fit inspiration Archives

March 23, 2020 By Shaeba Shaikh 2 Comments

5 Simple Exercises You Can Do At Home

Amid the Coronavirus pandemic, social distancing and self-quarantine are in full swing. With everyone locking themselves up indoors, The activity levels have seen a considerable drop. Social distancing has resulted in a 51% drop in step count in the first 15 days of march 2020 according to a recent real time data study of 5 lakh users using GOQii Trackers. This drop in percentage is only likely to increase in the coming days as the fear of spread of this deadly virus is only increasing by the day. However, don’t let the lockdown make you fall into the recesses of a sedentary lifestyle. Get back up and get active at home with these 5 simple exercises!

Start Your Day Right With These 5 Simple Exercises

1.Push Ups: A great upper body exercise to begin your day. Start with lying down in a prone position, place your arms with your palms facing the floor shoulder width apart. Bend elbows and upper body to do a Push Up. Repeat the push ups for 8-10 reps.

2. Balancing Table Pose: This pose is perfect for improving balance, posture, concentration and memory. Start with a kneel down position, while breathing, lift your left arm and adjacent right leg parallel to the floor and exhale, hold for 30secs. Repeat with the other hand and leg. Do this for 5-7 repetitions on each side.

3. Butt-Kickers: As the name suggests, it is simply kicking your Glute (Butt) muscles. Start by standing with your feet about hip distance apart, bring your right leg behind your buttock contracting the hamstring muscles, and touch your Glutes with your right leg, repeat the same with your left leg. Continue doing it by alternating the legs. Do it for about a minute and repeat the exercise for 3 sets.

4. Wall Sits:Start with sitting against a wall with your back supported by the wall and your feet about 2 feet apart from the wall. Sit in such a position that thighs are parallel to the ground forming a 90 degree angle. Hold the position for 60secs. Repeat for 3 sets. Great exercise for the core muscles, Glutes. Quadriceps and Hamstrings. It is a fantastic lower body workout.

5. Surya Namaskar or Sun Salutation: We all know it, we all have heard about it. It is one of the most impactful and easiest full body stretches to loosen those tight muscles and to energize the body instantly.

Start with a standing position with hands in Namaskar position, bend backwards with hands still in namaskar position, breathing out, bend forward touching the toes, Breathing in, push your right leg back, as far back as possible. Bring the right knee to the floor and look up. Then while breathing take the left leg behind and form a straight line. Gently bring down your knees and let the chest, chin, hands, feet touch the floor with the hips slightly raised, then slide forward and do a Cobra pose, lift your body and bring yourself in an inverted V pose, then bring the right knee forward in between the two hands, left knee should be on the floor and press the hips down and look up.

After this pose, get into the standing forward bend position, and then breathing in, roll up the spine. Raise the hands up and bend backward a little bit, pushing the hips slightly outward. And finally end it with the starting position of a standing Namaste. Start off with 5 repetitions of this exercise everyday to yield benefits.

We hope this article on 5 simple exercises helps you stay fit at home. For more home workouts, tune in to fitness experts on GOQii Play.

#BeTheForce

February 17, 2020 By Tanmaya Patil Leave a Comment

5 Muscle Building Mistakes Which Might Be Keeping You From Your Goal

If you’ve been looking at motivational posters on social media or your local gyms which have “go hard or go home” or “work until your muscles hurt” or “no gain without pain” or something to the effect of relating success to extreme weight training, then you’ve clearly been looking at the wrong posters. We come over so many cases where users claim that they’ve been at it in the gym for so long without ever achieving their desired result. In order to help you avoid the same fate, we’re sharing this article on muscle building mistakes!

Common Muscle Building Mistakes to Avoid

1. Prioritising Quantity Over Quality
We live in an age where we believe more is better. A gaze around the gym might show mindless addition of reps and set backed by piling unreasonably more plates (mostly on the leg press machine and rarely the squat rack if not for 1/100th partial rep squats). Most folks aiming to add muscle might believe training seven days a week must undeniably be better than three. What these people fail to realise is the foundation of quality muscle building still rests upon what it used to be about a hundred years ago – Getting stronger. Becoming stronger is neural training. The central nervous system demands its necessary share of rest before it is ready to tackle new challenges in your next workout. In the words of the Bodybuilding Legend Lee Haney: “Stimulate, not annihilate!”

Pro Tip: Build Movement Quality in a lift before gradually adding volume (sets and reps), before gradually adding weight.

