DON’T LOSE OUT, WORK OUT by Rujuta Diwekar

you burn more calories for 2 days post a workout session (you will learn details later in the book). And to top it all, because your workout changes your body composition or ensures that you have more muscle as compared to fat, it accelerates your basal metabolism too. Without working out, a sedentary lifestyle will cause you to have more fat than muscle and will decrease your BMR. Because fat is an inert tissue, it doesn’t demand calories from your body to maintain itself, it is easier for your body to keep it vs. keeping muscle.

When you are on a low cal / low fat / low whatever diet, you breakdown much more in your body than your ability to build up, you feel so low on energy, you can’t even think of gymming or lifting your hand to straighten your hair, result — ageing and accelerated ageing because of fat deposition. A diet that is high on nutrients makes you feel in the zone to exercise. When you exercise you break down yes, but building up processes cost more than break down, result — fat loss + younger skin, hair, face and waist.

when you contract your muscle endlessly — the rectus abdominus in crunches or the abductor in the side kicks — they produce a by-product of muscular contraction called lactic acid. Now this lactic acid is what gives you the BURN, and really has nothing to do with the fat on top of the muscle. In fact, the main difference between muscle and fat tissue is that muscle has the property to contract and relax while fat has the property to sag, it can neither contract nor relax. Exercise physiologists call it the ‘non-working entity’ of the human body. So when you lift your legs up or chest and shoulders off the floor, the fat just sits there enjoying the joy ride, the muscle overworks and produces tons of lactic acid, begging your brain to stop this voluntary contraction / torture.

Only walk or run on the treadmill at a speed at which you can comfortably do so without having to hold the side bars or the front panel.

it comes to running on the treadmill, learn to hold your body weight first, and learn to run without load-shedding on the treadmill, and your back will be safe. Not just safe but even stronger. Remember, technique matters more than number of calories.

What you do for 23 hours of your day will always have a greater bearing than what you do for 1 hour in the day.

It takes as little as 150 minutes of exercise per week to improve blood glucose tolerance, reduce body fat and the risk to all possible lifestyle diseases that come with obesity.

Type 1 / Slow twitch / Red — Low intensity / Long duration aerobic — Carb / Fat / Protein as fuel

Type 2 / Fast twitch / White — High intensity / Short duration — Glycogen / ATP as fuel

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

Technical note — Soreness or DOMS Glycogen, the fuel that is used during exercise, provides the energy for muscle contraction by breaking itself down and creating a by-product called ‘lactic acid’. With accumulation of lactic acid in the muscle, the muscle experiences fatigue and beyond a certain concentration of lactic acid, the muscle will refuse to contract or take part in exercise. Which means that even if the muscle has the required strength, in the presence of a certain concentration of lactic acid, it will be unable to perform the task at hand. It 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. In weight training lingo, this is called ‘delayed onset of muscular soreness’ (DOMS). 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.

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 reference table for strength training

Mindless training beyond an hour and improper meal planning post exercise are the two main reasons that people ‘stagnate’ or ‘plateau’

(And single polished or hand pounded whitish rice is much better than brown rice, read my earlier books for details.)

don’t forget that 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.

it’s called the FITT formula — frequency, intensity, time and type of exercise. This formula has the principle of periodization built into it, it forces you to rotate the time, intensity and type of exercise and ensures that you don’t burn out or get exhausted because of exercise.