Diwekar - Dont Lose Out, Work Out!

D ONT L OSE O UT,
W ORK O UT!

D ONT L OSE O UT,
W ORK O UT!

Rujuta Diwekar

westland ltd

61 Silverline Building, 2nd floor, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095

No. 38/10 (New No.5), Raghava Nagar, New Timber Yard Layout, Bangalore 560 026

93, 1st Floor, Sham Lal Road, New Delhi 110002

First published in India by westland ltd 2014

First e-book edition: 2014

Copyright Rujuta Diwekar 2014

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-93-83260-95-9

Typeset by Ram Das Lal

Disclaimer

Contents

Metabolism = break down + build up

Exercise to the rescue

Physical activity and exercise

Dil ki baat

Energy systems the key to understanding exercise

Fuel and muscle type

The miracle of after-burn

Energy systems and exercise myths

Some important concepts of exercise science

Borg scale

Parameters of fitness

Muscles and TBLJ

An exercise we dont know much about

But do we need to strength train?

Strength training in practice

Common strength training terms

Rules to plan the sequence of strength training workout

Workouts for beginners, intermediate and advanced

Guidelines to make progress

Meal planning for strength training

Pre and post workout meals

The case of whey protein

Strength training summary Facts, Fads and FAQs

The heart muscle

Training the heart

Concepts of Cardio

VO max and Lactate threshold

Glycogen sparing

Cardio in practice-

The FITT formula

Training diary

Application to walking and swimming

Running and marathon training

Meal planning for Cardio

Cardio summary Facts, Fads and FAQs

A short history of yoga

Different schools of yoga

Choosing the right yoga school / teacher

Yoga and energy systems

Yoga in practice:

The sequence of asanas

A beginners sequence

12 basic postures of Sivananda style

Meal planning for yoga

Yoga summary Facts, Fads and FAQs

The 4 principles of exercising right

Real life workout recalls and analysis

The doctor-dietician-trainer lafda

Learn to unhear

DIY: Exercise tracker

Prologue

Dont Lose Out

Maut aur tatti kabhi bhi aa sakti hai, said Javed, my guide on the Kolahoi glacier trek in Kashmir, as he quickly ran behind a rock. The most astonishing fact about human beings is that we all live as if we are going to live forever, said dharmaraj Yudhishthir, and won the life of his 4 brothers in return, goes a story in the Mahabharat . Life is but a pause between the first breath and the last. The only thing you can guarantee at somebodys birth is his or her death, everything else is unpredictable.

I am sure that, like me, you have heard and read endless stories and theories and researches on death and life after death. However, all we have access to is our life in its current form and what we do with it. And every moment of our life we are subjected to catabolism, the technical term for breakdown or destruction of our cells. And though we remain fascinated with death and theories around it, we remain quite indifferent to the process of catabolism that is happening in the body even as you read this. Catabolism can even be called preparation for physical death, but lets make it more accessible to what we are ready to understand and call it the process of ageing. Now all those who wanna age quickly put your hands up, and all those who want to delay it go answer the doorbell. Whats this, no hands are going up and nobody is going to answer the door either? Listen, one of the things you can do to reduce catabolism is get more active in daily life. Small activities help in a large way to arrest ageing and the associated deterioration in our jnanedriyas and karmendriyas, but the lions share lies with regular physical exercise.

Metabolism = break down + build up

Let me explain life blesses us with anabolism, the ability to build our bodily cells (and also our habits, beliefs, character, destiny and our workout routine). According to exercise or sports science, anabolism and catabolism, the process of building up and breakdown, together make for metabolism, our bodys daily energy or calorie expenditure. The Greek root of the word metabolism is metabole, which means to change, and metabolism does keep changing during our lifetime; the longer time you spend on earth, the lower your metabolism gets. There are many reasons for this, the main one being that you get progressively fat, fatter, who knows currently you may even be at your fattest. Not just that, your fat free mass (bones, muscles, etc.), gets less and less. Why, you ask. Well dont ask me, evolution built in this process of loss of lean tissue and gain in fat mass to ensure that there is no overcrowding, matlab to ensure that you die and dont occupy space meant for your offspring. So grandfather marne ke baad bedroom becomes available for the grandchild, get it?

Some of the ways in which ageing occurs are:

1. Skeletomuscular changes

Ok, I said this before and I want to say this again, we get progressively fatter and start losing out on our muscle or body tone, i.e. lose out on our lean tissue. The size of our muscle cell, or what is technically called as the cross-section of our muscle fibre, reduces or goes through atrophy (shrinkage), while the size of the fat cell increases. This process leads to a change in not just our total body weight but also in factors that contribute to our body weight. Now, more than ever, our fat mass seems to contribute to this magical body weight number, and, largely, till you get to around 80 +, the number is likely to grow. Post that, there will be an even accelerated atrophy of the bone, muscle and the fat tissue and you are likely to get skinny and will start rapidly losing your strength. The changes dont occur at once, they happen phursat mein, in slow mo. They kind of start once we are in our 30s, accelerate towards our menopause or andropause and then its a slippery slope from there on. We seem to lose more strength and gain more fat on our lower body first, our legs lose out on strength faster than our hands and we collect more girth around our hips, stomach and thighs. According to me, this happens because, typically, as we get older and richer, the less we want to use our legs. We wont walk, take the bus or run for the train, or for that matter wont even open the door, draw our curtains or walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water. In India, the richer you get the less physical activity you are supposed to do to help yourself, its not passed by the Constitution but we live by this like a law.

Can you do something about it? Of course you can, but we will come to that later. For now lets look at whats happening to the bones. Our bone mineral density goes down and our bone matrix starts getting weaker. Our bones are made up of minerals, the most important of them being calcium. Up to 4% of our total body weight comes from mineral weight and this weight starts going down. So lets say you weighed 50 kg when you were 25 years old, then around 2 kg is the contribution from mineral weight. Now you are 50 years old and 75 kg, the contribution from mineral weight will not be 3 kg, in fact if you have gone through the regular sedentary lifestyle it may be much less than 2 kg.