Five Golden Rules of Workout

1. Don’t overdo it

If you have been working hard at the gym with little success, yet you persist in pushing your body week after week, an injury is just waiting to happen. If you have learned how to put in maximum effort, then you should also learn the art of “backing off”. According to the iron guru Vince Gironda, “Over enthusiasm is the most dangerous virtue of an athlete.” Avoid overtraining, you should listen to your body and give it the time it needs for optimum rest.

2. Consistency is the key

I have met parents who tell me that they are sending their children to the gym because it’s summer holiday time and they need to be kept busy. But for the rest of the year, these kids are inactive as they just study, eat and sleep. Now will you expect your kid to do well in their exams if they study for just one month in a year? Same is the case with physical training. Just like other fields, physical training requires consistency. Likewise, all those would-be brides and grooms who think a 30 day package at a slimming centre is all they need to lose weight permanently, are deluding themselves. You can’t have breaks throughout the year and see progress, you have to train consistently.

3. Progressive overload

The primary principle of exercise physiology is progressive overload. If you embark on a journey of strength training and fitness, you should be improving consistently both in terms of muscle strength and endurance, depending on your goals. This can be in various ways such as increasing the number of reps or the amount of weight lifted or cutting down on rest between sets.

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4. Form comes first

Lifting weights is important, but lifting heavy barbells with poor form is equally dangerous. You do lifting exercises to improve your strength, not to impress the girl on the treadmill. In a gym, you will find two types of people—those who give no attention to their form and those who pay too much attention to it. For example, their form in some movements such as the deadlift is so poor that an injury is just bound to happen. On the other extreme, isolation movements like barbell drag curls are done with such strict form that people are stuck lifting the same weight for months, as they aren’t ready to compromise on form. I am not telling you to let your form deteriorate, but just to loosen up a little in the event that you are not improving. Loosening up your technique doesn’t mean using excessive momentum though. What you could do is in every four sets of barbell curls, try one or two sets of cheat curls and see if that makes any difference to how much you can lift.

5. Focus on the basics

Today, the market is flooded with new techniques and products which claim to make you leaner, more muscular and more athletic. Most of these claims are not only false but may even affect your performance negatively. Combining exercises from different sports like Crossfit does nothing to improve your performance but only brings you a step closer to injury. A traditional Crossfit workout combines Olympic lifts with plyometrics in a single session, a recipe for disaster. Any exercise can improve your heart rate and burn calories, but they may do nothing to improve your performance and could, in fact, impede it. So focus on the basics. If you want to develop strength in legs, first learn to squat before doing anything else. If you want strength in the upper body, first learn how to do bench press, parallel bar dips, pull-ups and rows before moving on to the more fancy stuff.

So the next time you are working out, keep these five golden rules in mind to ensure optimum results.

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I was at lunch with a group of friends when Tanya said this to Priya.

Priya’s meal had just arrived and she had ordered a cheese pav bhaji. This was after she had wiped off a plate of French fries all by herself while the rest of us waited for our main courses to arrive.

Priya, who had made the apparently “unhealthy” meal choice flushed on hearing the remark. From the change in her expression, one could tell that she was wishing she could disappear into invisibility, just like the dollop of butter that was fast melting to become invisible in her food. Not knowing how else to respond, she looked down at her food and nibbled in silence till the end of our lunch.

Sadly, Tanya was oblivious of the damage she had done and went on to brag about her latest diet changes and why she had banished certain foods from her diet forever. So obsessed was she with driving home her point that our forlorn faces were lost on her. Possibly my other friends were now wondering how Miss ‘Health Freak’ would react when their orders were brought to the table and whether she would approve of their choices. Sigh! There went another potentially fun lunch meeting, thanks to one person’s unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

Wrong words at the wrong time

Even though Tanya only had Priya’s best interests in mind [like we all have for our loved ones], her timing and tone were both wrong. Very wrong. Her harsh words and insensitivity would have harmed her friend more than any of the ‘unhealthy’ food she thought she was eating.

Let’s first get this out of the way. Sharing our knowledge and experiences is not wrong. In fact, it must be done as that’s what empowers us to make better choices. But we should be conscious of doing it in a sensible and sensitive way.

But don’t we all have that one friend, colleague or relative who goes into nutritionist- or crusader-mode at every opportunity they find and mostly it is during meal times? When I see these people giving advice that is not asked for, I’m left wondering whether they’re still trying to convince their own selves about their choices.

Food does much more than providing us with calories and nutrition. Each of us has a unique relationship with food. For some this relationship is sorted, while for others it’s complicated or still evolving. Add to it the information overload from the field of nutrition and changing trends in the health industry and things can get pretty convoluted.

The least we can do to maintain some sanity in these times of information overload is to keep our meal-times sacred and devoid of nutrition gyaan.

Eat and let others eat

Food is big deal for most of us, yet meal times are the most ignored events, mostly done mindlessly. If you have to discuss the food, let it be about the taste, the flavour, the ingredients, the recipes… but keep all talk of nutrition, calories and food choices out! Once the food is on the table and you have decided you’re going to eat it, just shut up, enjoy your food and let others do the same. Resist the temptation of asking the vegan where he is getting his protein from or snidely reminding the non-vegetarian about the inhuman practices at factory farms. One of the most important thing food does is bringing people together. It gives us a chance to celebrate our similarities and differences. Let’s not use it as an opportunity to convert the other and bring them on “our side”.

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