Unique Love Triangle

Lets look at this unique love triangle!

1.     Exercise - Activity to improve, challenge and build muscular and cardio-ventricular system. In simple words, it helps you build muscles, improve your heart and lung capacity.

2.     Diet - Food that we eat which provides us with energy to survive, thrive and build immunity.

3.     Sleep - Helps you recover from physical and mental fatigue. 

As I had mentioned earlier, these are the three factors that make-up for your good health. They are so well connected and dependent on one other that I call them a love triangle.   

Now, let's look at their relationship with each other.

Exercise - Diet

·       When you exercise, you use energy and the same energy is supplied by the food you eat.

·       Type of food you eat will decide the energy levels you have for exercise.

·       Regular exercise will regulate your digestive juices and hunger pangs. This will improve the energy utilisation and choice of food that you make.

·       Choice of healthier, un/semi processed or whole food items will increase your performance and energy levels for exercise.

This cycle can work in reverse way as well.

When you don't exercise you don't use the energy produced by food. When you don't use this energy it will be stored as fat which will induce lethargy. This will make you reach out for easy\packed or fast food which in turn would spike your hunger pangs. You will eventually feel tired and not have the energy to exercise.

Diet - Sleep

·       When you eat un/semi processed food, your digestive system is not overloaded and this helps your body to be relaxed and aids your sleep quality.

·       When your digestive and excretory systems are working well, it helps you have an uninterrupted sleep cycle. 

·       Quality sleep will help regulate body sugar levels and hunger pangs.

·       This will help improve efficiency of the digestive system.

When this cycle reverses, it looks like this.

When you eat too much of processed foods,  you feel sleepy and lethargic. (??However, this sleep will not be uninterrupted or quality sleep??). This will increase the risk of acidity and constipation which will in turn disturb your sleep patterns. And disturbed sleep will invite low energy levels and abnormal hunger pangs. And as soon as you eat highly processed food, this cycle continues.

Sleep - Exercise

·       Good night sleep increases your recovery from the physical wear and tear. By adding some exercises into your routine, you will wake up fresh, active and energetic.

·       This energy will spring you out of the bed and would want you to exercise more.

·       Exercising will release feel good hormones which will make you happy and less stressed and this will gradually aid your sleep. 

This cycle can also work in the reverse direction.

Poor sleep quality will make you feel lethargic and hungry which will leave you with no motivation to do any exercises. This would result in stress and fatigue and also intervene in your sleep quality.

In order to achieve a healthy lifestyle, you will have to make them all work together in great sync! 

How to make them work for you? I will cover that in my next blog. Till then keep it healthy and happy!

Cheers...

Hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to like, share, comment, share your feedback, ask questions. 

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

https://www.facebook.com/dhavalbhadeshiya

One hour of workout can change your life in 12 ways

Hi Guys this is about how just one hour of workout can change your life in 12 ways. And how it can impact on what you do throughout the day.

This is going to be a short one. Let’s look at how one hour of training\workout has helped me and can help you in many ways.

1) First things first, it helps you burn calories. One hour of workout can help you burn 300 to 900 calories based on the type of workout you chose.

2) It’s not only calories, your workout will help your heart and cardiovascular system to be healthy.

3) Your lung capacity will increase. Means your utilization of oxygen will improve.

4) Regular exercise will help your bones, strength training with good diet will help you retain and even increase your bone density.

5) Regular workout routine will help you bring discipline and schedule to your life. Either you will wake up early almost same time every day to hit the gym or you will finish off your work on-time every day to hit the gym in the evening.

6) This add one more advantage, working out regularly and being with fit people will help you increase your awareness towards your body and diet.

7) You will understand your body much better, you will be much more aware of muscular anatomy and skeletal structure.

8) Another advantage of working out regularly is eating smarter and cleaner. You will start eating on time and this will help you avoid reaching out to junk and unnecessary cravings. 

9) One more thing you will start doing is to look for Protein in everything you eat, and this will eventually help you choose the right food.

10) Soreness in your body will constantly help you to improve your posture, you will sit, stand, walk and bend in much better way than you would be doing earlier.

11) Fatigue from workout will help you sleep better, quality of sleep will improve drastically.

