Ayurveda is more conservative about exercise than modern fitness culture, and more precise. The classical measure of enough is half of your capacity — the point at which sweat appears on the forehead and the nose, breathing moves to the mouth, and the limbs feel light. Past that, the texts say, exercise stops building and starts depleting.
But the ceiling moves with the season. In summer and the rains, effort is meant to be minimal. In late winter and spring, full effort is prescribed. And spring gets the strongest instruction of the year, because Kapha is mobile and exercise is the most direct thing that moves it.
So for the next fortnight the target is genuine exertion, most days, ideally in the morning — the Kapha part of the day, from roughly six to ten, which is exactly when it is hardest to get up and go.
Alongside it, the classical spring measure that almost no one outside Ayurveda has heard of: udvartana, dry powder massage. Chickpea flour with a little turmeric, or a proprietary herbal powder, rubbed vigorously over the dry body before bathing, always upward, against the direction of the hair. It is drying, it is stimulating, and it is the season's answer to the oil massage that dominates winter. Twenty minutes, two or three times a week, and the difference in how the body feels is not subtle.
Oil has not disappeared entirely — the head and feet still want it. But the body's regimen in spring is dry.