Fitness freak Tollywood celebs dish out workout inspirations

When it comes to flexing their muscles, let it not be said that Bengal’s finest film stars lag behind their counterparts elsewhere. Tollywood actors are flaunting their eight-pack abs and showing off their perfectly-chiseled athletic physiques, while their leading ladies are also making sure they’re in shape for the spotlight. Ever wondered about Indraneil Sengupta’s sculpted frame or the workout schedule that lay behind Jeet’s eight packs? Or would you like to know how Koel Mullick stays slim and Paoli Dam curvy? It doesn’t come easy. Each of these actors slugs it out for a minimum of three days a week, incorporating everything from yoga to karate into their fitness sessions, and has a strictly regulated diet. Here’s a look at what lies behind those fantastic frames.

Tota Roy Chowdhury never wanted to look like a beef chop. “I prefer the athletic look to the blown up, gym-manufactured one,” he says and trains himself for an hour a day, six days a week. His schedule is a methodical mix of functional strength training, metabolic training, martial arts and balance training, with separate days reserved for each. While two days of functional strength training have Roy Chowdhury targeting all his muscle groups, but with varying exercises, metabolic training has him following the Tabata Protocol.

This prescribes a cycle of 20 seconds of intense cardio-vascular activity followed by 10 seconds of rest, which the actor has converted into a two-minute, one-minute cycle. One day a week is set aside for martial arts training and balance training, stretching and foam rolling (a form of stretching that loosens the muscles. A foam roller is a cylinder of foam that is rolled under the muscles.) for loosening up the muscles.

She doesn’t want to downsize her curvaceous frame when she hits the gym— toning it was her priority in the beginning. “I try to work out at least four times a week,” she says. The session could take anything between 20 and 90 minutes. “The 20-minute circuit training is extremely challenging,” says Dam. While core training is mandatory in every workout, she does upper and lower-body exercises on alternate days. She takes up multi-joint exercises, which increases her flexibility.

When it all started anyone would have been able to identify with Payal Sarkar’s gym graph. It would soar for three months before nose-diving into a period of inertia, then pick up pace again. But in recent past, the petite actor has been a regular at gyms, sweating it out for an hour, at least four days a week. She divides her schedules into three days of cardiovascular training and abdominal workouts, alternating with three days of strength training.

Srabanti, who went from being petite to plump (she once weighed 70kg), could well be the poster girl for weight-loss programs. “I dieted a lot,” says the actor who later underwent the VLCC slimming treatment. She works out twice a day, an hour each time, 6 days a week. In addition to the daily dose of cardio — 30 minutes on the arc trainer and 20 minutes on the treadmill — she exercises different parts of her body on separate days.

“I never, ever wanted to be a size zero,” says Koel. The petite actress began working out regularly from 2010, sweating it out for two hours daily — six days a week. She then brought it down to 75-90 minutes, three to four times a week. Beginning the workout with cardio —running and jogging on the treadmill and cycling — she moves on to exercising two body parts, side bending, yoga and working on her abs. During shoots in other locations, she does free hand exercises in the hotel room.

Six packs are passé. They just don’t match up to the eight-pack ab, especially when you have actors like Jeet flaunting them. When his workout isn’t “target driven”, Jeet gyms for 45 to 90 minutes, four to five days a week. “I don’t do intense cardio,” says the actor, who does a split routine workout, which focuses on two to three muscle groups each day. During tours, he packs a resistance band or free weights into his luggage.