BACK OF THE BOOK

Crunches, someone said, are the Cadillac of abdominal exercises. There's nothing to beat crunches if you really want to develop your abs, provided you do them with good form and technique. The plain vanilla crunch, done on the floor, can be tricky to perform though as many beginners make the mistake of bending their neck to achieve the movement instead of using the abs to curl up the upper body. If crunches are done with good technique, they can help strengthen your abs but as I have mentioned before, no matter how much you exercise your abdominal muscles, you cannot get a ripped, washboard mid-section without reducing your overall body fat. And, for that, you have to check your calorie intake (read diet) and burn calories through cardio-vascular exercise. So, great abs=exercises targeting your abs + a healthy diet + running/rowing/cycling or any other cardio routine. I know, it's a lot of things but did you think getting a six-pack was easy?

For this edition of Treadmill, I have an interesting exercise to stimulate your abs, the hanging leg raise. Grab and hold a high bar at shoulder or wider-than-shoulder width and hang from it. Now, raise your legs by flexing your knees until your hips are fully flexed-your knees should go as close as they can to your shoulders. Keep your back straight and do not swing from the bar as you do the exercise. At the top of the movement, hold for a second or two and then slowly extend your legs till waist, hips and knees are in a straight line once again. That's one repetition. You should try to do three sets of 10-12 reps. As the exercise gets easier to perform, hold a dumb-bell between your ankles or attach ankle weights before doing the raises. Remember, unless your waist is fully flexed, this exercise will not impact your abs and only your hip flexors will be affected.

A tougher variation of the hanging leg raise is one where you keep your legs straight at the knees and flex your waist till your legs are at a right angle to your torso. This is more effective than the bent knee hanging raise described above. My suggestion: begin with the bent knee raise and then slowly build in a set or two of the straight-leg version.

Most of us may have seen people at gyms doing an exercise called side-bends. You'll find hordes of people clutching dumb-bells or cables by their sides and bending sideways in an attempt to purportedly streamline their "love-handles" (you know the flabby parts at the sides of the waist). Here's my suggestion: don't do them. Well, not if you don't want a thick, square waist, heavy at the sides. These exercises unnecessarily build mass around the sides and defeat the purpose of abdominal exercises. If you have to get more defined oblique muscles (they run down the sides of your waist), do simple crunches where you can twist your torso (elbow to opposite knee) and alternate them between each side. Whatever exercise you choose for your abs, remember the cardinal rule: as soon as any exercise gets relatively easy to do, it means your muscles are getting used to them; that's when you have to make them tougher, either by adding weight or raising the difficulty level. On that potentially painful note, here's wishing you Happy Workouts!

-Muscles Mani
write to musclesmani@intoday.com

Caveat: The physical exercises described in Treadmill are not recommendations. Readers should exercise caution and consult a physician before attempting to follow any of these.

ALL ABOUT SLEEP DISORDERS

Studies show that one in three men and one in 10 women experience sleep disorder.

What Is It: It is a physical and psychological condition, wherein sleep is disturbed by abnormalities of specific sleep mechanisms. Sleep disorders are generally classified into one of three categories: insomnia (problems in initiation and maintenance of sleep); narcolepsy (excessive daytime sleep); and parasomnia (sleep walking, sleep talking, night terrors, etc.).

Causes: Sleep disorders are often associated with situational stress, illness, ageing, diet (e.g. caffeine, alcohol) and medications. "Night shift workers often experience sleep disorders, as they cannot sleep when they start to feel drowsy," says Dr Sanjay Manchanda, Sleep Medicine Consultant, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi.

Symptoms: Says Dr Manchanda: "Symptoms of sleep disorders include excessive daytime sleepiness, trouble falling or staying asleep, irritability, loud snoring, morning headaches, depression and leg cramps." Studies show that persistent insomnia can, but does not always, lead to clinical anxiety or depression.

Treatment: Treatment for sleep disorders depends on the cause.

Insomnia: "One must consume less caffeine, avoid exercising late in the evening, and engage in a regular relaxation routine before bedtime," says Dr Manchanda. For patients who are overweight, a weight loss programme can be helpful.

Narcolepsy: There is no cure for narcolepsy, but symptoms can be managed with medication. Stimulants can keep a person awake during the day, and anti-depressants can help the patient sleep better at night.

