Many of my students, including myself, use yoga so that we can enjoy a host of other fun pursuits like mountain biking, golf or running.
The are seven Fundamental Movements that humans have done since time began and they are a great indicator of how well you will age, how long you will live and the robustness of your mental health. These are movements we do in every yoga class.
We squat, we hinge, we lunge, we push, we pull and we twist.
Over a period of 30 years, Harvard researchers tracked 111,000 adults and discovered that exercise variety is an independent lever for longevity.
Participants who engaged in the widest diversity of physical movements showed a 19 per cent lower risk of early death compared to those who stuck to just one style of movement, even when the total time spent exercising was the same.
By training the seven fundamental movements, you unlock the exact cross-disciplinary variety.
In the Blue Zones – regions where people routinely live past 100, with fabulous mental health (Okinawa, Sardinia and Nicoya), people don’t spend hours at the gym (or yoga class) and their longevity results from using these fundamental movements in daily life.
They live and walk in hilly areas (lunging, squatting).
They perform daily task like kneading bread and chopping wood (pushing, pulling, and rotating) and spend hours gardening and tending their crops (hinging and squatting).
So come and join us in yoga class. Using these seven movements we “train for longevity”!
