The Kaizen Way (Yoga in Heston & Hounslow)

19 Nov The Kaizen Way (Yoga in Heston & Hounslow)

When we realise something about us or our life isn’t the way we want it to be we usually grit our teeth and tell ourselves we are going to completely change our lives.

We try to make radical and sweeping changes which at first work with the help of a lot of willpower but after a few weeks it all fizzles out and we end up back where we started. Gyms are full of people in January but not so much by February.

Kaizen is the opposite. It involves small steps, so small that we can’t fail. Kaizen means small continual improvement.

I highly recommend a wonderful book on Kaizen by Dr Robert Maurer called “One small step can change your life”.

In the book Dr Maurer writes of a woman who hated exercise but realising how important it was for her health decided she had to incorporate exercise into her life and she used Kaizen to achieve this.

She went out and bought a treadmill with the intention of running on it for 30 minutes every day just before she ate her breakfast. Normally she would spend these 30 minutes reading the newspaper.

Instead of just throwing herself straight into thirty minutes of running a day which she knew she wouldn’t be able to sustain she tried a different approach. She used Kaizen.

For the first week she read her newspaper for 30 minutes every morning while standing on the treadmill. Her mind and body got used to going to the treadmill and staying there for 30 minutes every morning.

In the second week she read her newspaper on the treadmill for 29 minutes and ran on the treadmill for just 1 minute.

In the third week she read her newspaper for 28 minutes and ran for 2 minutes.

After thirty one weeks she had achieved her goal of running 30 minutes every day and it had felt easy. It had also become a habit and required virtually no willpower. In that time her attitude to exercise had changed and she became someone who enjoyed running and often took part in charity runs!

The second limb of Yoga as described by Patanjali contains a concept called tapas. Tapas means doing what you don’t want to do. It involves pushing on the boundaries of your comfort zone and constantly challenging yourself. Kaizen is excellent and gentle way of doing this successfully and bringing about lasting change.