Why Gym is Called Gym?
Why To Go To Gym?
Gym or Home or Field?
Where it is Best to Workout - Gym or Home or Field?
Workout is important for physical and mental health. Workout anywhere is better than workout nowhere. In that light, whatever one may choose out of gym, home or field is a good and suitable place for workout. One needs to start. One needs to make a habit of working out and staying fit. One needs to make a habit of staying away from diseases, doctors and medicines. These are more important and higher priority than the place of workout.
This was about general workout and fitness. But if one has some specific purpose then the place of workout can become an important thing to decide. Also often it becomes quite complex to find one suitable venue. I will be saying a few words about that later in this article. Now though for a beginner the place does not matter much and doing the workout anywhere is most important, still often we have seen the place to become a big factor in the question of internal motivation, consistency and continuation. If these important factors are missing, for reasons whatsoever, then the workout neither will last long nor will provide much benefit as it can be expected to.
So the question turns in not the choice of place but the presence of motivation and resulting consistency. For a particular person, where he or she finds the motivation to do the workout well and keep going day after day with significant health benefits, that place is the right place for workout for that person.
Now in the above statement, I have tried to mention all the essential conditions for a right place of workout. Let me summarize pointwise –
- For a particular person
- Where he finds motivation
- To do workout well
- Keep going or being consistent
- With significant health benefits
These are among the most important factors of determining the right place for workout. Let’s get into a bit of detail in each point.
- For a Particular Person
Things do vary from person to person. Things have to vary from person to person. We are made that way and we need to understand the diversity factor. So one place can be good for one person and may not be as good for another. Thus one needs to find the place that suits him or her the most. There has to be some guidelines, some guiding specifications, some can be common factors, some can be diverse.
Like, in the case of a gym, availability of good quality machines and instruments, which are going to do good to our health and not any harm due to errors or defects is a common factor for any gym goer. This factor cannot change from one person to another, rather this is fixed for all.
In the field also, the ground should be well maintained and clean, and sports friendly. Even for a simple workout as running, in an ill maintained or damaged field or play ground can become extremely dangerous and can even be crippling. This has to be a common factor and not changeable from person to person.
Home is usually not a good place for a workout for any beginners. Lack of proper equipment, lack of workout partners, lack of trainers or instructors, and many more reasons can be there to ruin any good benefit of working out at home. Still, if one can alleviate most of the problems or barriers then workout at home can become quite good and accessible. One has to arrange all the required equipment and setup, get access to a good offline or online trainer, allot a good, clean and peaceful corner of the home for workouts. Also training or workout partners often become an important motivator. Having some workout partner at home can work extremely well. That can be anyone from the family, from the neighbourhood, some friend, anyone with whom one can align and resonate in mindset. That can make a great workout.
Now not all gyms can work equally well for all, neither can all fields be equally activating for all, nor can all homes become equally motivating for all. Things do vary and it is so very natural to vary. So one needs to understand one’s own requirements, purpose, goals, process and relevant everything else and then leverage the best possible from all available dimensions.
2. Where He Finds Motivation
Motivation is the source of all work and energy for human beings. Without motivation humans can neither work well and for long. Some source of constant motivation has to be there. But on the other hand, motivation is a very personal thing. It varies from person to person, both in quality and quantity. But again there are some common guidelines that should guide our motivation, though in diversity. We cannot take motivation from anything and everything, instead we need to be very rational, considerate and cautious to make any such effort.
What Time of day to Gym?
Is Morning Better for Gym?
Eat Before or After Gym?
What to Eat Before or After Gym?
Eating both before and after a gym session is very important. But there has to be at least 30 minutes gap between the pre-gym meal/beverage and the gym session. There is no particular directives about the timing of the post-gym beverage and many would like to take it at just the ending of the session and many others may take it after a period of 15 minutes or so. Both the way it is expected to work the same.
This question is frequently asked by many gym goers and especially newbies. And the answer of this question is necessarily not the same for every trainee and every time. But if one insists for a generic answer then that has to be “eat both before gym and after gym”.
This one line answer will develop into a few more questions like when to eat and what to eat. And there comes a major clause for varying the answer from person to person. Not everybody can or should have the same food and neither we are supposed to take at times of our will or wish. There are certain guidelines for this. And often those guidelines not only determine our performance and development but also affect our security and well-being.
