Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

6 days a week, at least an hour a day. If you add in the time you spend in the locker, the chit-chat before, dur­ing, and after, the total time is closer to 90 min­utes. I don’t pre­tend to be the busiest per­son in the world but do I have to spend 9 hours a week for bare min­i­mum results? I’d rather be play­ing Ulti­mate, or just hang­ing with my friends. The sheer ridicu­lous­ness of this sit­u­a­tion gets to me — toil­ing away at the gym while you are not get­ting much fit­ter, except in a very nar­row modal­ity. Nor are you get­ting much health­ier, maybe a few notches above your present level but nowhere close to where you can go (“Keep it together, Arv”). The work­out pro­gramme is usu­ally com­posed of two basic parts — 3 days of machines and weights and 3 days of cardio.

Pre­scrib­ing a body­build­ing rou­tine as a one-size fits all recipe, that too for fit­ness goals — I am at a loss for words on this! Get­ting fit, get­ting strong, get­ting it to trans­late to a prac­ti­cal, func­tional, and use­ful improve­ment to your qual­ity of life — doesn’t hap­pen at most gyms. That’s why a rede­f­i­n­i­tion is nec­es­sary. Let’s under­stand the prob­lem first. In this series of posts, I want to make the case for why the fit­ness land­scape is, well, lame. This post is about weights, the sec­ond post about car­dio, the third about nutri­tion, and finally wrap it up with where we can go from here.

On to it then — three days of work­ing with free weights and machines. On Mon­day, you work on your Chest and Biceps. A dumb­bell bench press — flat, inclined, declined — coz hey, you want every mus­cle in every pos­si­ble angle pop­ping. Then hit that pec dec machine. On to some bar­bell curls, fol­lowed by some preacher curls. Then do some light tri­cep work by pulling that v-shaped rope — ooh, a rope — how quaint! And then some lying tri­cep exten­sion. Maybe even give that forearm-thing-machine a go. About 3 sets of 10 reps, try to squeeze a few more here and there. On Wednes­day, we work the Shoul­der and Back. The Legs on Fri­day. Me per­son­ally — I’ve touched every machine there was in my gym. And on my first day, I over­did it to say the very least, that I had trou­ble get­ting out of bed the next day. I was told that was not unex­pected, and I loved it.

Is this the most opti­mal way to improve your fit­ness lev­els? Or hey, maybe you dont care as much about fit­ness lev­els, and more about just your appear­ance — even then, this is very sub-optimal. It doesn’t give you much. But this is the recipe used all over the place.

• Single-joint, iso­lated move­ments leads to non-functional gains
• Does not trans­late into func­tional, usable move­ments in daily life
• Bench press­ing under a Smith machine, for exam­ple, means you do not have to worry about keep­ing the bar bal­anced in one plane (as the machine does that for you). This causes you to lose form, not work your core mus­cles and sta­bi­liz­ers effec­tively. Multi-joint and multi-planar exer­cises are effi­cient — they use a lot of mus­cle groups!
  
• Causes mus­cle imbal­ance (more on this right below)

A prone leg curl + leg press, for exam­ple. Sure, you might be able to push 500+lbs on the leg press machine (strong quads), and your ham­strings are curl­ing 120lbs.  You are going to be dom­i­nant in one mus­cle (most prob­a­bly quad-dominant).

Let’s com­pare that with a func­tional move­ment — like squat­ting. Check out this lady — doing some­thing very nat­ural and com­mon. A lot of us are famil­iar with this but dont really squat much, espe­cially with west­ern toi­lets and well, chairs. But how many of you can do this today — with no sense of pain or strug­gle? I know quite a few of my friends who are quite active, who play sport mul­ti­ple times a week — but can­not do this. The squat is a func­tional, multi-joint, multi-planar move­ment. The front squat, while focus­ing on your quads, will work your entire pos­te­rior chain of mus­cles, and also bring in to play your core (as you need to sta­bi­lize the body). The quads are assisted by the glutes and one of the calf mus­cles, while the ham­strings and the other calf mus­cles assist in joint sta­bi­liza­tion. And about 14 other mus­cle groups help is main­tain­ing bal­ance, core integrity, and stability.

Talk about effi­ciency, talk about your entire body work­ing in the way it is sup­posed to work — to per­form a func­tional move­ment. That’s just freakin’ awe­some! Does a leg press or ham­string curl have any func­tional rel­e­vance? Absolutely not! For­get hav­ing fun, for­get hor­mone secre­tion, for­get neuro-muscular adap­ta­tion — the exer­cises have no prac­ti­cal rel­e­vance. Hav­ing a work­out pro­gramme designed solely with single-joint move­ments (the bench press is an excep­tion) is point­less and your trainer is just clueless.

Per­son­ally, I like hav­ing fun at the gym, and look­ing badass. To me, that’s stuff like Oly lift­ing, box jumps, ket­tle­bell swings, sled drags, sprints — not body­build­ing, not a chore you have to do!