Don't Lose Out, Work Out!

by Rujuta Diwekar

Walking uphill can qualify as strength training too; so will learning to lift your thighs off the floor in urdhva mukha svanasana. Qualifying as strength training though is not enough, you must make it work for you, and it should meet your training goals (fat loss ... FAT loss — to be sung like the tune of Sachin ... SACHIN).

you can’t enter the gym and randomly declare, ‘Chal aaj chest marte hai’, or fool yourself into believing that twenty-five squats in the bathroom will give you a toned butt.

weight training is way more effective in controlling and getting rid of diabetes than hypoglycaemic drugs.

Training in the gym provides the body with a testosterone buzz: for men it means lower body fat, for women it means higher sex drive. Now

As for cholesterol, nothing like weight training and its added advantage of after-burn to bring that LDL, VLDL down and HDL up.

Cholesterol is a problem only when the LDL and VLDL along with triglycerides are not being utilized sensibly by the body. As a matter of training response or adaptation (expect this to set in about 12 weeks post consistent exercise), the body learns to preferentially use the triglycerides and cholesterol and to spare the muscle glycogen (muscle fuel stores) for its metabolic needs.

take a leaf out of the elite runners’ book — strength train 2 to 3 days a week in the off season, and once a week during season.

Runners are made in the gym and run on the road.

A common mistake in gyms is either a complete lack of warm-up or doing a completely non-specific warm-up.

The right warm-up allows the blood flow to move through the specific muscle groups and warms up the specific joints that will be trained that day. Other

So on a day when you squat, you should warm up using less than 50% of the weight you will squat with; same goes for back or chest.

Follow these instructions for a correct warm-up: i. Perform a warm-up set of 12 to 15 reps before starting your training ii. Use 50% of the main workout weight iii. Rest for 30 seconds to 3 minutes before starting the main workout set This leads to muscles and joints being warmed up with the exact mechanics that will be performed on the workout set.

This is the golden principle of weight training — the more muscle fibres you recruit, the more you can lift.

The more you lift, the more calories you burn both during exercise and as after-burn. To recruit maximum muscle fibres, the chosen exercise should: iv. Involve maximum number of joints, as moving through more joints means recruitment of more muscle fibres versus moving through a single joint. v. Train larger muscle groups before the smaller muscle groups as they have a higher ability to employ muscle fibres.

The muscles contract and therefore perform exercises using their stored glycogen stores. Muscle glycogen is not just short in supply but takes a long time to replenish once its stores are exhausted. With regular exercise our body adapts and responds by increasing its ability to store muscle glycogen. But for beginners or even trained athletes, the sequence of exercise is of paramount importance because you don’t want to run out of fuel before you reach the main task or perform the big calorie-burning exercises.

Perform higher intensity before lower intensity exercises.

apply these rules, then you would work out in the following order — legs, back, chest, shoulders, arms. And within legs you would prioritize multiple joints exercises like squats before leg extension. And with the chest you would chest press (higher intensity, more exhausting) before doing the flies. And with the back you would want to do a bent over row, which is done using ‘free weights’ like the barbell, and is of higher intensity, before doing a seated row.

Use of machines reduces the intensity (and so the exhaustion) even if the muscle group employed is the same as in the example of bent over row and seated row.

Essential to performing any weight training workout is the correct technique or the form. This means: • Allowing joints to move through their full range of motion (ROM) • Not using momentum to create movement

A muscle, which is fatigued by the use of single-joint exercises, will not be able to allow the joints to move through the full range of motion in a multi-joint exercise.

For example, after contracting and fatiguing the quads through leg extensions, the legs will not be able to contract the quads through the full range of motion in a squat or lunge or even step

When larger muscles are employed using multiple joints and the intensity is kept challenging or high, then it not just results in maximum calories burnt in that one hour of exercise but it also gives you more after-burn.

. A very important consequence of after-burn or EPOC is that the anaerobic pathways can take up to 48 hours to recover, so never plan weight training or sprinting sessions on consecutive days.

Without adequate recovery, no anabolism and therefore no fat loss can take place.

Also, what you should keep in mind is that lactic acid, which is a by-product of anaerobic metabolism, can be used as a fuel by the aerobic pathway. It makes sense then to plan a...

Allow for adequate recuperation (two days at least) between two weight training sessions (to allow the body to repay oxygen debt, re-synthesize glycogen and repair wear and tear to the muscle tissue). This rule is applicable even if you are training two different body parts in consecutive sessions.

is exactly this lactic acid concentration in the blood that leads to what is called as ‘soreness’ in the muscles, the meetha meetha dard that you feel the next day after exercise.

