Carnival is finished and you had the time of your life. You trained hard, watched your diet and you looked fabulous for the two-day festival. On Carnival Tuesday night you could not wait to sink your fangs into a juicy beef roti and some fried chicken. This was your reward for all the hard training and rabbit food that you had to endure in the pre-Carnival season. Carnival is a show and you were on T&T’s biggest stage, so naturally you would want your body to be at its best.

In my years of training people, I have never heard of anybody playing mas who wanted their body to look bad. However, what are we to read into this? You want to look good for Carnival and don’t mind looking like crap for the rest of the year? It is truly amazing how some people abruptly stop training as soon as the festivities are over. Granted, you may not be able to hold the training intensity you had in the pre-Carnival season: however, that does not mean you should abandon your training routine and allow your body to go back to being mush.

Maintenance training
Despite what you may think, the body does not require that amount of work to keep it reasonably healthy and fit. Your first priority should always be your cardiovascular system—heart, arteries etc. Stimulate your cardio-system with some sort of aerobic training (running, Tae-bo etc), at least three to four times a week for about 40 minutes each session. To exercise your heart properly, make sure your heart rate stays elevated into its training zone in each session. To calculate your training zone use the Karvonen or Cooper’s Formula (you can e-mail me for it). Performing High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is another way to make your cardio work out exciting while ensuring that you burn nine times more body fat than conventional cardio workouts. In addition to your cardio work, engage in some form of weight training at least three times per week. This will keep your joints strong and ensure you maintain your muscle tone.

Diet maintenance
While I am sure that coming off carbs before Carnival did a lot to dramatically reduce your waistline, this is not a healthy practice to adopt for the rest of the year. When you come off of carbs completely, you are going to end up ingesting more protein, which could put undue stress on your kidneys. I am not saying that you should use bad carbs such as French fries, sweets, etc; I am saying that you should be selective in your carbohydrate intake and use foods like sweet potatoes, brown rice, dasheen, etc, as your source of carbohydrates. These foods carry low glycemic index ratings and won’t trigger an insulin rush. As a son of the soil, show the rest of the world that Trinis don’t only have good bodies at Carnival time. If they visit us at Easter or Christmas, “it doh matter”, same body. Keep training.

By Brian Chin Leung