Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

Choose Your Poison

Diets don’t work mostly because they are not sus­tain­able. You might be able to pull off a few weeks of eat­ing like a monk but will inevitably find your­self eat­ing a tub of mint choco­late chip at 3am in the morn­ing. Sounds famil­iar right? Hav­ing a 100% squeaky clean diet for just a month is […]

Adding in some conditioning

For the last few months, I’ve been mostly focus­ing on gain­ing strength. Now, am chang­ing my pro­gram­ming to a more bal­anced one — strength, endurance, speed, and mobility/flexibility. Hill sprints are my favourite work­out. And that’s pre­cisely the work­out that forms a core part of my con­di­tion­ing days. Pick a dis­tance you are con­fi­dent of […]

Pose Running Drills

Pose run­ning drills are here, finally! With­out fur­ther ado, the video’s below. Hop­ping in place: This is the first drill. Arms up, by your side, in run­ning pose. Start hop­ping in place. Land on forefoot/midfoot, and your heel lightly kisses the ground. Hop in place about 30 times, before mov­ing on to the next drill. Which […]

Fitness Articles in Indian News Media: A Rant

This is a rant. A rant about the dearth of good qual­ity writ­ing about health, fit­ness, and nutri­tion in India. I am yet to read an accu­rate, well researched and cited arti­cle in main­stream news media. I could pick on any one of the numer­ous arti­cles I’ve read before but the lucky win­ner is an […]

Patterns: Looking at Football Training

For those of you who do not know me very well, I love foot­ball. That’s an under­state­ment. Besides inter­ac­tion design and fit­ness, foot­ball is what occu­pies my life. So, it shouldn’t be a sur­prise to learn that I’ve spent quite some time research­ing train­ing meth­ods in this sport. Recently, I’ve started to work with a competitive […]

Interesting Articles

Lou Schuler talks about run­ning for weight loss, and if it works. Most peo­ple pick up run­ning after years of doing noth­ing. At first, you def­i­nitely will see results — coz you’ve been sit­ting on your ass for ever. But over the mid and long-term, you are going to eat away your mus­cles, not just […]

Redefining Fitness: Part 4 — Putting It All Together

We looked at the weights part of the work­out in part 1, the car­dio in part 2, and the nutri­tion in part 3. Let’s put it all together then. Work­out Hire a trainer, or fig­ure out your own work­out rou­tine. Stop with the iso­lated move­ments and machines and body-building crap. This means you need to […]

Redefining Fitness: Part 3 — The Nutrition

In the first two parts, we saw the poor trans­la­tion between goals (fat loss or strength gain, for exam­ple) and the work­outs pre­scribed — weights and car­dio. In this, I want to tackle nutri­tion. The issue with nutri­tion is not at the gym, but at a broader, sys­temic level. There are a lot of different […]

Redefining Fitness: Part 2 — Cardio

In the first part of this series, we looked at the inad­e­quacy of the work­out pro­gramme — the cookie-cutter one thrown at you as a one-size fits all. Let’s move on to car­dio, and aer­o­bics. I am refer­ring to steady-state car­dio for extended peri­ods of time — like run­ning on a tread­mill for 60 minutes […]

Redefining Fitness: Part 1 — Weights

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 […]