After years in the gym training with weights I'm going to try out some home exercises, like hindu squats, that don't involve equipment.

It's suggested that exercises like hindu squats can assist in optimizing hormone levels, help strengthen your immune system and boost growth hormone levels. People think that growth hormone will make you grow bigger. Actually, it helps burn body fat. Something that I could do with.

Not that I'm obese, but I could lose a little, just to feel better about myself.

The Hindu Squats Goal

The goal at this point is to build up to 100 hindu squats. I'm not going to do it every day, that would be suicidal. I'll try for twice a week and take it up to 3 times a week. The gurus reckon they do 500 a day !!! YEAH RIGHT !! I'd like to see that....

It seems to be a good cardio workout as well. Cardio is a 4 letter word to me.

I Hate Cardio. But maybe this can be different. I can't jog or run because I get shin splints, I hate treadmills - BORING. I used to enjoy some of those cycle classes at the gyms, but gyms are expensive and I'm not paying that sort of money anymore.

So, hindu squats are the next adventure.

Strong Body, Strong Mind, Strong Spirit

People wonder why I go to all this effort to do this exercise. They just don't understand the discipline that I get from it.

This is an interesting except from a book I found about the old Indian Wrestlers that used to perform hindu squats amongst other exercises. It's written by an academic so it gets a bit deep, but the basic message is what is conveyed in the heading - Strong Body, Strong Mind, Strong Spirit - this is what I want from hindu squats.

"In Hindu philosophy the mind and the body are intrinsically linked to one another (cf. Staal 1983–1984; Zarrilli 1989). There is no sense of simple duality. In yoga, for instance, it is pointless to try to define where physical exercise ends and mental meditation begins. If one considers Gandhi’s adherence to yogic principles it is indeed difficult to draw any line between the physical, the mental, and the political.

The implications are significant. If exercise and regimens of fitness manifest themselves as ways of controlling the individual body, then in Hindu India one cannot have a disciplined body without also having a disciplined mind. In the context of Hindu schemes of discipline it is impossible completely to objectify the body. The end result of regimentation and disciplined exercise in India is therefore quite different from its Western counterpart. Rather than a “nightmare of totalization” where the body is subjected to a refined and detailed biomechanics of health and fitness, in India one has a situation where discipline endows the body/mind with a heightened sense of subjective experience and personal self-awareness. This is not to say that in India the individual experiences discipline as personal emancipation. In India, however, discipline is not simply manifest as an objectification of the body but equally as a subjectification of the self. This point may be elaborated and clarified through an example.

In American physical education and sport, strength is a purely physical phenomenon. It can be measured in objective terms: body mass, arm size, muscle-to-fat ratio, heart rate, weightlifting ability, and so forth. As such, strength is something that can be developed as purely somatic and as quantifiable and calibrated. While strength is also manifest as a physical attribute in India, it is, more significantly, linked to such ineffable cultural values as duty, devotion, and morality. It is neither purely somatic nor strictly quantifiable. A wrestler cannot be strong if he does not follow his guru’s mandate. He cannot be strong and indulge in sensual pleasure. Strength is manifest not only in the size of his arm but also in the sparkle of his eye and the luster of his skin, symbols that indicate spirituality, devotion, and moral control."

Alter, Joseph S. The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p104/