Physical Fitness

Growing up in an education obsessed middle-class Indian family, physical fitness was never a priority. Interestingly, this is a new phenomenon. Even as late as my father's generation, youngsters were encouraged to be active. My uncle played basketball at the national level and my father swam for 4 hours everyday. Unfortunately by the time I was born, India had changed.

Rate of population growth outpaced growth of opportunities. College degrees became more important than physical fitness. Studies trumped sports. Focus was always on doing well in school, nothing more was expected or encouraged. My father was not particularly happy with the change but economics always wins out. Consequently, by the time I got to IIT Kanpur I could barely run a mile.

But this post is not about sports in India. It is about my slow realization that fitness is also important. Having a working set of knees at 60 is a worthy goal! The change started late in undergrad but took a firm hold when I came to US. I ran a marathon in 2007. It was probably the first time in my life when I felt fit and it was a nice feeling. Since then I have dabbled in squash, weight training, and lately yoga.

During the time I have learned a few things. Some of them are:

1. Human body is very quick to react to a fitness regimen. All it takes to run a marathon is 16 weeks of supervised training! Regularity is the key. Find a regimen no matter how easy but stick to it.

2. Balanced workout is very important. You can't attach a jet engine to a car. Workout only the arms and you will get injured. Try improving your running times without strength training, you will get injured. If done in isolation. routines like "100 pushups in 6 weeks" can be harmful.

3. Stretching is not very useful for runners. This is especially true for static stretching. At best it it should be done after workouts, and not before. Warm ups, strength training are known to work for runners, stretching is not.

4. But flexibility does have some injury prevention benefits. Active stretching is the way to go. I have found yoga to be very fun way to increase flexibility.

5. In strength training, machines are useless and nothing beats barbell training. Exercising isolated muscles is neither healthy nor comprehensive. Normal physical activities use many muscles, not just one. So developing only one muscle at a time does not train them to work together.