India Abroad - February 24, 2017

By Gretchen Reynolds

oga offers some obvi-
ous benefits: stress
reduction, muscular
flexibility, an
enhanced sense of
well-being, even cute
clothes. But does it qualify as
an aerobic workout?

Aerobic activity, characterized by an elevated heart rate and increase in the body’s use of oxygen, is closely linked to improved health and prolonged life spans; current guidelines suggest that people get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise each week. Scant research has examined whether yoga is exercise under those guidelines, though. Now two new studies in Complementary Therapies in Medicine indicate that it can be, at least if it’s done rapidly.

The practice of yoga in America typically consists of bodily poses interspersed with or followed by breathing exercises and meditation. The most famous movements are incorporated into the sun salutation, a series of poses that includes the downward-facing dog, among others. These are usually performed near the start of yoga classes and can be among their most physically demanding segments. Yet according to a 2016 review of yoga research, the energy expended by those who move slowly during sun salutations generally compares to the demands of a stroll at three miles per hour. (This was the case for both standard yoga and the poses used in Bikram-style hot yoga.)

Exercise scientists at the University of Miami wondered whether less-languid yoga would be more aerobically beneficial. They outfitted 22 healthy adult male and female volunteers with masks and sensors that measured energy expenditure and muscular activity and had them complete as many sun salutations as possible in eight minutes while taking either 12 seconds to hold and flow from pose to pose or three seconds. (The subjects had experience doing yoga.)

Not surprisingly, doing yoga
faster required greater effort
and burned far more calories:
about 48 calories on average
during the eight-minute ses-
sions, compared with 29 calo-
ries while doing the standard
salutations. But the researchers
were intrigued to find that
most of this exertion took place
in between poses rather than
during the poses themselves.
The salutations, particu-
larly when done three
times as fast, functioned
as intense interval train-
ing, says Joseph Signorile,
a professor at the
University of Miami and
the senior
author of the
studies.

Transitioning from
pose to pose was
similar to sprint-
ing, he says,
while the poses
allowed for brief
recovery. Eight
minutes of almost
any type of high-
intensity interval
training qualifies
as an aerobic work-
out. Of course,
most yoga classes
are not structured as
this experiment was.
Those seeking physi-
cal exertion should
look for classes billed
as “power” yoga,
according to Melanie
Potiaumpai, who led
both studies as a doc-
toral candidate in Dr.
Signorile’s lab.
Dr. Signorile
acknowledges yoga’s
nonaerobic virtues.
“We’re not saying that
you should ignore the
meditative side,” he says.
The guided contemplation
of body and self provides
significant psychological
benefits. But the energy
expended to achieve those
gains is about the same that
you would spend taking a
nap.

— The New York TImes

INDIA ABROAD February 24, 2017 33 HEALTH
INDIAABROAD.COM

Eight minutes
of almost
any type of
high-intensity
interval
training
qualifies as
an aerobic
workout

Two new studies in
Complementary
Therapies in
Medicine indicate
that it can be,
at least if it’s done

Does Yoga Qualify
as an Aerobic
Workout?

hotel to hire fewer people.

Bart Selman, a Cornell professor of computer science and artificial intelligence who studies how technology affects the workplace, said a service that scans all social media postings to develop a “sentiment report” showing how customers feel about a hotel brand, for example, has replaced people who do that kind of monitoring.

These types of services are
also getting better at discerning
the meaning of customer mes-
sages and
posts on
social
media, and
can respond
to them
appropriate-
ly, so fewer
people are
needed for
that task.
“There
are definitely jobs that we
thought we couldn’t automate
five years ago that we are
automating now, using tech-
nologies like natural language
processing and voice recogni-
tion,” he said.

“A lot of the motivation is
cost driven. So if companies can
get away with using a technolo-
gy, they will do it more and
more.”
Digital keys on phones could,
in turn, be replaced with hall-
way cameras and facial recogni-
tion software to unlock guest
room doors, he said.

Technology, of course, will not eliminate the human touch completely.

A new Skift.com report on travelers and the travel industry found that meaningful personal experiences are more likely than efficient transactions to lead to customer loyalty.

“The travel brands should strive to understand how the experiences they provide make travelers feel,” the report said.

“High tech has become the norm,” said Albert Herrera, senior vice president for global product partnerships at Virtuoso, a company whose website connects travelers with luxury travel advisers. “Hotels need to embrace it and manage it, but not forget why they are there.”

“Sometimes,” he added,
“there’s no substitute for a real
person who delivers their
expertise.”
— The New York TImes
senting former employees of
Walt Disney Co., Abbott
Laboratories and other com-
panies in discrimination
claims pertaining to tech-job
outsourcing.

Some economists are skeptical about the claimed lack of qualified workers, especially an oft-cited 500,000 open positions in technology that cannot be filled.

“I’m sure employers might not have as much choice as they would like, but if the shortage story were true, we’d see wages rising more rapidly than they are,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. There is substantial unemployment, Baker said, even among workers in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

Lawrence F. Katz, a prominent labor economist at Harvard, said companies like the H-1B visa program because it expands the pool of applicants. That means having to pay less in salary and retaining more control over employees.

“From the point of view of
an economist, there are two
big winners,” he added. “The
workers who come here with
H-1B visas and the companies
that employ them.”
While it remains to be seen
what Trump will do, various
members of Congress have
proposed measures to change
the H-1B system. One idea is
to raise the minimum salary
of an H-1B worker to $100,000

or more from the current
$60,000 minimum. The hope
is that this will narrow the gap
between the standard pay for
an American tech worker and
that of a foreign worker.
Another proposed measure
is to change the current first-
come, first-served lottery sys-
tem that is benefiting out-
sourcing firms. Yet another
idea is for a salary bidding
system, in which companies
bid on what they would be
willing to pay an applicant,
potentially making it more
difficult to flood the applicant
pool with lower-cost workers.
— The New York TImes
Not
Everyone in
Tech Cheers
Visa Program
for Foreign
Workers