Tenets of a Healthy Life

While taking a stroll through our neighborhood mall last week, we realized that one of the anchor stores, Sears, is closed down. Oh yeah! It’s one of the 1500 Sears stores closed since 2013! A retail giant, Amazon of the 20th century is on death bed. A company which at one point enjoyed a revenue equivalent to 1% of US GDP, which pioneered services like the mail-order catalog has lost its luster in the wake of the new online shopping spree! A stark reminder of the fact that businesses not only need strength and stamina but they equally need flexibility.

Microsoft on the other hand was faltering in the early part of this decade, but under Satya Nadella’s leadership, they showed the flexibility to invest in the Cloud Business and are now seeing its fruition.  Startups on the other side are very flexible, but without core product strength and the stamina to showcase quarter over quarter growth, many of them don’t see the IPO light.

The trio, strength, stamina and flexibility is important in all walks of life, from war to politics, business to personal relationship and physical and mental health. When we are young, we are more flexible; the level of flexibility goes down as we grow and mature. We need to strike a right balance of these three tenets, no one in isolation is good enough!

Various techniques like meditation and Sadhana (a practice of telling positive, reinforcing words to the subconscious mind) help in building mental strength, stamina and flexibility.

On the physical capabilities side, bodybuilders concentrate on the strength part, without giving due weightage to the other two parts. Whereas many athletes focus on strength and stamina; ignoring to a large part, the flexibility. No wonder there are a lot of sports injuries, could be resulting from overuse of strength or under preparedness on flexibility. Make sure your physical trainer has a balanced exercise routine for you which blends in all three aspects, not just one or two.

It’s a misconception that women need to be flexible and men need to be strong. It’s true that generally women are more flexible and men are little more stronger. Over last few thousand years, men typically performed tasks which required more strength, for example, hunting, tilling, farming etc, whereas women performed more activities which required and developed flexibility, however, both genders require all these three aspects for a healthy life.

And well, humans have been walking on 2 legs for millenia, so naturally our bodies are geared towards or should I say, formed using this form of exercise. Modern day studies do bring up the benefits of walking, including lower blood pressure, longer life etc. If you look at the cause and effect relationship, where the cause is that we have been walking for thousands of years, the effect, walking as the best exercise, can be easily explained.

Walking builds lower body strength and stamina, while Sun Salutations (Surya Namaskar) build upper body strength and flexibility. If you need a balanced exercise, there is no better form than to combine these two and embed them in your daily routine.

The above video shows all the positions of Surya Namaskar. Make sure you hold each of the positions for 3-4 seconds. 12-18 Surya Namaskar (about 10-15 minutes) and 4-5 kms of walking a day will give you the exercise your personal trainer cannot refuse! Best part of walking that much is that you can perform chores while doing the exercise!

Whether you want to get in shape or you are already in shape, these two forms of exercise will give you the benefit for years to come. You can tune the amount of the exercise based on your needs and abilities.

If you want to get in shape, be sure to start with exercise first rather than starting with controlling your diet as the former is a positive cycle whereas the latter is a negative one. If you eat less, you will feel less energetic to exercise and then you will eat even less. Instead, if you exercise, you will feel more energetic and yes, hungry. Controlling diet at that time will provide you long term benefits.

One more important aspect of healthy life is Rest. Before the advent of light bulb, TV and other gadgets and of course the internet, humans used to get home by dusk, have dinner, spend time with family and friends, and have 8-9 hours of sleep before ushering in the next morning. Now that the forms of social connection and entertainment have changed and also because of the stretched working hours, we stay up late thereby denying our bodies the sleep hours that it needs and is accustomed to over generations. The sleep requirement might have dropped to 7-8 hours, but it's not a healthy habit to deprive ourselves of even that much sleep.