So let’s say you trained your legs on Monday, on Tuesday your legs revolt even when you want to get off the chair or sit on one. It’s not that your quads don’t have the required strength to get off the chair or your hamstrings have lost the ability to lower you onto the chair, but they hurt and show unwillingness to perform these activities. What should you do then? Rest? No, that would make it worse. The thing to do then, is more activity, more specifically an aerobic workout, a light jog, walk or cycling for half an hour. This is because the muscles, liver, heart and even kidney tissue in the presence of oxygen can use up the lactic acid.

we must remember that once the glycogen stores are over, then the body will burn its proteins to keep up with the exercise. This will lead to both a drop in exercise intensity and a higher risk of injury.

Wasting protein or burning it for metabolic processes like producing energy for muscle fibre contraction is the exact opposite of the goal of weight training.

In one gym session perform about 8 to 10 sets (excluding warm-up) that train major muscle groups.

Perform 8 to 15 reps per set, with good form and to a point of fatigue (fatigue is reached when you know you can’t do another repetition with the same weight without compromising on form). x. Use both multi- and single-joint exercises.

The ‘concentration’ curl, where the guy sits on the bench smiling at the camera, his elbow flexed, a dumbbell in his hand moving towards the shoulder, is one of the most commonly seen photographs of ‘weight training’. The truth is this ‘popular’ exercise is missing from the routine of most serious weight trainers! The reason is that it’s amongst the smallest muscles, so it’s performed fewer times a month as compared to the big muscle exercises like squats, dead lifts and chest press.

Mindless training beyond an hour and improper meal planning post exercise are the two main reasons that people ‘stagnate’ or ‘plateau’ in their workout routines. An elevated level of cortisol — which prevents the re-synthesis of glycogen and breaks down more protein than the body can repair — brings about this plateau phenomenon and negates any benefit that an exercise program can

Immediately post exercise, our muscle cells have heightened insulin sensitivity. Which means that we have a brilliant window of opportunity for 45 minutes post exercise, where we can push maximum nutrients into our muscle cells.

A meal which comprises water, carbs, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals that leads to a surge in insulin levels can a) arrest muscle breakdown, b) increase the speed of glycogen re-synthesis, c) increase glucose uptake by the muscles, d) increase the muscle contractile protein which increases both size and strength of the muscle tissue, e) increase the blood flow to the muscles which improves both nutrient delivery as well as removal of waste like CO2 and lac...

First things first, a supplement means that it will only aid nutrient delivery if diet, exercise and lifestyle are already in place.

The ‘natural’ chana, sprouts, eggs, chicken, etc. as ‘repair’ protein in the 4 R’s will disturb the blood flow to the working muscle group. And also disturb both the nutrient delivery and waste removal from the damaged muscle tissue.

compound exercises that employ large muscle groups more than adequately raise your heart rate; you don’t have to jump, skip, run in between sets to do that.

The ‘effects’, as in the positive effects of cardio, have been exaggerated. 2. Cardio is not the ‘go-to’ option for fat loss or even weight loss. 3. Nor is it the ‘go-to’ option for heart health. 4. If you have only 2 days a week to exercise, don’t even bother with cardio!

Our heart rate is an indicator of how efficiently we are pumping out this 5L of blood per minute. So if you need 72 contractions (beats per minute) to pump out this 5L, of course your heart is ... ah ... well, average. Now to really have a big heart (not just technically, but really) you must have a much more efficient pumping system. Which means that you should be able to pump those 5L in much fewer contractions.

Medical science says that each one of us is born with a certain number of total heartbeats and when we reach that number the heart stops beating. On an average, the human heart has the ability to beat 2.5 billion times. If the average resting heart rate is 72 beats per minute, then we would all die when we’re about 66. So if you accept the premise that the heart is born with a certain number of beats, post which is death, but you want to live longer, you must work to lower the resting heart rate to below 72.

decreases.As we also learnt, it’s the anaerobic activity that brings about the increase in the capillary network, basically the strength of the heart.

And that is one reason cardio for heart health is a misunderstood concept.

It is important, but if you really want improvements in heart health, you will need to complement it with ...

Yoga and all our classical dances inherently follow what is now called ‘periodization’, that’s exactly why it didn’t burn out or bore students in months / years.

So when you are ‘bored’ of the gym or aerobics or any other activity, know that it’s not lack of consistency from your end, it’s the lack of the periodization model in your activity.

Now if you must make progress with walking and progressively begin to run and run faster (or swim faster, cycle faster), the TBLJ will have to bear more forces than earlier.

Without the required strength in your TBLJ, all your cardio efforts land you you-know-where — on the bed, and no, not with a sexy guy / girl but with pain for company.

oxygen).VO2 max (maximal volume of oxygen consumed during exercise, measured in ml/kg-min) or maximal aerobic power is also a measure of your insulin sensitivity and therefore your ability to lose weight, control blood sugar, reduce BP, etc. — basically your entire metabolic health.