team were using it to stay in shape over the summer. My dad was doing it in the man cave at his architecture studio. After crushing a bunch of beers with a high school friend, I slept over at his dad’s house in Berkeley, and ended up doing Ab Ripper X hungover with him and his dad the next morning.
Over a decade later, Ab Ripper X seems like a fever dream in my fitness journey. So what exactly was this viral core workout and why did it briefly and painfully take over my life and the United States? The following 10 things are true:
Ab Ripper X is a perfect exercise video. It’s short, requires no equipment, and is easy to follow along. You can literally do it lying down but it still feels really hard. The moves leave you intensely sore, visceral proof that you exercised. They also target the area of the body that literally everyone wishes looked more muscular: the stomach. Implicit in its diabolical intensity is the promise that by carpet bombing your core with crunch variations you’ll surely end up with a six pack.
Spot reduction of belly fat is a myth. Whether or not you have abs defined enough to grate cheese on is largely a reflection of your genetics, diet, and metabolism. Even the most well-defined abs are simply not visible if you have over 10% body fat as a man or around 20% as a woman. Abdominal muscles are built in the gym but revealed in the kitchen, as they say. The curious paradox of Ab Ripper X’s popularity is that it’s an undeniably difficult workout whose implicit promise (do this short workout for ripped abs) is as compelling as it is unachievable, at least through this workout alone.
Ab Ripper X is just one one of many workouts that’s a part of P90x, a workout routine developed and sold by Beachbody in 2005. P90x is structured around the idea of muscle confusion. This is an ironically confusing and heavily disputed principle in the fitness community that constantly changing up the exercises you do will avoid the dreaded strength plateau and result in more gains. The scientific consensus is that while your body will indeed adapt to exercises if you merely repeat them every week, this doesn’t mean that the best routine is a constantly changing one. Calling this muscle confusion is unhelpful, misleading, and implies a level of chaos in your training that can actually be counterproductive. This didn’t stop Beachbody from structuring their masochistic P90 and Insanity routines around a dizzying array of exercises that the late night infomercials promise will confuse your muscles all the way to the promised land.
Tony Horton was born in Westerly, Rhode Island in 1958. After moving to Hollywood and trying to get into acting and comedy, he ended up working as a personal trainer out of his garage to support himself. He eventually started training famous musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Usher, Tom Petty, and Stevie Nicks. After appearing in a ThighMaster infomercial and serving as a spokesperson for NordicTrak, he caught the attention of the team at Beachbody. Founded by Carl Daikeler and Jon Congdon in Santa Monica, California in 1998, Beachbody had aspirations to conquer the United States, one living room and garage gym at a time. Daikeler was an ambitious entrepreneur who’d appeared in informercials for Ab Ripper X’s 90’s predecessor, “8 Minute Abs.” When he approached Horton about a comprehensive home fitness program, the match made a lot of sense. This would give Beachbody an energetic and results-oriented public face and would give Horton a bigger platform than he could have ever dreamed of.
P90X was a huge success for Beachbody. By the 2010s it made up half of their sales. Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and politicians like Paul Ryan were doing it. It was so culturally ubiquitous that even “The Lazy Song” by Bruno Mars, quite literally an anthem to inactivity, found a way to mention it: “Tomorrow, I'll wake up, do some P90X/ Meet a really nice girl, have some really nice sex.” Like most viral products of LA County, success meant sequels. To date, the entire P90X series has earned Beachbody over 700 million dollars.
In 2017, Tony Horton felt some pain the right side of his face and a tingling in his ear. He assumed it was a pinched nerve. Then, he ended up in the ER after he couldn’t drink water or close his right eye. His symptoms quickly spiraled into horrific pain, vertigo, and vomiting. He announced on social media that he’d been diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt Syndrome. This is a particularly nasty form of shingles affecting the facial nerves. Since shingles is often caused by poorly-managed stress, Horton shared that “Now it’s time for me to look at how I suppress my emotions and try to fight through everything with exercise alone.” The man who’d built his brand around pushing through pain finally met a foe he couldn’t defeat with a motivational catchphrase or a superset of crunches: his own body.
This health scare is in part why Horton left Beachbody in 2018. He then launched his own fitness empire: Tony Horton Life, which includes seminars, retreats, apparel, books, dietary supplements, and a moisturizing hair and body wash. Today, he lives in the hills above Los Angeles, in a house with a mind-bogglingly big home gym.
COVID-19 was the best thing to happen to Beachbody since Tony Horton. With gyms closed and people confined to their homes and apartments, the demand for at-home fitness skyrocketed. Beachbody’s subscribers grew by 300% during the coronavirus lockdowns. This growth meant a huge payday for Daikeler and Congdon. In 2021, Beachbody merged with Forest Road Acquisition Corp and Myx Fitness Holding, for a valuation of $2.9 billion. They became publicly traded under the name BODY.
In March 2023, Beachbody rebranded to BODi to be more inclusive. They explained the name change this way: “Our mission has always been to help people achieve healthy, fulfilling lives. But society now uses the term differently. Truth is, there’s no such thing as a “beachbody,” except that EVERYONE has a body, and everyone is welcome at the beach. So rather than fight to overcome the perception that Beachbody equates to an ideal, we need to start again.” To reflect their new identity, they changed one letter in their stock symbol to BODI. While this rebrand may have helped improve their image in the eyes of the body positivity movement, it hasn’t had the same affect on their stock price, which tumbled to below $1 per share in 2023. They also faced a class-action lawsuit over sketchy multilevel marketing tactics that financially exploited their coaches. To try and turn this around, they’ve since announced new leadership, stock splits, and a free subscription tier. The jury’s still out on if their profit and loss statement can get into as good of shape as Tony, Audra, Adam, and their legions of sweaty followers have.
Visible abs are a superficial indicator of health. Aesthetic goals like having a six pack appeal to our vanity but also allow the perceived perfection of others to become an infinitely receding horizon for us to chase in search of self esteem. Workouts like Ab Ripper X do challenge the rectus abdominis muscles, but these are just one of many muscle groups that make up the core, and core strength is just one component of physical fitness. At 20 I was significantly weaker than I am today, but assumed my nascent abdominal definition was a result of Ab Ripper X, rather than having the metabolism of a starving hummingbird. Some of the strongest people I know today do not have visible abs. Since I stopped doing Ab Ripper X I haven’t stopping “BRINGING IT” in the gym but have realized that, for me, sustainable fitness doesn’t look like suffering alone on my living room floor. It’s about community more than crunches, resilience more than appearances, and consistent growth above all else. Ultimately, the pain of chasing abs is as short-lived as the the abs themselves, but the strength and bonds formed training alongside friends last long after the workout is over.
Know someone that would enjoy my take on Ab Ripper X?
Have you done Ab Ripper X? P90X? Insanity? A gratuitous amount of crunches?
Want to support my writing and never miss a post?