2. Chasing The Pump
If you are a true meathead, you remember the first time you curled that lonely barbell in the gym and the immediate next thing you did was flex your arms before the nearest mirror. It’s okay if you did. Pursuit of the ‘pump’ or build-up of metabolic fluid as a result of high volume resistance training in a muscle has fascinated millions of people entering muscle building. The degree to which pump helps increase muscle size fades as quickly as the pump itself a few hours after training. Don’t get me wrong, metabolic and high rep training has its place, though making every exercise in your program a high rep per set one in order to feel the temporary pump at the expense of actually getting stronger (refer to point 1 above) would be a big miss.

Pro Tip: Focus more on documented progress in weight lifted and the volume for which it is lifted rather than an arbitrary goal like ‘feeling the pump’.

3. Pain is (the only way to) Gain
Most people wearing the ‘Pain is Gain’ t-shirts have a very myopic vision of their training years. Most of them belong to the late teens to late twenties. Fast forward ten years and they may soon begin to laugh at their idea of ‘balls-to-the-walls’ intensity every workout, week after week. As we age, especially as we enter 30s, training revolves more about recovery than making unending progress. Joints and connective tissue take a solid hit if we are really lifting seriously. As such, making every workout a masochistic fiesta can seriously hamper our joints’ ability to outperform them later.

Pro Tip: It’s okay if a workout didn’t leave you hurt and devastated. Try to make a majority of your workouts in a year energizing and your training longevity might increase by several years.

4. Taking Supplements Is Like Pressing A Switch
All of us know that someone who swears by his or her shelf full of powders and pills claiming to transform them into a machine. Supplements have their place in the life of serious strength and physique athlete. However, replacing natural, real food with doses of meal replacement drinks is a strategy that might fail to deliver real robust and healthy changes in your physique. Quality, natural and fresh nutritional food would always beat sole supplementation.

Pro Tip: Make a select handful of supplements such as Whey and Creatine Monohydrate a tool to fill in the gaps in your nutrition wherever or whenever you see it, rather than a staple in your diet.

5. I Need To Train Like A Pro
In the pursuit of ‘Big Guns’, an amateur might look up the internet for the training split of an eight time Mr. Olympia winner and begin to emulate it in his training. The efforts might soon begin to be outweighed by the stopping of gains through either injury or incorrect loading parameters and the trainee might soon end up in dire frustration before switching to an altogether new program, this time followed by a multiple ‘World’s Strongest Man’ title winner.

Many individuals fail to understand that it might take more than a decade of continual solid and consistent effort with the big lifts in order to come anywhere near being called a pro. And we aren’t even talking about ‘pharmaceutical aids’ yet.

Pro Tip: Aim for Health first, followed by getting stronger, followed by improvement in appearance whenever drawing out your training strategy or designing a muscle building program.

We hope this article helps you avoid these common muscle building mistakes and aids you in making the right choices. For more tips, muscle building mistakes to avoid and the dos and don’ts, check out expert LIVE sessions on GOQii Play within the GOQii app.

Do leave your thoughts in the comments below and let’s #LevelUp our muscle building game!

#BeTheForce

February 3, 2020 By Asmita Maredia 4 Comments

At Your Desk for 6 Hours? Try These Office Workout Options

Most individuals in desk jobs are stuck in front of their computers for 6 hours or more on a daily basis. If you don’t believe us, ask yourself some simple questions:

Out of 24 hours in a day how many hours do you sit ?
Do you feel any back or muscle pain during or at the end of the day?
Do you feel a strain in your eyes or around your forehead area?

If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, it’s time to start with some basic office workout options which will help you remain active throughout the day. It doesn’t matter if you hit the gym in the morning for an hour, when you sit in front of a computer or TV, in a car or in a meeting, you’re not moving! This will increase your risk of obesity, heart disease, etc. Continuously sitting is bad for your health!

Workouts You Can Do At Work

1. Walk: Keep an alarm for every 45 min and get up from your seat to take a 3-4 min break. You can walk till the dispenser to drink water or go to printer to get a print. Take a bio-break or just take a round in the lobby. The idea is to walk!

2. Neck Stretch: Tilt you head to the right so you feel the stretch on the left. Hold for 5 seconds. Similarly, do it on left side, front and back. Repeat this 2 times.

3. Head Rotation: Slowly rotate your head in clock wise and anti-clock wise 5 times.

4. Shoulder Shrug: Raise your shoulder to the max, take them back, squeeze gradually and relax.

5. Arms:

Sit or stand straight and place one arm across your body. Keep your arm parallel to the ground and pull your elbow towards your body.
Stand with one hand behind your neck and elbow pointing upwards, then use your other hand to pull your elbow behind.