12) And last but not the least recovery from good night sleep will help you concentrate better on your work.

Hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to like, share, comment, share your feedback, ask questions. 

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

https://www.facebook.com/dhavalbhadeshiya 

How to measure your true fitness

Hi Guys, its been sometime since I posted. Of late I have been little busy and distracted from writing :D

This one was on horizon for a quite sometime now. In this post I will talk about how to measure your fitness.

Measure Your Fitness

Scenario: Is your workout really working?

If you are a beginner who started working out recently you may have feelings like,

• Its been few months but I don't seem to loose\gain weight!
• I don't see/feel any different in last couple of months.

Or if you are a regularly active person, have been working out for sometime now you would feel like,

• I have been working our for a long time, I don't see any changes to my body.
• I am not improving even thou I am working out consistently.

Here is where regularly tracking and measuring your fitness is important.
If you looking for some insight on how to measure your fitness, this post is for you.

Its important to know and understand the effect of exercise on your body for two reasons.

1. Improvement in your fitness will provide the right kind of motivation to continue to work harder and strive for better results.
2. If there is no improvement, you need to modify your fitness routine to help you achieve your goals. (Post on Goal Setting coming soon)

Now the question is how do I measure my fitness, lets look at different elements of fitness and their measurements. List of measurable fitness elements are as follows.

External
Internal
Pathological
Performance

External: These are tangible measurements that we can see\touch and we normally check. External elements of fitness are Weight and Size, lets look at the details below.

• Weight: 

• This is your overall body weight. First thing that most of us check in the gym or at the sight of the weighting scale is weight, its very important to keep track of your weight. You should keep track of your weight on monthly or fortnightly basis ideally.

There is a calculator which shows indicative ideal weight for your height and gender. click here

Note: As you keep track of your weight, please remember that weight is not the only indicator of your fitness. What is your body weight made of matters(muscle mass, fat mass, bone mass, water mass etc). So loosing weight may not be always good and gaining weight may not be always bad.

• Size: 

• This is another indicator of your fitness. You should check your size measurements monthly or fortnightly. This will help you keep track of the impact of the exercise on different body parts. There are chances that your weight is same but the size would have changed. You would have added few millimeters to some body parts and may have lost few millimeters from another. Is this good or bad, that will depend on your goals. Adding and loosing size should be inline with your goal and routine.
• These are the body parts you need to measure, all you need is a measure tape and help from a friend.

• Neck
• Chest
• Upper Arm
• Abdomen
• Waist
• Hip
• Thigh
• Calf

Internal: These are the elements of the fitness which cannot be necessarily seen. They are little difficult to measure and more complex.

Body Weight Composition:

• Now a days most of the popular gyms have these fancy weighing scales which helps to measure body weight composition. Most of these scales provides below details.

• Weight: Overall body weight
• Fat: Percentage/Amount of body fat 
• Muscle Mass: Amount of muscle mass
• Bone: Amount of bone mass
• Visceral Fat: Rating of fat on internal organs
• Water: Amount of water content
• Base Metabolic Rate (kcal): Number of calories required for basic functions of your body
• Metabolic Age: This is calculated based on percentage of body fat.

You should check these details on monthly\fortnightly basis. Changes to these factors should be inline with your fitness goal and routine.

• Blood Pressure: 

• You should get your blood pressure monitored as well on quarterly or monthly basis based on your medical condition. Regular exercise will help you regulate your blood pressure. For a well conditioned individual blood pressure will be slightly on lower side. 80/120 is considered to be ideal by most physicians. 

You can go to a local physician or use automatic Blood pressure monitor yourself.

• Resting heart rate: 

• This is one of the indicators of your fitness. number of times your heart beats per minute is your Heart Rate. You should keep track of your resting heart rate on regular basis preferably monthly or fortnightly basis. If you have an injury or if you are suffering from illness, your RHR will be higher than normal. If you haven't recovered from a intense training, your RHR will be higher than usual. 72 beats per mins is considered to be ideal. For a well conditioned individual RHR will be lower. 

Measuring RHR is easy, all you need is to press your finger on the neck, at the angle of the jaw, behind your ear and check the pulse, count it for 60 seconds.

