My fitness journey as an IT professional – Redefined my life

• I am an IT employee working for well reputed MNC IT company holding a senior position. I am a happily married man to a wonderful wife and a lovely kid.
• Mine is a typical life of any IT employee living in Bangalore city. Daily routine will be like reluctantly wake up, getting ready, commute to office at 9 AM though traffic chaos, stay in office till 7, then return home through the notorious Bangalore traffic, reach home to take care of family needs, spend some time with my wife and kind, before I realize it is already 10:30 or 11 PM . So finally go to sleep by 11:30 PM or 12 PM. This is could a common routine among most of the private sector professionals .
• I have been working in IT industry from 2017 and it has turned busier with changes in personal life, more responsibilities. With marriage and then with the arrival of my baby boy things turned hectic. But one activity that I do even no matter what happened in my life is  exercising, it could be anywhere be it gym or at house.
• Now I want to be clear that that I do not want to be a bodybuilder with great physique and aesthetics. My main goal is to become fitter, stronger and healthier than ever before in my life.
• So in the last week of May 2018, I decided to transform my daily routine, my diet, my fitness style, my priorities. This involves refinements in my diet, food intake, rigorous and consistent training . All this while working full time in office for 9 hours, 1.5 hours on an average in traffic on a 2 wheeler, going home on time and taking care of all other daily chores .
• You might ask me “why all this now”, “what is the need or necessity to do all this crazy stuff now”, “it does not make sense”, “I am not a fitness enthusiast”, “I am already stressful”, “full of work”, “suffering from some physical or mental ailment”, “no time to even sleep”. This is much more than that. For sure I am going to demonstrate how a consistent routine changes your perspective and priorities in life and how physical fitness routine is one of the best means to transform your mindset for good.  This is the part where I was also at the same level of thinking and I was completely unaware of the bigger and better things yet to come in this process.
• However, at the time I started, I was having two main objectives.
  • Firstly I want to have a daily routine that makes me feel pumped up every morning, that challenges me, a daily routine that puts me in pain yet a chance to grow, a daily routine that tests my determination and self-control, a daily routine that makes me push the boundaries physically and mentally. Basically I look forward for the next day to attack it and must not snooze the alarm when it rings at 5:30 AM. When I looked at such possibilities and considering the interests or passions I have, my body and mind are only things that are in my control. Anything other than these two are out of my hands and I cannot control them beyond certain point. But with my body and my mind, I can do anything. It is just that I have to decide to do something worthy with them, that’s all. So I decided to transform my physical and mental strength to a higher level.
  • Secondly, I am passionate to spread awareness the immense value of health and fitness among youth and working people especially between age group of 20 to 40 years old. Motivate people, inspire people by showing real life example of myself to prove that we all can do this. Finally prove that physical fitness leads to mental transformation. If this happens with a lot of people, they lead a healthy meaningful life, their families have a better life, then who knows this mindset can do wonders in achieving great things for them which extends to they inspiring others in the process.
• Now how would I get the required guidance for achieving my target. Here I would say that there is no better tool than internet if we could use it for right purposes. Though I had good knowledge and awareness on health, nutrition, fitness as I have been doing it from past 10 years, I decided to upgrade myself.  I started doing a lot of research on topics of fitness exercises, nutrition, health, physical anatomy so on. I read through hundreds of expert articles and watched hundreds of hours of video demonstrations how to perform the exercises and movements correctly. I did research and a lot of reading on nutrition and supplementation because this is the most important part that is must for me to recover from the rigors of training, that keeps me attentive to be give my full services at office for 9 hours, then be a good husband and a father when I reach home. Hence I started this research, reading and upskilling process. Usually I used to do this whenever I get some free time in office or at home.
• I wake up early morning. Train for around 1 hour 30 minutes and get refreshed to be back to my job. I will be ready to work by 9:30 AM. After that I start on usual office work. I return home mostly by 7:00 PM in the evening, sometimes I may be late. Play with my kid and assist my wife with chores and finally try to go to sleep by around 11 PM. This is just an example of how a normal day runs for me.
• I intentionally skipped the daily preparation that I do at home and office, food nutrition and diet I follow, the challenges I face at home and office while keeping up with this routine and all other stuff that goes into my regimen.
• Coming to my overall health and fitness, there is a multifold increase in my strength, endurance and stamina. Now I have better immunity towards common cold, Allergies and other infections. I am able to handle work pressure and stress more efficiently. I experience a sustained energy, mental focus and clarity of thought throughout the day. I am able to be energetic when I return home which enables me to meet all the necessities in my personal life.
• We have to observe one thing here. I work out for just 1.5 hours which is may be 7% of the day. Rest of the 93% of the day is about successfully doing rest of activities that support livelihood and life. I am going to talk in detail about why this 7% of a day spent in gym positively impacts rest of the daily activities. Basically you would be amazed to observe how it forces us  to be disciplined and organized in all other tasks. During a course of time, people around us and we ourselves could feel transformation in us physically, mentally and emotionally.
• Just to give a glimpse of how everything is interlinked once we start with a fitness and strength training first thing in the morning. First of all, the three main elements which are tightly coupled are exercising, well informed diet and nutrition plan throughout the day, optimal sleep to recover.
• Now all things are interdependent, just to give a summary. If you perform an intense and well defined strength training early in the morning then you cannot and will not survive without following a systematic diet and nutrition plan. We need to have meals placed at right intervals with recommended sizing of macro nutrients. Well then if we need to have a meal at a given time, then we need to plan everything around it appropriately, or else we might miss the meal which results in exhaustion . As a result of this we are planning our office work and meetings more resourcefully. If we do all these tasks correctly form the morning, then we can reach our home on time and spend some quality time with our family. And finally if we got to feel energetic and get going the next day, sleep is extremely important. So we tend to not waste any time in watching videos, movies or doing any other trivial stuff that would reduce our sleep time. So we should plan everything at home so that we would get to bed at specific time. Finally for you to wake up early and leave home on time, you need to prepare everything like food, supplements, clothes, bag etc. the previous night. I need to hold together what all things to do proactively so that I could manage tasks at work and home on time and what goes on in a typical day.
• In the process of following this routine and consistently , I am inherently developing a strong mindset. Waking up early, intense training/exercising, proper diet and nutrition plan, finally need to hit the bed as soon as possible. While doing all these activities, managing work for 7 to 8 hours, studying and doing research on fitness, nutrition, spending time with family, address the needs at home, take care of parents needs and other miscellaneous tasks.
• So my dear friends, now you can realize how much of a mental strength we have to develop to follow a strict routine, what kind of mind set we need to develop and sustain to continue with this process daily, the patience needed to wait for the results to realize, the kind of determination we need to have to overcome challenges and obstacles that try to distract us from various fronts.
• Finally I would like to describe the process I went through in a single sentence – Watching your physical and mental transformation is like watching a plant grow into a tree. You will not see drastic improvements day by day, you might not get much support from your close ones, many people would not even understand why you are doing even after explaining, many times you question yourself. But if we are determined, have the will to do it with consistency and sincerity, it results in massive gains holistically.

