Get your head in the game!

Raj Ganpath

Fitness is an infinite game. Most of us consider fitness as something finite. We think about losing X kilos in the next Y months. We want to train for a marathon. We sign up for twelve-week programmes. We hope to transform ourselves in a few months. While all these feel complete, they are time-bound, temporary and only a small part of a much larger journey.

Fitness is a never-ending game. Like parenting, business, education and life itself, there is no manual or rulebook. There isn’t one set of rules that applies to everyone. The game was being played before you started and will continue after you stop. And the goal of the game is not to win. It is to keep playing, keep learning and keep discovering new levels and experiences.

Fitness is not something you can ‘finish’. It is a lifelong pursuit. Because reaching a ‘goal’ is not the end. It is just a milestone that marks the end of one bout of effort and signifies the start of the next. And that’s why fitness needs to be fun, purposeful and sustainable for it to make sense in the long term.

So start viewing fitness as a never-ending journey of betterment. You’ll realise that there is no rush. You’ll realise that you have the rest of your life to get stronger, leaner and healthier. You’ll realise what you can achieve is truly limitless. Because an infinite game comes with infinite possibilities.

Nutrition: The trick is to pay attention

People say that your body is always talking to you, and you need to listen to it. Obviously, your body is not literally ‘talking’ to you. But it is constantly sending you feedback in the form of signals. You can feel these signals. The only requirement is this: you need to pay attention.

One part of mindful eating is about paying attention to what we eat and how it makes us feel. The other part is using that information to make the right food choices. It does require practice, but it is not a hard skill to master. Because mindful eating is just about being smart when making food choices.

Making smart food choices doesn’t mean eating only low-calorie foods or following a diet. It means understanding what you need from each meal and eating the foods that fulfil those needs. This will mean different things to different people. It will even mean different things for the same person at different times. For a professional athlete training multiple hours every day, energy-dense foods and a high-calorie diet are smart choices. But it isn’t for someone who is trying to lose body weight. A cup of coffee is a smart choice for most people in the morning. It helps them be alert and active. But it may not be a smart choice for the same people at night because it might disrupt sleep.

To make the right food choices, you need to ask yourself a few simple questions every time you eat.

1. →What am I eating? Does it contain what I need from this meal, given my current goals?

2.→How much am I eating? Is this the right amount of food for me for this meal, given how hungry I am?

3. →If I eat this, how will I feel while eating? How will I feel right after? How will I feel after a few hours?

The act of asking yourself these questions to create awareness and make your food choices accordingly is what we call mindful eating.

The good thing about mindful eating is that you don’t have to think too hard. You don’t have to write anything down either. It is just an internal dialogue. By simply asking yourself these questions, you become aware of what is on your plate. This awareness will drive you towards making better, smarter choices as and when necessary. As simple as it is, the first few times may not be easy. You might forget or feel confused. But in a few days, this will become a simple but significant habit that guides you towards better food choices. And, hence, towards better health and fitness.

Movement: The four Ss of exercise

Exercise science is the scientific study of human movement that is performed to maintain or improve physical fitness. A large and wonderful discipline, a part of which is about what exercises need to be done, by whom, for what, when, at what intensities and for how long. But unless you are a specialist (competitive sportsperson, model, actor, etc.,) you don’t need to worry about the minutiae.

What you need from exercise is quite simple. You need the four Ss:

• Strength

• Stamina

• Speed

• Suppleness

Strength is your ability to apply force. You need strength to do anything in life. Holding a bottle of water or pushing a water tanker all by yourself. It is only a question of how much strength. Outwardly, you use your muscles and bones to do the final movement of strength application. But the process starts in your brain, right from the time you think about doing something, and involves every system in your body.

Stamina is your ability to sustain physical or mental effort. Effort that involves some form of discomfort for extended periods of time. So building stamina requires you to work on your ability to endure discomfort, that is, endurance.

Speed is your ability to do things at different rates. Doing something fast is about speed, but so is moving very slowly. And since doing things requires applying force, speed is about applying force at different rates, which is where ‘power’ comes in.

Suppleness is your ability to move in different planes and speeds, fluidly and without pain. This is a combination of being flexible in your muscles and mobile in your joints.

Though exercise has many forms and even more names, the end goal of all forms of exercise is the same—to optimally stimulate your muscles, joints, organs and organ systems. Bodybuilding, Zumba, sports, yoga, distance running, gymnastics, figure skating and more types of exercise exist. They are all different from one another in many, many ways. But one is not universally better than the other. Not in an absolute sense. They were all created with the intention to help improve fitness. And they all have their pros and cons.

It is simply about understanding what exactly you need and picking the ones that serve you best. If you are able to do that and address these four aspects of movement consistently, you can rest assured that you will see your fitness levels rise with time.

Weight loss: How to burn more calories

As tempting as it is to complicate things, you don’t have to. Keep it simple, and do the following if you want to consistently increase energy outflow and create a sustainable calorie deficit.

1 Exercise: Do some form of exercise every week and target burning about 2,000–3,000 calories per week from exercise. This can be through anything. You can walk, run, dance, play sports, lift weights, go kayaking, cycle, swim or do any activity you please. Your goal, from a calorie-burning perspective, is to accumulate enough activity throughout the week to burn the required amount of energy. This means you can do this as three days of exercise burning 700–1,000 kcal on each day, or split it up across all seven days and burn 300–400 kcal per day.

2 Strength training: Since strength training is what will build muscle and increase your BMR, ensure you strength train at least two days every week. It doesn’t matter which equipment you use, what your specific training plan is and what set-rep template you choose. But it definitely matters that you load your muscles and work on them regularly every week.

3 Walk: Get in 10,000–15,000 steps every day. It’s OK if you are nowhere close to this right now. Start where you are. Slowly, every week, increase the total number of steps per day by 500 or 1,000. And soon you’ll find yourself at this level of activity.

That’s it. These three actions will take care of increasing energy expenditure in the short term and also lay the foundation for increased energy expenditure in the long term by increasing your BMR. If you can do these regularly, you can certainly set yourself up for long-term success in weight loss and management.

Excerpted with permission from Simple, Not Easy by Raj Ganpath, published by Westland, an imprint of Westland Books. 

The author is a certified coach and mentor with more than 15 years of experience in the field of nutrition and fitness. He is a specialist in nutrition, strength training, biomechanics and women’s fitness, among others. He is also an entrepreneur and one of the founders of Quad Fitness.