The word security may intrigue many queries especially to newbies. Let me say a word or two on that to give at least a faint idea. It may sound a little disheartening or discouraging that gym is really a very risky place for human beings and any mistake can cause enough trauma or troubles, some can be too long term, even up to lifelong. So we really need to take care of that. But if proper process and protocols are followed then there are very less chances of any injury or damage.
When talking about processes and protocols, food comes almost at the top of the list. If one is doing workouts in the gym and not concerned about the proper diet then he is almost obviously inviting problems. So even before starting serious workouts, the food chart has to be meticulously prepared based on the width and depth of engagements.
We will talk about the total food chart later. In this section I will only discuss the foods that we are supposed to take before starting a gym session and after the end of that gym session.
Many think that they take meals, maybe 4 or 5 or even more and that must be sufficient for the purpose of gym workout. Meals are essential as they provide the gross nutritional requirements of the body based on the level of physical and mental engagements. But high intensity sports like gym strength training requires more nutrition than just the gross meal-based ones.
I have seen people go to the gym and do various types of workouts. Not all equally stress on weight training or strength training as core. There can be various types of charts, some charts can focus more on aerobic cardio based workouts, some on yoga, some on basic level strength training with very small involvement of weight-based machines as well as free weights. And then there can be charts with very high intensity strength and weight training, even reaching to levels like bodybuilding, weight lifting and powerlifting. Requirements and choices vary with individuals.
Not every chart would need equal food and beverage requirements. Some charts will require quite less amount of food and beverage requirements and some others can require too high amounts of food and calorie.
When we talk about food charts then the very first thing that has to come to mind is calories. Calorie is the most important aspect of food nutrition, even more than the essential macronutrients like protein and carbohydrates. If a food is low in calories, that food usually is not going to serve as a major source of energy and nutrition as well. There can be some support foods like certain herbs and supplements, those may contain negligible amounts of calories, but they are not for providing energy. They must be having other purposes.
What Food to Eat Before Gym?
As I said the food chart of any type will actually develop individually based on individual requirements. And that individual requirement will depend on the type chart or type of workout one is to do.
If the workout is weight training, with weight machines or free weights, then the food requirement becomes maximum. And that exceeding requirement can also be easily noticed in pre-workout as well as post-workout food or beverage charts. In workouts like the post-workout chart is perhaps the most critical one but pre-workout chart will be also important.
Pre-workout charts are usually more carbohydrates than other nutrients. But that carbohydrate most of it has to be a complex one. Slow energy release carbs are very good pre-workout food or beverages.
Some easy choices on pre-workout complex carbohydrate foods:
- Sattu
- Vegetable boils or soups
- Milk with milk-based or malt-based health drinks
- Curd or derivatives (can be enhanced with some supplements)
- Nuts and dry fruits
- Biscuits
These are some examples, there can be numerous varieties varying on person and other demographic variables. But the food must have to be healthy, easily digestible and assimilable, and need to require less energy for digestion.
Between pre-workout food and post-workout food there are workout beverages to be taken. Such beverages are to be prepared meticulously for meeting the right purpose because such drinks usually are very crucial and determine a lot about one’s performance and even more important the development based on the performance. Performance is one issue, but during training what developmental purpose the performance is serving that becomes even more important than the performance itself.
When one is on training then development is the central focus and not just daily performance statistics. If one is developing properly then soon one day obviously has to come when he will be very good and efficient in performance. So training should be goal oriented and value oriented and not performance oriented. And moreover any training can lead to fluctuating performance and that is always very natural. Someday it will be high, someday it will be enough low, but that should not discourage the practitioner and instead the objective should be to stabilize that performance to a desired mark and that can take a considerable amount of time.
And that development and stabilization of performance takes a certain amount of training intensity. Workout beverages are to support that training intensity and hence are to be designed according to the training chart and system. Still, if I try to be too generic then I would suggest two options –
- Oral Rehydration Solution
- Glucose with electrolytes
Again among these two also, the choice has to vary on the workout requirements. For example, if the workout chart is intense and exhaustive, then glucose with electrolyte becomes a better choice than the ORS as ORS is much more mild than glucose with electrolyte, and also we can easily customize it but cannot customize ORS according to our beverage requirements for workout.
What Food or Beverage After Gym?
