The science of movement isn’t really about VO2 max or lactate threshold or optimal training zones. HLF 2026 session explores the Physical, Mental, and Social Dimensions of Active Living, Naresh Nunna of Neo Science Hub, reports.
On Sunday (25th Jan, 2026) morning at Sattva Knowledge City, three experts gathered to discuss something deceptively simple yet profoundly challenging: getting people to move. “The Science of Movement and an Active Lifestyle,” presented in partnership with the Hyderabad Runners Society, brought together Dr. Rajat Chauhan (sports medicine physician and founder of La Ultra, the world’s highest ultra-marathon), Keerthana Swaminathan (sports psychologist and founder of INSPA), and Rajesh Vetcha (founder of Hyderabad Runners Society and race director of the NMDC Hyderabad Marathon). What emerged was not a celebration of elite performance but a searching examination of how movement transforms lives—and how we systematically prevent people, especially women and girls, from accessing that transformation.
The La Ultra Paradox
Dr. Chauhan opened with a story that defied conventional wisdom about achievement. For years, he refused entry to a persistent applicant for La Ultra, his brutal high-altitude ultra-marathon in Ladakh. The races range from 11 to 555 kilometers at elevations between 11,000 and 17,400 feet. “When something goes wrong in my place, it’s very simple. It’s black and white. No shades of grey. Either you’re alive or you’re dead,” he explained with stark honesty.
But eventually, after the applicant demonstrated sufficient preparation, Chauhan relented. The runner completed the 222-kilometer race, then returned for the 333-kilometer event—which he didn’t finish. At the finish line, he told Chauhan: “I’m so glad I now understand why you did not let me in when you did not.”
The revelation came from what Chauhan did next. He reduced the entry-level distance to 111 kilometers, and “Indians started participating, because for 111, they were qualifying.” Regular people—from the army, the air force, ordinary runners—began completing 111 kilometers, then 222, then 333. In 2019, an Indian became one of only three people in the world to complete 555 kilometers.
“That’s courtesy, lowering the bar rather than raising it,” Chauhan emphasized. “If you want to accomplish more, do less. The problem with us is to do what we do, we try to do more than we can’t even do. Start with less and get very far.”
It was a philosophy that would echo through the entire session: accessibility over aspiration, consistency over conquest, community over competition.
Rescuing Girls from Enforced Inactivity
If Chauhan’s La Ultra story challenged assumptions about achievement, his work with Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas demolished them entirely. These residential schools serve India’s most marginalized girls—from broken homes, minority backgrounds, families without homes. “They almost always won’t end up finishing school,” Chauhan noted matter-of-factly.
Working with a former student from Ashoka University, Chauhan developed “Run to Fly,” a program targeting girls in grades 5-8 in Mewat district, Haryana—”the most backward when you want to talk about things in life.”
The timing is deliberate. Chauhan identified three critical phases when women are systematically discouraged from physical activity. The first hits during puberty. “You’ve been playing with your cousins, your friends, your family, all this stuff. And things start changing… and you’re told not to play with them, and you’re impure, all that stuff, don’t go to the temples.”
“That’s the first phase, when you’re told not to move, by everyone. By so-called well-meaning people,” he said with evident frustration. “That fits in with the 10-12 year age, that’s about 5th or 6th class, or 7th class. All those world champions are now disappearing, courtesy that.”
The second phase is pregnancy, when even educated women face pressure to stop all activity. The third is perimenopause and menopause. “If you so far survived, now you do menopause.”
Run to Fly intervenes during the first critical phase. The program’s efficiency is remarkable: Chauhan spends approximately 10 hours per year training 3-4 older girls, who then train younger students. “3,000-4,000 girls have gone through the program,” he reported. The evaluation focuses not on athletic performance but on confidence, self-perception, academic performance, and ambition.
“They dream about becoming a constable, they dream about becoming a nurse,” Chauhan explained. “What I’ve changed for them is, hey, I’m a doctor, I go to an IPS [Indian Police Service]. Why don’t you plan becoming a doctor or a surgeon? Why don’t we actually try and think about becoming the IPS officer, why only a constable?”
The transformation isn’t measured in race times. “Medals are way overrated,” Chauhan stated bluntly. “They don’t change a thing. Most medal winners in front of me when they sit, I’ve seen their arrogance, I’ve seen them being such pain in everyone else’s back as well.”
The Psychology of Starting Small
Keerthana brought the neuroscience perspective to the discussion of incremental progress. “When you do something, that’s where you start with something small. Because when you start something very big, sometimes there are some challenges.”
The brain rewards completion. Start with a 5K, then a 10K. “What actually happens is that you are tricking your brain to say that you have done so much, you can do it. Just one more kilometre, just one more kilometre and that’s it.”
She shared a personal anecdote: “There was once a time when I wanted to stop running. Can you think of why? Because I said just one more, one more. I ended up doing it. I took a look at my watch and I said, I need to stop right now.”