Some facts as per my opinion:

• We all start as equals, with little masses of muscle and tiny bones and less than 200 ml of blood in our body. Then why do very few people turn out to be exceptional human beings who we all look up to. What makes them so special that when we read about them or get to know them, we would be in awe. Because they did those things that we consider to be impossible and amazing.
• If you are willing to do the work, put in effort, improve day by day one step at a time, be consistent and disciplined, many things are possible. Just that we need to put all of this into something we are passionate about, to change ourselves and in the process make a positive difference in other people’s lives.
• Only way to make a special place for your self is to improve yourself continuously. We don’t need to have a concrete goal to attain, but if we strive to be better than what we were last day and keep improving day by day, that makes a huge difference in terms of progress we make. This is what I have learnt.
• I sometimes feel very sad and almost feel no sympathy for people who squander their precious nature given gifts and privileges like health, people, wealth etc. Like some great person said our body is our temple. It is like disrespecting everything you have in life if we cannot take right care of our body. Remember that what we give is what we get, same is applicable to our health and lifestyle. If we treat our body and mind well, they will look after our wellbeing . But majority of us neglect and ill-treat our body until it turns against us.
• Besides hard work It needs discipline, dedication, consistency, focus, a strict routine and regime which builds ‘No excuses’ mindset to achieve anything in life. Having a right and well guided fitness routine helps you in achieving all these traits for our wellbeing which in turn supports you in taking good care of your people and contributing something to society.
• Be a doer, don’t wait. Do it for your health, your family, do it so that you will get mentally strong and healthy. Transforming yourself physically will transform your mental strength. A healthy body leads to a healthy mind. A healthy motivated mind will always do better for oneself and contributes positively to family and the society.

~Praveen Jada

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