© Anindito Mukherjee
A young boy in Delhi, India looks pretty comfortable in this posture.
Sentences that start with the phrase "A guru once told me..." are, more often than not, eye-roll-inducing. But recently, while resting in
malasana, or a deep squat, in an East London yoga class, I was struck by the second half of the instructor's sentence: "A guru once told me that the problem with the West is they don't squat."
This is plainly true. In much of the developed world, resting is synonymous with sitting. We sit in desk chairs, eat from dining chairs, commute seated in cars or on trains, and then come home to watch Netflix from comfy couches. With brief respites for walking from one chair to another, or short intervals for frenzied exercise, we spend our days mostly sitting. This devotion to placing our backsides in chairs makes us an outlier, both globally and historically. In the past half century, epidemiologists have been forced
to shift how they study movement patterns. In modern times, the sheer amount of sitting we do is a separate problem from the amount of exercise we get.
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