Pathological: These elements of the fitness require you to get a blood check at path lab.

• Lipid profile: 

• A simple blood test can help you check your lipid profile. If you workout regularly for 12 weeks you should a positive change in your lipid profile. 

You can get your lipid profile done from nearby lab and consult a physician and your trainer for help.

• Blood Sugar level: 

• Another simple blood test can reveal your blood sugar level. Regular exercise and balanced diet will help you regulate your blood sugar level and insulin supply. Consult your trainer or physician for any help.

You can get your blood sugar level checked from any nearby certified pathological lab.

• Hormone levels: 

• There are many different hormones that our body produces to help with bodily functions. One of the hormones is Testosterone, this hormone helps with growth and building muscles. Regular exercise and strength training will help boost production of testosterone. 

You can get a blood test to check the testosterone levels.

Performance: Measuring performance can be bit tricky. Its tricky because we first need to define performance. 

This is directly inline with your goals and routine that you follow. I will give few examples of measuring performance below.

• Strength: 

• This is your ability to lift heavy weight. This is measured by single repetition maximum weight that you can lift. Weight exercise like Bench Press, Squats and Dead lifts can be used to measure your strength. 

Single Rep Max is quite theoretical so the best way to determine is "Maximum weight that you can lift for 10 reps" this weight is ~80% of your single rep max. If you are doing strength training use this to measure your progress.

• Muscular endurance: 

• This is your ability to repetitive anaerobic task for a longer time. I can give you couple of examples of measuring your muscular endurance.

Maximum number of push-ups, pull-ups, dips or elbow plank(hold) you can do without dropping, there is no time limit, limit is your ability to hold. Track the number of reps and repeat the test after 12 weeks.

• Cardio-vascular endurance. 

• This is your ability to do cardio\aerobic exercise for a longer duration. 

Start jogging\running(you cannot take break\walking intervals) measure the distance covered and the time taken before you are out of breath. Next time around(after 4 to 12 weeks) check the distance covered in same time.

• Flexibility: 

• This is another trick one. Flexibility of different body parts is different. Forward bend\Sit n Reach is usually most used measure to check your flexibility. There are many ways to do this test, I would suggest the simplest one.

Sit with your legs straight, legs should be shoulder width apart, take a scale and put it to your heel. Scale should start from 0 at your Heel and number should go high as they move towards knees. Now bend forward and touch the scale. measure the distance between your heels and fingers. This distance should be reduced as you gain flexibility.


Hope this post helps you measure your fitness and help in achieving your goals. Feel free to like, comment, share, ask questions and provide your feedback.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

https://www.facebook.com/dhavalbhadeshiya 

Deceiving Shortcut workouts

Hi Guys, I am back with one more :)

This time around it’s about the motivation on social media. I would rather call it deceiving information. 😊

I see number of videos\articles and picture proposing the quick fat loss/flat abs/muscle gain workouts.

They are titled like "7 minutes fat loss", "10 mins flat abs", "15 days weight loss", " 21 days flat stomach"  and the list goes on. Google these phrases and see the number of results for yourself.

Now the best thing about these tips are that they turn you on immediately. And you start dreaming about the flat abs in 15 days, 21 days with 10 mins workout.

And then the reality strikes, and it come with disappointment. After 15-20 days you realize it’s not working 😢

Fact of the matter is that there is no such quick fix. If it were so easy everyone would have been fit.

 Something like "If greatness was easy to be achieved, everyone would have been great"

There are few very important things that most of these articles don’t tell you.


Part 1: Scientific Principles of calorie burn

Now let’s look at this from scientific principle of caloric consumption\burn rate. 

Some of the most intense workout burn around 800 calories per hour, so for 10 mins it 133 calories. 

And as I mentioned previously you need to burn 7700 calories to loose 1 KG of body fat. So based on this calculation 7700/133 it will take 57 days to reduce 1 KG. 😲

Part 2: Scientific Principles of Workout design

Now let’s look at guidelines for workout

1.    Before you start any exercise you need 5-10 mins of warm-up (oh forgot your program was only for 10 mins 😂)

2.    These 7 mins or 10 mins cycles usually needs to be repeated 3-4 times in a session, which makes around 30-40 mins of workout. (another disappointment isn't it) 

3.    After you finish your workout you need to cool down and stretch for 5-10 mins. (they never told you this)

So all-inclusive this needs to be a 40 mins to 60 mins session. Wooo that's way longer than what you thought it was. 

