This is how you do it

MORNING AFTER

Three prominent women instructors share their physical fitness secrets with Ashish Virmani

Warm-ups are important

Sulekha Talwalkar

The important thing is a proper warm up. I would ensure that my clients walk and stretch every body part either freehand or on a Precor machine prior to the main exercise program. I see to it that 10 or 15 minutes are given to the warm-up before the clients start exercising.

When it comes to the main exercise programme, I advise my clients to target their weaker areas first. With women, these are generally the abs, thighs and gluteals (buttocks). Squatting is excellent for gluteals and thighs, and can be done freehand, on a squat machine or on a Swiss ball.

Stomach crunches are of various types. Vary them by keeping one leg on top of the knee and then come up. Also do mid-air cycling by rotating the legs, lying flat on your back.

If you need to tone your gluteal muscles, freehand exercises and the butt blaster machine is excellent for this. Or you can try it freehand by getting down on your hands and knees, in a doggy position. Push one leg behind slowly and straighten the knee as much as possible before gradually bringing the leg back to position. Repeat with the other leg. Begin with 15-20 repetitions of this.

Never end a workout abruptly. Cool down with some yogic asanas and hyperextension. Lie flat with your stomach on the floor and your palms pressing downwards, near your chest. Bring your upper body up to the count of five and then lower it down again to the count of five.  Wait for a count of five  before repeating. This is good for the lower back. Also recommended is shavasana.

To tone your abdominal muscles, lie flat on your back on an even floor. Fold your legs so that your soles are touching the floor and your knees are bent upwards. Then lift your body up from your shoulders, without neck support. Exhale while coming up, inhale while going down. About 15-20 repetitions of this, is good for a beginner.

Sulekha Talwalkar and her husband Amber run the Talwalkar's gymnasiums at Santa Cruz, Malad and Borivali

Set a goal

Ritu Shah

The most important thing before you start a workout is to have a fitness goal. What are you aiming at - weight loss/ fat loss, or anything else that you need to achieve?

Fitness has four aspects: cardiovascular and muscular endurance, flexibility and diet. 

To achieve your fitness goal you need to focus on  the frequency and intensity of exercise, the duration of the workout and the type of activity you choose. I  normally recommend a workout frequency of four to five days a week, each session lasting anywhere between  20-60 minutes.

For me, it's important to vary one's workout during the course of a week. For example, one day  one may train on the treadmill, stepper and cross-trainer for cardio-vascular endurance, another day do yoga, strength training the third day, swim the fourth day and do kick-boxing on the fifth day. This is important to prevent your workout from getting monotonous.

For flexibility, I recommend stretching or yoga. Personally, I find regular yoga too slow and conduct courses in power yoga which is a speeded-up version of the same thing. 

If you're into strength training, be aware of the number of pounds you're lifting, and don't overdo it. Strength training is important for women. It's a myth that women get bulky with strength training. The fact is that it tones up the muscles and makes women look good. It cannot make them more bulky or more masculine because unlike males, they don't have testosterone.

You need to get your heart rate into the Aerobic Zone while exercising. The Aerobic Zone is the heart beats per minute that will burn fat in your body, otherwise you may be exercising for a long time without the right fat-burning intensity. To calculate your Zone, subtract your age from the number 220. Approximately 65-85 per cent of this is your Aerobic Zone.

Ritu Shah runs Xersize Gymnasium, Andheri and will be running the London Marathon in 2006

 

Diet is equally important

Rujuta Diwekar

The secret of my success as a personal instructor is that I do a fitness test on each of my clients  before prescribing a fitness routine. I look into four aspects of my clients' fitness: firstly the body composition with respect to muscle and fat; the strength level of their core muscle groups, more specifically the abdomen and lower back; their flexibility; and lastly cardio-respiratory fitness.

Diet is an important factor of fitness. It is essential to remember that one must eat more when more active and less when less. Consuming calories and consuming adequate nutrition are two completely different things and in this I'm totally opposed to junk foods like vada pav and pizza.

While working out, you should know when to stop and take five. Don't over-exercise. The optimum time for a workout is between 40-45 minutes for a maximum of five days a week.

Exercise and proper diet will bring down your weight and cellulite. I'm against the use of celluilite creams, bodywraps and other quick fixes.

An increasing number of women are using cellulite reduction cream nowadays which is nothing but a fad. In any case most of these creams have a warning in fine unreadable print to the same effect.

When it comes to food intake, my advice is to eat up to half your hunger levels, fill a fourth of the stomach with water and leave one-fourth empty.
While using a stepper, make sure  you use one with adequate shock-absorption abilities. This will prevent your knees from taking three times your body weight. 

When working on a rowing machine, keep your spine as straight as possible. See that your back is not rounded because the strain could impinge on the nerves in your spinal cord.

There's this current fad of slow repetition training where clients want to lift weights in slow motion and suspend them for some time before bringing them down. I recommend lifting the weights as quickly as possible, though without jerking, and then bringing them down slowly.

Rujuta Diwekar trained Anil Ambani for the Mumbai Marathon