The mechanism is powerful but requires careful management. Chauhan interjected with a caution born from treating injuries: “Be careful when you’re starting off. We get into the zone of, hey, doesn’t this feel good? Initially, when you’re starting, it’s very important. Try and feel it. Be very disciplined about that. Because you can get very carried away.”
His concern is practical: “The difference between the two of us is, I’m the guy who sees people getting hurt. I would rather have you run it for another 70 years.”
Community as Infrastructure
When the moderator asked about community-building experiences, Keerthana described her current running group—four women with hectic travel schedules who post every workout to a private group chat. “Whichever part of the world we are in, every time we finish a run or a strength training or a yoga session or whatever we finish, we end up definitely posting it on our group where only four of us are there.”
The accountability works. “Even if we’ve had a hard day… I would still get up and do something. I’d either go for a walk or find a way to go for a run, something or the other. And it really motivates, just to see other people doing.”
Her advice was practical: “Start small. Definitely start small. Don’t do something overwhelming.”
Walk With Your Parents
Chauhan’s most moving initiative emerged from grief. His mother passed away in 2019, leaving him with profound guilt. “I wish I could have spent a couple of more minutes with her.”
On what would have been her first birthday after her death—January 5, 2020—he organized “Walk With Your Parents” at Delhi’s Aerocity. He expected modest turnout for the free event arranged on short notice. Over 500 people showed up—parents, children, grandchildren, grandparents.
“The feedback was, it was amazing, some of them were connecting with their parents and their children after 20 odd years. They had not spent quality time… just being there, not even talking, and they realized how important that part is.”
His prescription: “Call that parent, call that child, figure out that holiday where it’s just about you and me… to connect, sometimes you need to disconnect, put that phone down, because this is the biggest enemy you make.”
The Insanity Question
An audience member—himself a marathon runner—asked the session’s most uncomfortable question: “What are physical and mental benefits that we get by running longer and longer and longer… And second, what is the bare minimum that is enough?”
Chauhan’s answer was characteristically direct: “If you do the 7 or 10 kilometers, you’re doing enough. After that, it’s about madness. It’s because you’re addicted to it, you love it, all that. There’s no need.”
The moderator interjected with humor: “It’s not IQ—Intelligence Quotient. It’s Insanity Quotient.” To someone running 10K, a half-marathon seems insane. To the half-marathoner, a full marathon is insane. “And then it just goes on.”
But Keerthana offered a more nuanced perspective on the mental benefits of extreme distances. “When you are training your mind to get a better stress threshold… you are already getting it. But what happens when you run a 42 or a 21 because it is so physically challenging, you are telling or you are trying to tell your mind how to expand those limits.”
The training itself becomes mental discipline. “Even when you go to those interval runs, maybe physically you are able to do it, but mentally, you give up, you want to give up… So even that is about you talking to yourself. Are you able to be in control of your mind?”
A 42-kilometer run takes four hours or more. “It’s a long time for your mind to keep quiet… And that is where your mind plays a lot of tricks. And it’s more about controlling your mind.”
She also normalized the questioner’s feelings: “Please don’t beat yourself up that it’s changing. Usually our priorities and our goals keep changing at every aspect of our life.”
COPD, Stairs, and Strength
The session concluded with practical questions. A senior citizen with COPD asked about running advisability and building muscle mass, plus a common concern: “Don’t go down the stairs, because it affects your knees, but it’s better to go up.”
Chauhan clarified: “For a healthy person, there’s no pain. Carry on. Please carry on. But… if you don’t have enough stability, if you don’t have enough strength, going up is easier musculoskeletal-wise, injury-wise, versus coming down.” More injuries happen running downhill because each step is a brake.
On COPD: “Start breathing. Don’t be in a position like that. Be more upright. Start breathing… Get those ribs moving for you, get the spine moving, do the spine mobility exercise to improve COPD.”
The muscle mass and COPD questions connected: “Strength training is very important because if the muscles are working right in your spine, in your chest, if the front is not tight and the back is not weak, and your lower back is not weak and your legs are not weak, it’s helping your COPD.”
His reassurance: “You can start strength training at any age. Just start with small exercises.”
Beyond the Finish Line
The session embodied its theme: movement as medicine, community as infrastructure, incremental progress as the path to transformation. Not the mythology of marathon heroes or ultra-endurance achievements, but the unglamorous daily practice of putting one foot in front of the other.
Chauhan’s work with marginalized girls in Mewat. Keerthana’s group chat accountability. Vetcha’s community-building through Hyderabad Runners Society. Walk With Your Parents. Lowering the bar to help people go further. These weren’t about producing champions; they were about resisting the systematic forces—cultural, economic, physiological—that tell people, especially women, to be still.
As the session concluded, the message was clear: The science of movement isn’t really about VO2 max or lactate threshold or optimal training zones. It’s about creating conditions where people can access what their bodies already want to do—move, explore, challenge themselves, connect with others. The rest is just insanity quotient.
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