Part 3: Diet and Nutrition plan. (this was never included)

Now let me tell you the biggest secret, that no fitness program is complete without diet. Shocked?

Whatever your fitness goal may be, if it’s not supplemented by the correct type of diet and nutritional program it’s not going to deliver results.

Only sustainable and balanced workout and diet plans will provide long lasting and satisfactory results.

"There is no shortcut to success" 

So stop looking for these quick tips on internet, instead follow proper guidelines for workout and diet to achieve your goals.

Slow and steady wins the race applies even today :)

Hope this will help you chose right workout for yourself.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

The Special Journey

I had to write this one, about the most enjoyable journey I have had.

It all started somewhere at the end of the 20th century year 1999-2000 in the city of Rajkot (This is not a story of a period movie). This was my first step in to the world of fitness and from then onwards there is no looking back.

This post is going to be all about giving credit to all the people who have played important role in this Journey.

So now let me start by the mention of the first person, and he is the most special person Pushan Savalia. My dearest friend who introduced me to the world of fitness. It all started then as fun and desire to be physically strong. Access to internet and right coaching was almost negligible back then. But we were so passionate and dedicated that we went to every place n person where we could learn from. He was my partner in workout for most of the time I was in rajkot. We helped, motivated, corrected each other and learned a lot by trial and error. We also managed to get "encyclopedia of bodybuilding" by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (This book itself was so heavy that you can workout with it 😆).

Second mention and thanks goes to my Family. No one in my family or even distant relation had been to a gym or Akhada. These were very crucial years for my studies as I was in 11th and 12th grade. But my Mom n Dad, never stopped me from going to gym. My Sister with whom I shared lot of my boring gym and workout stories 😆. My Wife in spite of being as busy as we are taking away couple of hours of time away from home.

Having spent years working out in different cities and lot of different gyms I always thought there was a need for better trainers in the Industry. And I always thought I can be a very good trainer. Having this thought always in back of my mind somewhere in 2014-15 I seriously started thinking about it and started my research. Spoke to some of the best trainers, gym owners, my family etc.

And I finally I decided to give it a shot. So if you want take up something professionally then you need to do it like a professional. So I took up a course with certification. Read lot of international books and blogs. And Finally got certified. Here is where I would like to thank Praveen Sp for his guidance and being the mentor he has been.

It took 16+ years of preparation to reach where I am. Having turned professional for sometime now, I am enjoying this life.

Before I conclude I need to thank Rohith Krishnachar, Balamurali Ramachandra, Gautham Sangappa and Rakesh Kumar for their help support and guidance and encouragement.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Demons of Diet

When I published my last blog, I got overwhelming response from all you guys. I would like to thank all of you for reading, comments and feedback. This is biggest motivation for me to write more often.

Demons of Diet

In few weeks, I had so many discussions on all three factors affecting the health and fitness of an individual, one of the most interesting topic was Diet. And no prize for guessing. 😄

On Diet, there are so many researches, books and tutorials out there and in spite of them being around we still somehow are not able to get this right. Especially the ones who are looking at weight management(Mostly weight reduction).

I think the reason behind this is we are made to believe and we have now accepted that its very complex and difficult thing. Based on all the research I have done and speaking to people, its not as difficult as it seems to be.

So lets first look at why it seems difficult. Reason is, as soon as we hear a word "Diet" suddenly we start feeling stressed and feel like we will have to punish ourselves. We will have to avoid a particular type of food, specially that you would love to eat, buy low fat\low cholesterol oil and products. They are going to be costly. They wont taste the same. You cant eat Samosa, Paratha, Cake etc. These are some of the demons occupy your mind immediately.

And if you little more exposed to fitness industry and social media then you are in even more miserable condition. 😃 
You will have questions like, should I adopt Vegan diet, Keto diet, GM diet, Paleo diet, juice detox, gluten free and what not.

And then you start getting into details of what these diets are and being in place you are in, India(which is not the origin of these diets) will you get all these ingredients here? If you are veg, how will you do Keto diet? etc.

