It’s amazing how often the exercises that Mr Desikachar taught us turn out to be so beneficial and so intelligent from a physiological point of view, when as far as I know he never had any formal study of physiology. I’ve recently been working my way through the late Dr Michael Mosley’s book Just One Thing and I came to his chapter on Eccentric Exercise. Mosley tells us, for example, the walking downstairs is, in it’s own way, as much if not more challenging than walking upstairs. Mosley quotes a study by Tony Kay, professor of biomechanics at the University of Northampton. Subjects were divided into two groups; one group was instructed to keep walking downstairs and take a lift up and the other gr
oup to always walk upstairs and take lifts down. The downstairs walking group improved their muscle strength by twice as much, as those who’d been told to walk upstairs.
What Mr Desikachar taught us was something he called dynamic uttānāsana. That is to say, raise your arms when standing, breathe in, and bend forward, keeping your arms lifted as long as possible, breathing out slowly all the while. This exercise sounds simple, but many people will need to start by bending forwards only as far as resting the hands on a chair or the knees (see illustration), or by resting the back of one hand in the lower back and working with one arm raised only, in order to provide a more gradual introduction for the muscles of the back. Adding an ‘oo’ sound to your out-breath will help to prolong it and will encourage your abdominal muscles to support your low back.
But this is not the only way that Mr Desikachar got things right. In an early chapter on Intelligent Exercise, Dr Mosley reported research by Prof Damien Bailey at the University of South Wales. Apparently, “the action of moving your body up and down against resistance seems to be particularly effective at stimulating blood flow to a part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.” Keeping your arms lifted in line with your body, except for a brief rest between exhale and inhale movements, adds the necessary resistance element. So, Mr Desikachar’s dynamic uttānāsana will not only gradually strengthen your back, but help to maintain or improve your memory. Not bad, eh, for such a simple exercise?
