Anatoly Yasinsky: A Physicist Who Explains Yoga and Qigong

I have done sports since the age of fourteen, and almost always it was combat sports: boxing at school, sambo at university, hand-to-hand combat in the army. Alongside that came mathematics: a specialized math class, city olympiads, and then the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. I interrupted my studies at Phystech to serve in the Airborne Forces, and after the army I came back and graduated as a physicist.

The next twenty-five years were all about computers. I started out assembling circuit boards and ended up as the founder and head of Meijin, a company that built professional and gaming computers and was one of the first in Russia to fit them with water cooling.

All those years Eastern practices went hand in hand with work. Starting in 2000, I trained for twelve years at Valery Gusev’s Western Dragon wushu school, three times a week at seven in the morning. Every session began with breathing exercises, yoga stretching and moving meditation, and only then came technique and sparring. That is where my habit comes from: I don’t split practice into “yoga” and “qigong”, I take the best from both systems.