By now as you go through these you have already fought and lost half the battle in your mind. 

And as the popular belief says, you start something being skeptical or with negative mindset you are most like to fail.

If you look at the issue of diet in weight management its very simple equation to start with.

Its calories that you consume from food every day versus calories that you burn everyday.

Limit your caloric intake and most of the people go wrong here. Instead of looking to limit their caloric intake, people try to remove a particular type of food item from their diet, and replace them with some fancy off-the-shelf products from super market. By doing this they may haven't changed their caloric intake but they would have definitely deprived their selves of some essential nutrients their body needs resulting in altered metabolism.


Second most common issue that I have seen is the speed at which they want to reduce the weight gained. They would have added 5 kg of weight in in a year but they would want to reduce that in a month. Here is where all these fad diets come into play. They provide the rosy picture of reducing kgs of weight in month but what they dont tell you is that, its not scientifically sustainable and you are not loosing body fat, but you are also loosing muscle mass, which is detrimental to your strength and well being. So you will end up feeling miserable, low on energy, and weak. And not to mention, as soon as you come back to your normal diet you will gain that weight again. This time its going to be fat gain with muscles(worse than what it was earlier).

So essentially I would recommend that the 2 simple principles of weight management that you should be looking at is to 

1. Reduce and caloric intake and not the nutritional intake.
2. Second is have a reasonable timeline for reducing the weight.

Lets look at these two principle in details for reducing body fat

1.  Deficit\Negative caloric intake

Why is this important?

reducing the caloric intake is the most important factor in reducing your body fat. and a very simple reason is that the amount of calories that you can burn daily is limited by your physiological and biological composition. Working out for more than 1 hour daily is very difficult for a common man. And when your workout for an hour the amount of calories that you can burn is as follows.

Calories Burning Chart per hour of workout.

So now you know how much time it takes to burn these many calories. what this also tells us is that there is a limit to which we can burn these calories. So only exercise without control on diet will not be too useful in reducing body weight.

So what is the ideal intake, its divided as below.

How Much:

Your weight is direct result of your calorie surplus. Means the total calories you eat - total calories you consume\burn.

70 kg male needs 2600 calories a day if he works out for 30-60 mins70 kg female woman needs 2150 calories with the same level of workout

What:

Now divide these calories by these Macro nutrients:
Protein + Carbs + Fats
And Water, Vitamins, Minerals, Fibre(These micro nutrients do not have caloric value)

When:

Divide these into 5-6 meals daily.

Eat within 30 mins of waking up and do not eat 1-2 hrs before going to sleep.

Now as you know the calories required per day and calories that you can burn everyday based on your routine, its time to look at what is your current caloric consumption.

Examples:

• 100 gms of apple is 52 calories
• 100gm of banana is 89 calories
• 1 chapati - 100 calories
• Mcveggie Burger (W/O Cheese) - 360 calories

You can always look for more details on the calories that you consume on daily basis by searching the caloric value of your staple food on google.

How many calories to reduce from your existing diet?

Its safe to reduce about 200-250 calories per day. Which will result into half a kg of weight per week. In order to reduce 500 gms of body weight, you need to cut down 500 calories per day.
If you are doing a moderate workout for about 60 mins daily then, you are burning 250-300 calories per day.

You lose one Kg when you burn 7700 calories.

Establish reasonable timeline.

Establishing the reasonable timeline is very crucial. First thing that you should do is to check how much time did it take for you to gain the extra weight. If its a sudden increase, try to look back on our recent diet and other activities to check if its a result of that. In case of a sudden increase please get your regular health check-up to eliminate any medical conditions or ailments.
If its gradual increase then most probably its safe to assume its because of excess calories intake vs the calories burnt.

In any case reasonable time line will be minimum of 12 weeks to anything about 1 year. This is purely based on the amount of weight you need to reduce and your physical activity levels.

As mentioned about 1-2 kg per month is acceptable and reasonable weight reduction. Going at a greater speed of reduction has its own disadvantages. That includes gaining back the lost weight, sometimes gaining more than what is lost, also feeling very week and low on energy, loss of concentration, constant carving for food, insomnia etc.


