Health and Fitness

In this article, I'll talk about weight/muscle gain. People usually think that losing weight is very difficult. I would argue that while it isn't easy, it isn't as difficult as putting on muscle. By following a proper diet and workout routine, shedding fat will occur. Building muscle or gaining weight isn't so straightforward. Progressive overload, sleep, volume, eating enough calories, stress and genetics affect the ability to put on muscle. Some people see faster progress as compared to others. This could be due to a better hormone profile, better eating habits, sleep and could just be plain old effort put in. The best person to compare yourself to is you. As long as you are progressing over time, you don't need to compare yourself to other people. Skinny people or ectomorphs or "hard-gainers" are usually so since they don't eat enough. They either think they eat a lot more than they do, or they just don't have the appetite to ...

We know that exercising leads to fat loss and muscle gain. But how exactly is the muscle built? What are the factors that influence the rate at which you can build muscle and how can you optimize it? How does our body increase muscle size seemingly out of nowhere by performing resistance exercises? What is the upper limit to muscle growth? The human body is extremely complex and intelligent. It readily adapts to the environment encompassing it. We can acclimatize to a wide range of temperature and humidity. We are constantly responding in physiological ways to changes in temperature, infections, pollution, mechanical stress etc. These changes usually occur over the span of a few days to several months. How exercise affects muscles During resistance training, our body is experiencing an external mechanical stress. When we do this often enough, the body realizes that to respond to this external stimuli more effectively, it must become more efficient at that partic...

If you've asked people around you what their top priorities were, eating healthy and fitness would be very low on their list. And it’s difficult to blame them. Indians generally tend to have lower quality of food readily available to them, have highly stressful jobs and long working hours. This, coupled with our extremely curbed knowledge on a balanced diet, culminates into the obesity epidemic India is advancing towards. Our food is very rich in carbohydrates. Grains (wheat, ragi, rice, millets etc.), lentils (commonly known as dal), sweets, vegetables and fruits, legumes (such as green gram, beans) and dairy have a lot of carbohydrates. Dal which supposedly has a “lot” of protein, in fact has double the amount of carbohydrates as compared to protein. An average adult should be getting at least 60 g of protein a day. However, most of us wouldn’t cross 20-30g per day with our carb loaded diets. People who exercise regularly, especially those who perform resistance traini...

Remember your dad telling you about the importance of setting goals? That if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail? Most of us want to look good. Six pack abs, broad shoulders and nice arms. Some of us want to be able to run a marathon or do 25 pullups in one go or lift heavy things. Some of us just want to remain healthy and be able to run when we're 70 years old.  Rich Froning Jr, CrossFit athlete My goal is to look like a Greek God, run like Usain Bolt and lift like Pyrros Dimas (widely considered as one of the greatest Olympic weightlifters of all time. Seriously, just google this guy). Something like Rich Froning Jr, winner of the 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 CrossFit games. I know I will never achieve any one of these. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t aspire to get there. Breaking the 10 second barrier in the 100m dash was considered impossible in the early parts of the 1900s. Yet, people believed. And finally at the 1968 Olympics at Mexico, Jim H...

Now that you know what to put into your mouth, let’s talk about exercise. Exercise plays a key role in maintaining good health and fitness. It boosts your energy, improves your mood, promotes better sleep and improves your overall quality of life. Being fit requires you to exercise. As long as your diet is good, weight loss will be the least of your concerns. You’ll be more focused on how you can improve at the sport/fitness activity you have taken up. Depending on what your goals are, you’ll have to tailor your workouts. Here, I’ll talk about the different types of exercise and their effects on the body. Physical exercise can be broadly classified into three types: 1.        Aerobic exercise 2.        Anaerobic exercise 3.        Flexibility Aerobic Aerobic exercises cause the body to use more oxygen and primarily make use of carbohydrates and a sm...

So, in my last article, I spoke about the science behind weight loss. Now I’ll tell you how to use this knowledge to achieve your goals. In this article, I'll be specifically talking about weight loss. Do you want to know the secret to losing weight? The one so called ‘tip’ that dieticians and personal trainers hate? Eat less and move more. That’s literally it. Did you expect something else? Sadly, like the answer to most things in life, there isn’t any shortcut. However, you can optimize your habits such that it becomes significantly easier to achieve your goals. So here are what you need to do to start shedding that fat. 1.        Eat at a caloric deficit. Calculate your TDEE and subtract 500 from it. This is how many calories you must be eating every day. Irrespective of what diet you follow, a caloric deficit is required to lose weight. The body is a very complex machine. So just eating fewer calories isn’t necessarily the health...

Losing weight is often considered a daunting task. When you think of losing weight, all you can imagine are strict diets, cravings, low fat/low carb diets, “health foods”, starvation and inevitably, failure.    There is a science behind weight loss. And by following what I’m going to tell you, losing weight will become a breeze. Remember reading about the laws of thermodynamics in high school? The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another. This applies to us too. We get energy from the food we eat. This energy is usually measured in terms of kilojoules or kilocalories or Cal. 1 Cal (or 1 kilocalorie) =4.184 kilojoules. Whenever you see calorie labels on food items, they are almost always in terms of Cal or the kilocalorie. BMR and TDEE Depending on a person’s height, weight age and gender, their daily caloric expenditure varies. If you think about it, it makes sense. A 5’ ...