Efficient Enlightenment: 7 Tim Ferriss Principles Applied To The Ancient Practice Of Yoga

Since the publication of The 4-Hour Workweek in 2007, New York Times bestselling author Tim Ferriss has been provoking his fiercely loyal readership to challenge assumptions, question popular beliefs and seek out unconventional ways to live a richer and more fulfilled life. His approach involves deconstructing complex topics, and then demonstrating the simplest and most effective way to accomplish extraordinary things.

Tim Ferriss has applied his trademark framework to many areas of health and fitness, including how to prevent fat gain while bingeing, gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days and 4 hours total gym time, go from running 5km to 50km in 12 weeks and add 150+ pounds to your lifts. Could yoga, a discipline that is characterised by surrendering and going with the flow, stand up to the same level of scrutiny?

Efficient Yoga

Optimised, productive, methodical and systematic are not words that are often associated with yoga but I would argue that they should be. With more than 20 million practitioners in the United States, the time has come to hold yoga’s feet to the fire. Here are 7 ways to apply the principles Tim Ferriss teaches in the 4-Hour canon to establishing a consistent, effective and efficient home yoga practice.

1. Optimise Your Body

In an episode of his podcast, Tim Ferriss uses the metaphor of a racing car to explain why the physical body is the focus of so much of his work:

“The car itself, the vehicle, is the physical body upon which everything is predicated. People tend to have this Cartesian separation of mind and body but at the end of the day you have certain levels of neurotransmitters that are produced at a certain rate, depleted at a certain rate, and that is the rate-limiting step in your mental performance. So if you want to have better levels of working memory, sustained attention and so on, you can optimise those by optimising the car, ie. the body. You can use exercise to improve the production of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Growth Factor and all these things that are very very interesting.”

Yoga is a great tool, as part of a well-formulated training program, for improving health in both body and…