Parasomnia: Treatment by a sleep specialist is necessary. It might involve medical intervention with prescription drugs or behaviour modification through hypnosis or relaxation/mental imagery.

-Manu Kaushik

PRINTED CIRCUIT

Free And Comparable
The release of Open Office 2.0 has made a compelling case for free software. But is "free" software all it's cracked up to be?

Openoffice, or ooo to its fans, is actually nothing new. In 2000, I had played about with StarOffice (see StarOffice Heritage), a free downloadable office suite that tried to break the virtual monopoly of Microsoft Office in the space which is now defined as a Productivity Suite. StarOffice had a nice, light feel to it, but ultimately failed because it tried to do too much and really wasn't that useful. Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision in 1999, and in mid-2000, its code became open-source. However, a restrictive licence means that Sun still has ultimate control over the software. Thus, OpenOffice, much like the open-source Firefox browser, will always have an "official" release. But it will be free, in the sense that you will not have to pay for it.

But is OpenOffice worth chucking away that brontosauraus called ms Office, which is probably the biggest resource hog in your computer? Yes and no. Let me explain why. Which is the most successful open-source software to date? The answer is FireFox, a very nice, neat, infinitely alterable internet browser. It was successful because the market leader, Microsoft Internet Explorer (see a trend here?), had become so grotesquely massive and difficult to use. Why has Linux never taken off? Simple; it's terribly easy to set up if you have a BSc or BTech degree and love tinkering with your motherboard every two hours, but ordinary people don't get it. Plus, there is no one Linux anymore. At last count, there were close to 15 major releases and many of them don't work with each other. With Windows, you know that there is xp and okay, every second hacker in the world wants to break it, but it works normally.

Back to OpenOffice; why will it work? It will because several offices are running either antiquated versions of Office or have antiquated machines (with nowhere enough memory) to run the latest versions of the Microsoft behemoth. And Office is expensive, very expensive to licence. (It is the Redmond-based colossus' most profitable division). Then, OpenOffice has a look and feel disconcertingly similar to MS Office. And it runs almost all MS Office documents. Impress (the presentation software) does not have any pre-loaded templates (considerably bringing down the download size), but you can create your own templates rather easily. And the Open Document Format (ODF) is an XML-based format; that means these files will open on contemporary versions of MS Office, and Microsoft has dedicated support to XML-based formats even in the future; so a switch will not mean limiting yourself to a small user group.

Maybe because I'm so frightfully used to MS Office, I just couldn't switch over that easily, but there were some nice tools and tricks in the software that you appreciate. On Writer (the word-processing software), you can automatically save your document as a Portable Document File (PDF), and it does look very similar to MS Word, but in case you use this program, do remember to turn on Autosave. In fact, the software that impresses one the most is not the cornily named presentation software Impress (which does have a nifty export to Flash feature), but Calc, the spreadsheet software with an array of nifty features; making graphs on it is a breeze. However, to be totally honest, Google Spreadsheet, an online spreadsheet launched by the company, is actually better still.

And this makes you wonder about the future model for such software. In three years' time, will we need an Office suite on our hard drives at all? Or will high-speed internet access become so ubiquitous that we will operate not just online spreadsheets, but online word processors and online presentation tools all saved on online drives and rapidly transferred to colleagues online? A couple of years ago, people would have called me mad, but it isn't a pipe dream anymore.

But that sort of Productivity Suite environment is still two-three years away at the earliest. Until then, let's get back to OpenOffice, with its Writer, Calc, Impress, the three critical elements (Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation software, respectively). The other part you download when you go to OpenOffice.org (and you have to download the entire suite) is Base, a database creation and editing tool similar to Microsoft Access. There is also Math, a mathematical equation editor (quite a nifty tool for engineering types) and Draw, a vector graphics tool, which can create highly complicated flow charts rather easily.

I liked OpenOffice, but I do plan to remove it from my machine because I didn't find it as invigourating as FireFox; ms Office does the job fine for me and the built-in compatibility with ms Outlook is one reason why it is still numero uno.

Final analysis: OpenOffice is a decent replacement for ms Office if you are sick and tired of the massive bills you pay to licence the product, but if you like the fact that you can call up someone if something goes wrong, stick with ms Office. Customer service is a really nice thing!

-Kushan Mitra