You got to use it lest you lose it
by VITHAL C NADKARNI
SIXTY years ago, the secret of healthy longevity came to Jerry Morris in the guise of a British double-decker bus. The war had just ended and nobody could figure out why alarming number of people were dying of heart attack. That's when the 99-year-old epidemiologist noticed the striking difference in the mortality rates among bus drivers and conductors. Substantially more drivers were dying than conductors, he told a Financial Times interviewer: "The drivers were prototypically sedentary and the conductors were unavoidably active." The conductors had to go up and down as many as 500 to 750 steps on a bus per day and were half as likely to die of a sudden heart attack as their colleagues behind the wheel.
A similar "use-it-or-lose- it" message came from studies of postal workers: those who delivered mail by bike or on foot suffered fewer heart attacks than sorters and telephone clerks. Exercise was a universal for health.
Since then, Dr Morris's epiphany has been verified many times round the world. The latest study from Israeli researchers, for example, confirms that exercise benefits even the oldest of the old. More heartening, even the oldest goldies, who'd never exercised, got eye-popping benefits but only as long as they worked out.
This accords exactly with what Swami Svatvarama says in his medieval yoga manual Hathayoga-Pradipika : "Everybody — from the youngest to very oldest, even most diseased and feeble — benefits from yoga. But you have got to use it or you will lose it."
That is why Sri BKS Iyengar, arguably the world's most celebrated yoga guru, continues to practice vigorously even at ninety-two. "Because of age I have increased the timings in the advanced poses of my practice," he told your columnist last week in Pune.
"I can thus clearly appreciate Sage Patanjali's definition of asana as that which brings stability (sthiram) and ease (sukham). Now, I see in each asana the perfect freshness and firmness of body, the alert steadiness of intellect and the sweet benevolence of the self."
Iyengar, however, clarifies that what he practices is more difficult than what he did in his youth or when he struggled to learn: "Today it is a big fight between the body and the mind. Believe me after a certain age, doing asana and pranayama is very hard. That's all the more reason to persist. If I surrender to the will of the body, I am no longer a yoga practitioner."
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