Why puts? If you think the market is going down you should buy calls, not puts, on bear funds (I assume you refer to funds that have a short position on the underlying).
vol on levered ETFs tends to be extremely overpriced so I'd remain hesitant on buying puts on these 3x bear funds. moreover with 3x leverage, overtime you have to deal with the lovely statistical issue of autocorrelation.
Problem is, as the bear funds drop as the market recovers, those put options are going to see their IV plummet, and the options won't go up nearly as much as you'd hoped. I usually trade long options, but for the past two weeks they've been too expensive so I've gone long in bull funds like FAS.