After-gym food and beverages are the most important thing. Some sportsmen, bodybuilders and weightlifters even followed that after-gym food has to be the heaviest in comparison to all other foods of the day. Though I won’t suggest that.
But for proper development, after-gym food contributes a huge part and without that it will become really tough to make any consistent progress and development even if one works hard in the gym. And all time, effort and training investments will go to vain. That is obviously not desirable for any practitioner. Getting positive results are important.
After-gym food or beverage has to be based on protein. And the more easily digestible and easily absorbable the protein will be the better the result will be from the gym session. Dietary proteins are usually harder to digest and use up considerable energy to achieve that digestion and absorption. Consuming that amount of energy to digest food is not a good choice just after the gym session.
Thus protein supplements become the first choice as an after-gym food or beverage. Good protein supplements are usually in an extracted form which makes them more easily digestible and absorbable. Thus the choice of the right protein supplements also often becomes an important as well as critical job. Once a good choice is made then arise the question how to administer that.
Protein supplements usually are taken with some beverages or drinks. Fruit juices are among the most popular options. Fruit juice has its own good reasons to become a popular choice for this purpose. They contain handsome amount of carbohydrates, a lot simple ones as well as also a lot of complex ones. This carbohydrate combination works very well as it provides both short term as well as long term energy.
Thus a good post-gym beverage would contain a good amount of protein, both fast usable as well as late usable. The ratio of fast usable and the late usable often can be around 70:30 or 80:20 at max. Thus there has to be both the supplement as well as food grain based nutrition. Only one of the either would create a huge vacuum in the training as well as performance.
The optimum post-gym beverage can be like –
- Highly efficient protein supplement
- Considerable amount of dietary or slow protein
- Good solvent ingredient (Fruit juice, sattu, lassi, milk, and so on)
- A healthy combination of simple and complex carbohydrate
- High energy both by protein and carbohydrate
- Enough of water for hydrating
- Enough electrolytes and salts.
These are some of the basic as well as better criteria or paths to enter hypertrophic growth and development which will later contribute to not only a better and stronger framework but also a good performance in almost every area of sports and Martial Arts.
Hydration is very important after any kind of sporting activity. Gym and even a light weight resistance training can demand a huge amount of water and electrolytes. So we need to be very careful about this. A post-gym drink or beverage makes this point easier to handle and then there remains less to worry. Though this way the whole good day of hydration is not possible, still the beverage can serve as a crucial just-after-gym source for maybe some amount of water and electrolyte requirements of the whole day.
A good, well selected and rationally nutritions post-gym drink or beverage actually can make one much stronger both internally and externally and thus can become one important component for any game changer athletic performance development. Our tissues like muscles, bones and soft tissues, etc. all participate in their own capacity and environment to produce some valuable and useful output.
How Food Will Contribute in Muscle Growth, Strength and Power
And more of the tissue mass and speed, better they contract and extend and all these have to be continuously maintained. Without proper maintenance the volume and performance are both reducing. On the other hand if more bone and muscular tissue forms better support becomes available. This is the central concept behind this huge world of resistance training, weight lifting, Martial Arts and so on. If one has to break the normal human limit in any sporting event then there is nothing better than strength training. If one wants to lift 100 kg or more, or if one wants to sprint 30km/hr or more, if one wants to jump 20 feet long or more, 7 feet or more, or let it be anything in any sports, strength training or resistance training or weight training becomes an indispensable method to achieve that. In Martial Arts, only skills and techniques would not always be sufficient. Often, the strength, ballistic power, muscular endurance, etc. becomes as important as skills and techniques. And there the need of strength training or resistance training begins.
Strength training or resistance training or weight training makes the whole body grow. Grow stronger, bigger, better and healthier. To achieve all these purposes, there arises the need for a good amount of food. Usually after a certain age our body stops growing any further and then the food requirement becomes quite moderate and flat or stable. Seldom we can find an adult of maybe 30 or 40 years is eating as vigorously and as voluminously as a growing child or teenager would do. Why so? Because after a certain age the body usually does not grow much and by implication the food requirements become much more moderate. Actually when the body is not in a severe growth system, then it needs food and nutrition for mostly three purposes –
Providing caloric energy to our day to day voluntary
(1) as well as involuntary activities.