6. Wrist/Hands:

Roll your wrist 10 times clockwise and anti-clockwise. If possible every hour or while taking on phone.
Extend fingers as far as possible and hold for 5 sec, then make a fist as tight as possible and hold for 5 sec. Repeat 5 times.

7. Back:

Place your hands on the edge of your desk and slowly push your chair back until your head is between your arms and you are looking at the floor. Feel the stretch and slowly return to normal. (Repeat 5 times)
Stand straight, raise your arms up to the ceiling, alternately extend 1 arm up to the ceiling.
Stand straight, lock your hands and extend them towards the ceiling by turning your palms upward. Slowly pull yourself back. (Repeat 5 times)

8. Legs:

While sitting on the chair, straighten each leg one at a time, gradually lower it, stop halfway and hold for a few seconds. Repeat with the other leg (Do this 5 times with each leg).
Stretch the front of your thigh by standing straight. Place one hand on the chair or desk for support, grab one of your ankles and bring it upwards to your buttocks. Remember to be in an upright position, keeping your back straight and knees parallel to each other. Hold for 10 seconds and relax. Repeat with other leg. (Repeat 5 times for each leg).
Place one feet on another chair or desk and bend forward until you feel the stretch in the back of your leg. If possible try to touch your feet. Flex your foot and then point it. Hold it for a few seconds and repeat with the other leg. (Repeat 5 times each leg).

More Office Workout Tips To Keep You Active!

Take stairs instead of the elevator – 2 at a time to maximize the burn!
Have a good posture as you work at your desk.
Sitting on an exercise ball will help your posture more.
Park away from your workplace so you have to walk farther.
When you can – stand rather than sit and walk rather than stand.

The above stretching guide is to reduce muscular stress and aches. Try doing as much as possible to get healthier. If you feel any unbearable pain while exercising, stop and seek professional help.

If you really want to get active, you can read these Lunchtime Workouts You Can Do. You can also tune in to experts on GOQii Play for more expert advice on staying fit at work!

We hope this article on Office Workout options helps you #LevelUp, get active at work and stay healthy! Do leave your thoughts in the comments below!

#BeTheForce

January 20, 2020 By Mohammed Tufail Qureshi Leave a Comment

Is Weightlifting For Men Only? Here’s Why We Think Otherwise

If a woman lifts weights, does she bulk up like a man would? Will it change her appearance to a more muscular one like those guys at gyms who rip through every piece of heavy equipment they can get their hands on? Very few women desire that bulky or ripped look but those who don’t, tend to avoid using weights at all.

In truth, weightlifting is for everybody. Let’s look at it from a functional perspective. Women require the same muscles as men to open a door or lift something up from the floor. The muscles that are engaged are the same. It begs one to ask the question:

Should Weightlifting Be For Men Only?

Be it lifting a cylinder at home or a box and placing it on a shelf, carrying shopping bags, moving a chair or sofa, one requires muscles and the strength to carry out these tasks. While most women prefer cardio, they also need to focus on strength training and weightlifting to be able to carry out these tasks just as effectively as men.

Does Weightlifting Really Bulk Women Up?

It’s a myth. There are many reasons why a woman won’t gain the kind of bulk a man would. One of them being the male hormone called testosterone. It is the primary sex hormone in males as well as a muscle-building hormone. Men are genetically designed to have more muscle mass and physical strength than women.

At best, strength training will make a woman gain some lean mass and reduce extra body fat. Many women fear that they will look manly if they train with weights but the truth is that women cannot build muscles like men because they do not have enough of the male hormone Testosterone. The difference of the levels of this hormone is the primary reason why women will not gain heavy musle mass while training with weights. In fact, they will look leaner and toned.

It stands true for men and women that any amount of muscle gain leads to fat loss and any loss of muscle causes one to gain fat.

How Does Weightlifting Benefit Women?

Apart from the aesthetics, having more strength makes one feel independent and confident. It also provides a lot of other benefits. Weightlifting:

Tones the body
Reduces extra body fat
Improves posture
Strengthens bones and joints
Improves skin quality
Enhances sleep quality
Improves strength and endurance
Reduces stress
Boosts energy levels
Improves heart health
Fights aging and helps you look younger

Who’d want to forego these awesome benefits! We hope this article eases your doubts and helps you make the decision to try weight training today! For any help you may need to begin your weight training journey, watch workout sessions on GOQii Play.

It’s time to #LevelUp and #BeTheForce!