(public domain image from www.pixabay.com)
In his book, Yoga For Physical Fitness, published in the early 1960s, American Yoga pioneer teacher Richard Hittleman offers this amazing but perhaps dated insight: "The sedentary worker knows that he is deficient in the exercise department because he is able to feel the results of his inactivity. The housewife is the supreme example of the person who believes she is getting all the exercise she needs - indeed, her complaint is that she usually geets a lot more than she needs. But the fact is that as a group, housewives are seriously deficient in true exercising (often more so than the sedentary workers because of the nature of housework). The housewife confuses the amount of activity with the type of activity. She fails to distinguish between just plain activity (housework) and the manipulation of the body that is true exercise. If the activities of housework (cleaning, shopping, child care and so forth) constituted true exercise, then we would not see the housewife tense, irritable, overweight, flabby, depressed and complaining of every type of soreness and pain."
This is an issue not only for the "housewife" but for many others who are engaged in physical activity because of their work. Just look at the laborers who work in your home or property: plumbers, electricians, gardeners, roofers. Though they're doing hard physical labor, many of them are over weight, in poor physical shape and all of them talk about pain and stiffness in their bodies. So, Hittleman makes a vitally important point saying it's not just any physical activity that leads to health but the proper "manipulation of the body."
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