(2) Maintaining the existing body muscle and bone density
(3) Repairing tissues wherever and whenever required (in small scale)
(4) Adding new tissues (eg. adding muscle and bone tissues, etc.)
Among these requirements, the first one is most easy to be met and is one of the most common food philosophies and practices that we can see all around. Next important factor is the maintenance of existing muscle and other tissues. If one cannot maintain the already existing ones then there arises no value to adding more. So maintaining the current tissue position of the body is absolutely essential, even if one cannot add new ones.
This maintenance job is tougher than the caloric energy provisions, as this job requires many nutritional as well as physiological variables. The main nutritional requirement for this purpose is protein. But protein alone cannot do it. Right amount of micronutrients like vitamins and minerals are also required. Carbohydrates are also required as the process of repairing is quite energy consuming, though the amount of carbohydrate required for the first purpose of providing caloric energy to body systems is much more. Also there are many physiological variables, like endocrine health, digestive health, systemic homeostasis and other factors that can often affect the process of maintenance positively or negatively.
The third job of repairing damaged tissues is the most challenging one for any human body. Even the most genetically endowed ones also can face a crisis in this aspect. There are quite a lot of factors and variables that affect this process. External variables are also not any less vital and critical. Proper nutrition, sleep, mental conditions, physical health and conditions, everything has its own share of contribution to this process of repairing.
The maintenance and repair phases often overlap somewhat as maintenance of existing tissues also requires covering up any damage or weakness of the existing ones. Though in sports and especially in strength training the repair works are so voluminous, that’s why I mentioned the repair phase as another separate job.
When we do strength training, we usually lift heavy weights many times in a very short duration. This results in huge amounts of muscle, joint and other tissue damages, which has to be recovered and repaired on an emergency basis. All the relevant body processes are triggered and then there arises a huge amount of energy requirement for the whole process to get carried on. That’s why a huge amount of food requirements arise.
Once all these energy requirements are satisfied then the body will find more energy to build up new muscle and other tissues. Usually the body gives this job the lowest priority. After certain ages of aggressive growth, the body does not initiate major growth for muscles or any tissues. Thus we do not find adults to grow bones, joints, muscles and any such tissues. We usually find adults only to accumulate body fat or shred body fat, thus they become bigger or thinner. This is the usual body trend. But strength training triggers lots of new changes in the body. One of the changes is to re-initiate the natural growth processes of the body, such that the body again tends to grow bones, joints, muscles and all other tissues. For professional bodybuilders and weight training people, the rate of growth can be much much higher than any average child or teenager. This is an unusual trend for the body. Still, by its own internal programming the body would not assign energy and resources to this acquired purpose of growth until and unless the other three purposes are well fulfilled. And that can be logically backed up because if the existing tissues are deprived and not getting maintained or repaired sufficiently then where is the actual use or purpose to increase more tissues? The body is wise and knows this. So it will delegate energy and resources to further growth only at the last, after all other requirements are well fulfilled.
Thus we can understand why we need a lot of food and that also quality and nutritious food to make all these happen. We eat a lot of times a day. A sportsman would eat a lot more by frequency as well as by quantity. And if one is doing strength training the food intake frequency and quantity increases manifold. It actually depends on the intensity in which he will be training. More intensity, the more work the body has to perform, the more energy and nutrition it will need.
Among all those many times we eat the food, the post gym food becomes the most crucial. This is the time the body is trying hard to overcome the stress of the workout and also to assess and address whatever all the damages has happened in the session. It is a basic nature of the body, it is made by that. Thus then arises a kind of emergency time for the body within. And the best way to respond to the emergency is to provide relevant resources to the body at that time. Two of the most relevant resources are food and water.
Thus a lot of water intake is advised after an intense workout. With that a lot of food also. And that is why we tend to make the two together to constitute what we call the post gym beverage. It contains everything that is required at that time of crisis, viz. high protein, enough carbohydrate recharges, excess vitamins and minerals, even some fat can work well in repair and recovery (also fat is an important component of our natural immune system). Sometimes some bioactive components from some herbs or so can make great outputs.
We can have such a well prepared beverage anytime in the day, not only after gym workout. But as I said, providing the body at the time of extreme emergency makes the total difference. The growth and performance output we can harvest by a high quality post workout beverage, cannot be substituted by any other timing for the same beverage.