बलोपासना
Samarth Ramdas (1606–1682) taught that a weak body cannot carry a serious life. The tradition that grew around him put a Hanuman temple and a wrestling pit in the same courtyard, and treated push-ups and prayer as one discipline rather than two.
This page collects those practices — what they are, how to begin them safely, and which of the famous claims about them are history and which are affection added later.
Literally the worship of strength — treating physical capability as something owed, not optional.
Ramdas's argument was practical rather than aesthetic: devotion, study and public duty all need a body that can carry them, and a person too weak to act is of no use to anyone regardless of what they believe. Strength was framed as preparation for service.
The institutional form of this was the Hanuman temple. Ramdas is credited with establishing temples across Maharashtra where the courtyard doubled as an akhada — a training ground where young men wrestled and drilled. Hanuman is the obvious patron: enormously strong and entirely in service of someone else.
The salutation to the sun — the practice most associated with his name, and the one with the most complicated history.
A continuous cycle moving the spine through forward folds and backbends while the shoulders, hips and legs take turns bearing weight, breath tied to each movement. It warms the whole body, needs no equipment and no more floor than your own height. As a single daily practice covering mobility, light strength and breath together, very little else competes with it.
The Hindu push-up — the akhada's upper-body staple, and not really a push-up at all.
From a downward-dog position with hips high, you sweep the chest down and through close to the floor and rise into a cobra with the arms straight and the hips low, then push the hips back up and return. Where a Western push-up is a straight line moving up and down, a dand is an arc: it trains the shoulders through a much larger range and adds a spinal wave the flat version has no equivalent for.
The Hindu squat — the conditioning engine of the whole tradition.
A fast, rhythmic squat: heels lift, knees travel forward over the toes, arms swing to counterbalance, and you come straight back up without pausing. It is closer to a locomotive drill than a strength lift — done in the hundreds it becomes a conditioning tool that leaves most cardio machines looking dull, and it builds real tolerance in the knees and ankles through a deep range.
The mace — Hanuman's own weapon, and the most distinctive implement in the akhada.
A heavy head on a long handle, swung behind the back and over the shoulder in an arc. Because the weight sits far from the hands, a modest mace feels enormous — the leverage, not the mass, is the training effect. It builds the shoulders, upper back and grip in rotation and overhead, which is precisely the range most modern training neglects, and it teaches the trunk to resist twisting.
The point all the drilling served.
The conditioning existed for wrestling. Training took place on prepared earth, and the day included preparing the pit itself — digging and turning the soil — alongside running, rope climbing, carrying, and the long grinding sets of dands and baithaks. Diet was plain and enormous: milk, ghee, almonds, chana. The whole arrangement was residential and communal; you trained where you lived, with the people you would wrestle.
The half that makes it a discipline rather than a workout.
Ramdas's own instrument here was recitation. The Manache Shlok — verses addressed directly to one's own mind — are still learned by heart in Maharashtra, and the practice is exactly that: say them daily until they are yours, then let them argue with you. His Dasbodh is the longer work, dictated over years, on how to live and act in the world.
Alongside it: steady breathing, a period of sitting, and namasmarana — repetition of the name — as something done while walking or working rather than only on a cushion.
Deliberately small. The tradition's advantage was daily repetition over years, and nothing here should leave you unable to repeat it tomorrow.
| Day | Practice |
|---|---|
| Mon | 6 Surya Namaskar · 3 × 10 dand · 3 × 25 baithak · 5 min breathing |
| Tue | Walk or run 30 min · 10 min sitting and recitation |
| Wed | 6 Surya Namaskar · gada technique, light, 4 × 10 each side |
| Thu | Walk · 10 min sitting |
| Fri | 8 Surya Namaskar · 3 × 10 dand · 4 × 25 baithak · 5 min breathing |
| Sat | Something carried, dragged or climbed · outdoors |
| Sun | Rest. Recitation only. |
Ramdas attracts a lot of affectionate attribution. None of it makes the practices less worth doing, but it is worth knowing which is which.
Indian tradition links the sun salutation to Ramdas, and some form of sun veneration with movement is genuinely old. But the specific twelve-position sequence practised today was structured in the 1920s by Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi, the Raja of Aundh, who popularised it and had it taught in schools. What you practise is his arrangement, whatever its ancestry.
The story of Ramdas as spiritual guide to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is the best-known thing about him, and historians treat it with caution. Ramdas's own works — the Dasbodh and the Manache Shlok — do not mention Shivaji at all, despite discussing righteous war at length. Shivaji's own administrative records and letters do not name Ramdas as his guru; where early influences are credited, they go to his mother Jijabai and to Dadoji Kondadev. The guru narrative appears in the bakhars, Marathi chronicles composed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well after both men were dead.
This does not diminish either figure. It does mean the familiar framing — that the saint supplied the philosophy behind the kingdom — is a later reading rather than a documented fact.
1,200 Surya Namaskars a day for Ramdas; 3,000 dands and 5,000 baithaks for the wrestler Gama. The first is a traditional account of a saint's discipline. The second is a report about a full-time professional at the height of a fifty-year career. Both are there to convey seriousness, and neither is a programme.