Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

After grad­u­at­ing from col­lege, I found myself pudgy and not the thin guy I remem­bered from before col­lege. So, I did what most peo­ple do — I signed up at a flashy new gym. Here’s my story. I tend to ram­ble a bit — so if you are in the mood for a badly writ­ten short story, this is your lucky day!

I went and inspected the facil­i­ties, along with my poten­tial work­out buddy. His goal was to put on some bulk on his very thin frame. Mine was, obvi­ously, to lose weight and be lean and thin, like I was, back in high school. The place looked great — spank­ing new machines — tread­mills, ellip­ti­cal thin­gies, row­ers, and a dif­fer­ent floor for the weights sec­tion, with the Nau­tilus machines — includ­ing an adduc­tor one! So, we went upstairs and signed up for a year coz we were here for the long-ish haul. We knew it would take a while but slow progress was good. We were being sen­si­ble about it. After part­ing with almost all of my first pay­check, I stepped out and felt good.

Fancy look­ing for sure. This is not the actual gym I went to.

First step — meet the train­ers and get our work­out pro­gramme. Both of us got iden­ti­cal programmes(this one-size fits all is another prob­lem), and we got our­selves weighed and mea­sured. This was new to me — until then the cheap-ass gyms I had been going to were the no-frills type. Then, we did our first day’s work­out, with the trainer walk­ing us through all of it — we did not sign up for a per­sonal trainer, they were really good about the ori­en­ta­tion and first few days. In fact, we made friends with a really fit-looking trainer over there, and he hung out with us a lot while we were work­ing out. They would spot us on most work­outs that required spot­ting, and would swing by at least once on all the other machines. Just want to point out that the atten­tion was pretty awe­some through­out. So, what did the pro­gramme look like? The cookie-cutter body build­ing pro­gramme done in every pos­si­ble gym with machines, as I now know.

3 days on the weights, 3 days of car­dio (about 20 mins on the tread­mill, 20 on the bike, 20 on the ellip­ti­cal or stair walk­ing thing or the rower)

Day 1: Chest and Back

Day 2: Cardio

Day 3: Arms and Shoulders

Day 4: Cardio

Day 5: Legs and Abs

Day 6: Cardio

Day 7: Rest

But hey, some­thing is bet­ter than noth­ing. After 4 years of sit­ting on my ass, using my mus­cles would do me a world of good, for­get effi­ciency (again, some­thing I now know. Back then, I thought that pro­gramme was pure genius. It even is, in rel­e­vant cases). I went at it at full swing. My buddy joined me on the weight train­ing days but on car­dio days, I was alone — no one to keep me account­able, let alone show up. But I went — 6 days a week for almost the entire year, I might’ve missed less than 20 ses­sions that entire year.

After a few days, we had an appoint­ment with the nutri­tion­ist. I was pretty igno­rant about nutri­tion back then, and thought nutri­tion was just the icing on the cake — the real stuff was in work­ing out. Our nutri­tion­ist lis­tened to our goals, and started dis­cussing what she wanted me to do. A sam­ple day looked some­thing like this -

Break­fast: Oats

Lunch: 4–5 chap­pathis, some dal, and but­ter milk.

Din­ner: Rice and vegetables

Then, she got to my friend. She men­tioned a list of foods — banana smoothie, 5 idlis, and eggs — and he was writ­ing this down furi­ously. Then, she said “For lunch, you should…” at which point I looked over and saw my friend with his mouth open. I knew what he was think­ing — “Does she expect me to eat that much for break­fast? But that’s what I eat in a day?”. He was pretty reg­u­lar for 2–3 months, but not after that. But this was the moment where I lost him.

The rest of the year

Like I said, I was real reg­u­lar. I did every pos­si­ble thing with dumb­bells, and worked out on every damn machine they had. I did bench presses on the Smith machine, leg presses and blah blah blah. I always had the trainer with me, like I men­tioned ear­lier. He would sug­gest one or two slight mod­i­fi­ca­tions, new exer­cises — to keep me inter­ested. But it wasn’t very inter­est­ing. After a cou­ple of months, the nov­elty wore off. It got very bor­ing. I saw some weight loss the first 2 months (about a kilo each month) but noth­ing much after. Maybe my strength increased a bit but def­i­nitely was not impres­sive, else I would’ve remembered.

A small note about the train­ers. These guys (at least back then) come from mod­est back­grounds. They are mostly body­builders with no rel­e­vant edu­ca­tion in the field. They are self-taught for the most part. And almost all of them were pretty well-built. And they stuck to what worked for them — and pre­scribed the same stuff to every­one else. But if that doesn’t work, well, too bad. Train­ers with some cer­ti­fi­ca­tion — not much bet­ter off because of lim­i­ta­tions of the gym and their peer groups. Train­ers should be able to do a lot for you — check out this really awe­some post by Raj on this. The lack of knowl­edge­able train­ers is one of the biggest prob­lems in the fit­ness land­scape in India. The other, IMHO, is the basic gym land­scape — buy fancy machines, make the place look fancy, get a bunch of train­ers to stand around, rinse, repeat. Ridiculous!

Meet­ing my doctor

I was get­ting ready to move to the US, to study. So, I went to my doc­tor for a final phys­i­cal. We get blood work etc., done and what is the first thing he says — “You are a young man. You should get some exer­cise”. Not kid­ding. Then he looks at my cho­les­terol and tells me I have pretty high cho­les­terol and that I should eat a bit more care­fully. So, the two things that the supposedly-trained pros at my gym told me to do, which I did — and I had noth­ing to show for it, and in fact, stuff was worse?! When I relayed this to my friends, I was roundly mocked by them (well, if roles were reversed, I would’ve done the same thing) — coz I had gone to a gym for a year, ate ‘healthy’ or tried to when we went out and here I was!

Well, that’s my story. Thank­fully, I didn’t give up per­ma­nently, even though it took me a cou­ple of years before I sorta stum­bled on to the right track. I won­der how many of you have a story sim­i­lar to mine. Maybe you didn’t spin your wheels as much as I did, maybe you had even less results than me. But fact is, for the amount of time and money you spend, you could be doing a whole lot bet­ter. And that is just sad! Hope­fully, some­one will try and do some­thing about it soon ;)

I will fol­low up on this story with the rea­son­ing behind this — why it is inef­fi­cient, what is flawed about this sort of pro­gramme — the one-size fits all cookie-cutter crap, why the nutri­tion is *exple­tive deleted*. It is not just a case of ‘poor old me’ but a fun­da­men­tal flaw in think­ing, and lack of new ideas. More on this soon.