To sum up, remember below points.

• Control your caloric intake

• Workout regularly

• Do not remove any particular food item from your diet or maintain your nutritional balance.

• Slow and steady wins the race

Hope this helps you control your diet and weight.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Take control of your fitness

Its been sometime since I wrote a blog post. With this post I bring to you three major components that impacts your fitness and how can you really control your fitness.

So now lets look at what they are!

1) Exercise\Workout

2) Diet\Food\Nutrition

3) Sleep

Now as we look at the these 3 aspects, they form the base of your true fitness. You must wonder whats new about these, most of you might know this. What I want to draw your attention towards is how you can control these to your benefit.

Lets start with,

1) Physical Exercise or Workout. 

Control percentage 80%, means you have very high control over exercise routine, only thing you dont have voluntary control over is the reaction of your body to the exercise routine.

This aspect of fitness is tangible. You can choose Frequency, Intensity , Time and Type of workout you want or you enjoy doing.

How many times you workout per week. 

Its recommended that you workout at least 3 times a week to maximum 6 times a week.

Intensity with which you perform the workout.

For aerobic workout its suggested that you hit 60-90% of your maximum heart rate and for strength training, its recommended to have 8 to 12 reps at 70-80% of 1 rep max.

Duration of the workout per session.

Session needs to be minimum of 20 mins to optimum 60 mins.

Type of workout, Aerobic , Strength or Flexibility training. 

Its highly recommended to include all three i.e. aerobic, strength and flexibility training in your overall workout schedule.

Based on the workout that you follow, you will have your Aerobic capacity, Muscular strength, Bone density, and Range of Motion(Flexibility) enhanced. This will also determine the calories that you are going to burn. (Very important for weight management)

So this is a voluntary task, and the performing this task is in your control. 

Higher the frequency, intensity and duration of the training, more calories you burn.

Moving on to the second aspect, 

2) Diet\Food and Nutrition. 

Control percentage 70%, you have control over what, when and how much you eat. But you dont have control over how the food was produced(grown\processed) and how your body reacts to certain types of food(it could be allergy or certain aliments or hormonal levels).

This is one of the critical parts of the individual fitness. And this has different impact on each individual. With respect to diet and nutrition there are general guidelines laid for daily nutrition requirement. These requirements define the amount of carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals requited for daily consumption. 

As for choosing workout we also have a choice to decide what, when and how much do we eat. Most of the people who failed to manage their weight have gone wrong here. we often hear from them that in-spite of working out they are not able to loose weight or gain weight.

One of the things that we dont have voluntary control here is what our body does with the food that we eat. By choosing the right type, time and amount of food we can more or less control its effect on our body. 

Items you should include in your diet.

Fresh fruits and vegetables, Milk, Eggs, Whole grains. Replace sugar with honey and Jaggery(Brown sugar) where possible. And limit your total sugar consumption to less that 6 spoons a day.

Things you should limit in your diet.

Refined carbohydrates, desserts, table sugar, deep fired food, any food which is highly process and refined. 

And looking at last and most important and somehow widely ignored aspect of the health is,

3) Sleep

Control percentage 40%, we dont have too much of direct control over the quality of sleep. There are physiological as well as psychological factor that play a very important role.

However we may not have direct control on the quality and quantity of sleep, doing the first two(Exercise and Nutrition) right will help you improve the quality and quantity of sleep. One of the other things that can help you enhance your sleep\rest\recovery is bringing in a fixed schedule in your daily routine. 

Additionally there are multiple relaxation techniques that can help you better your sleep quality. Use dim lights in you bed room and reduce the over all light intensity in your house before bed time. Read some fiction book. Take a warm water bath. Slow down your breathing pace and inhale and exhale deep. Meditate if you can. Listen to some calm non lyrical music.

Avoid coffee\tea 4-6 hours before bed, stop use of any gadgets like mobile, TV etc 1-2 hours before going to bed. Avoid puzzles and brain teasers.

With understanding of the above factors you can gain more control over your health. As I conclude I would want to make a point that all three Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep are very profound scientific topics. This blog contains very generic guidelines and observations which I have drawn from my personal learning and experience.

Hope this helps your take control of your fitness

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach