With college apps completed, seniors have begun preparing for the upcoming class trip to Laguna Beach. Some students are making concerted efforts in their exercise and diet regimens prior to the trip.

Seniors Kedar Gupta, Peter Wu, Srivatsav Pyda, Aashish Jain, Rahul Shukla, Rishabh Nijhawan, Arnav Tandon and Shasvat Jawahar have been doing the “5 day split” workout at YMCA in Cupertino.

“Each day we do two sets of an ab workout and then we workout a specific body part, whether it be legs, arms, back, shoulders or chest, on a rotation,” Rahul said.

The students have been following this regimen since early January.

“One day I just saw Rahul, and I saw the dedication he had, and it just motivated me to just push myself and push my limits in a way that I didn’t think was possible,” Srivatsav said.

Many seniors are working out in order to achieve “abs for Laguna.” Rahul discussed methods for overcoming unhealthy habits while eating.

“You’ve got to think of the superior goal,” he said. “You think about that, and you can overcome any obstacle.”

Srivatsav drew inspiration from Rahul to overcome unhealthy eating habits and to be motivated when working out.

“Everytime that we eat, Rahul always makes me stick to my diet,” he said. “We try to cut down on carbs; a couple days ago we went to Mongolian Barbeque and I really wanted to get the noodles, but Rahul was like ‘no, noodles are carbs; you should be eating meat.’”

May Gao (12) has also begun working out in the past few weeks at ClubSport San Jose Health and Fitness Gym.

“I mainly just warm up with like cardio stairmaster and after that, I just do free weights and the weight machines,” she said.

May goes to the gym three to four times a week and spends one hour when she is alone and two hours when she is with her family. In order to stay within a caloric range, she sometimes uses the MyFitnessPal app to track intake.

“If you put in a lot of work to go to the gym, you don’t want to just counter that by eating unhealthily,” May said.

Rather than aiming to lose weight, May is aiming to be healthier and stronger and to “be able to do pushups properly.”

“I think the whole “flabs for laguna” thing is probably an influencing factor in what got me to look into working out, but now that I am, I just feel better doing it, and it’s not really about my appearance,” she said.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on March 28, 2017.