Arvind Ashok

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In my last post, I spoke about ‘eat­ing paleo’ as part of my next steps. In this post, I want to give you a bit more details about what the paleo diet is. I will keep this sim­ple, as there are a lot of great resources out there that talk about paleo. If you are […]

It has been a while since I spoke about what I’ve been doing in my work­out rou­tine. About 6 months ago, I dropped Cross­Fit as my main work­out rou­tine. Met­cons are awe­some fun, but get­ting beat 5 times a week will even­tu­ally cause prob­lems. And while Cross­Fit tries to pro­vide a bal­anced work­out in components […]