Cardiovascular work is very important. But many people have it the wrong way. Cardiovascular health is when the blood flows and circulates very easily but the heart hardly has to beat. Many people, especially in Australia, shorten and abbreviate words and by calling ‘cardiovascular exercise’ simply ‘cardio’ this puts the emphasis in the wrong place.

The emphasis should be on the ‘vascular’ (i.e. move blood through the blood vessels) and not the ‘cardio’ (make the heart work).

Fit healthy people can exercise, do lots of work and run fast without their heart rate increasing much. That is one definition of being fit and healthy. With good cardiovascular health, with good circulation and with healthy ‘exercise’ you should be able to quickly become warm in the cold weather, and easily stay cool in the hot weather. Good circulation should give calming useful energy while breathing less and eating less than normal and make the blood flow easily without the heart racing.

Five things retard blood flow and healthy circulation.
1. Too much stretching or unbalanced posture
2. Too much muscle tension or tissue compression
3. Too much breathing (hyperventilation)
4. Too much thinking (especially mental stress)
5. Too much eating

There are 12 ways to move blood through the body. The least effective way to move blood is the heart. This is why the yogis of india used to say that ‘a yogi counts his life not by the number of years they live but by the number of beats their heart makes and the number of breaths they take’. These 12 ways of moving blood, many of which healthy people do naturally but are actually the secrets of real hatha yoga, are elucidated in our book and online courses available in our online shop.