This article is more than 7 months old
Devi Sridhar
Forget snake yoga. All it takes to increase your life expectancy is factoring a set of simple exercises into your weekly routine
Are you still keeping up with your 2026 resolution to exercise the last thing on your mind. Whatever it is, social media is alight with fitness influencers showing off all kinds of bizarre and viral exercise trends.
Take squats, a core exercise move. Those don’t seem good enough any more, so now we have Zercher squats (holding a barbell in your elbow crease like a metal baby), squats on vibration plates, squats while throwing a heavy ball and on and on. Some of these exercises may in fact be good, some useless, but because influencers can’t be seen to be doing the same thing every day, the key thing is that they’re novel and can be sold as “the little-known secret exercise that everyone should be doing”.
Then there’s adding a gimmick to an existing exercise. There’s goat yoga, puppy yoga and – my favourite new trend from the US –
<p>Here’s my public health take: fear of snakes is rational.
