I posted last week about the yoga I was trying to get into, for some long overdue flexibility improvement. It's been going pretty well so far, with me doing 45 minutes or so (the length of the two 20ish minute programs on the DVD we got) each
morning afternoon when I get up. The two hosts (man and woman) on the DVD are downright creepy, and the poses they do on the two shows have a fair amount of overlap and don't target that many body areas, but the poses are useful for a beginner without much flexibility, and they hold them long enough that I can breath half a dozen times and stretch into them. It's a nice way to loosen up in the morning, and though the moves are just sitting still or kneeling or whatever, I always get enough energy flowing to actually get sweaty doing them. I then often go do some Kali outside, or head to the gym, before showing off and having some breakfast.
I'm getting bored with the same routine every time though, so today I tried the yoga shows I've been taping each night at 3am on Fit TV. Yes, they're on at 3am. No, I don't think it's exactly their biggest show.
Anyway, I was bummed by them. I had 4 shows on tape, I FFed through most of them looking for any useful poses, and while perhaps I just hit 4 that were not very good, this program doesn't look like it's of much use to me. I can't find a detailed description of it anywhere, (the
Fit TV page just lists a bunch of show times with zero info about the show) but
here is a page about it on something called the W network (East Coast cable? Canadian? Never heard of it.), that at least has a photo of the frightening host demonstrating the tooth baring grimace that passes for her smile.
It's not that bad, or good of a picture, but after just a few episodes the host is already scaring me. She's always got this scowly intensity to her, with what looks like fury and hatred behind her eyes. Her face reminds me of Rosie O'Donnell, circa late 90s, when she was still officially "in the closet" (not that anyone ever had any real doubts about her sexual preference), and was apparently the most pissed off human alive. No matter how she was dolled up with hair, makeup, clothing, etc, she always had eyes full of the most burning hatred imaginable.
The Breathing Space Yoga host isn't quite that psycho, but her smiles are these painful-looking grimaces that remind me of the real (non-Disney) version of
The Little Mermaid fairy tale, when the mermaid got her human legs, but at the price, so that every step felt like she was walking on knife blades. I'll bet she placed her feet with as much care as the yoga woman parts her lips. You can't help but wonder how tense and furious she'd be if she hadn't become a yoga guru.
Strange facial expressions aside, I could easily ignore the host if the show were useful. Unfortunately, it's not, at least not for me.
The main problem is the pace of things. It's a show for intermediate or advanced students, in terms of knowledge of the poses. They move from pose to pose very quickly, often with one or two forms in between, and you have to know all of the poses to keep up. I suppose you could follow along, even without great flexibility, if you knew what the poses she was naming were, but what are the odds of anyone knowing the name of yoga poses without having spent the time stretching to be able to do them? As it is I'm constantly pausing the tape to study their forms and figure how to get into them, and then after just five or ten seconds in the poses, far too soon for me to start breathing and trying to stretch into it, they move on to another one. It's sort of like trying to learn martial arts by watching a demo movie of it; useful if you already know and can do the moves and just want to run through them with a lead, but useless if you're trying to learn from it.
The poses themselves are pretty scary too. The show has four people doing the poses while the scary host talks, and they usually arrange the posers on a sliding scale of ability, which is helpful. There's one pregnant lady who has to modify everything for her impending maternity, there's a guy who does things halfway, and then two other women who have warm butter for bones and can be twisted into human pretzel shapes that would have landed them prominent spots in a freak show, a century ago.
So while I can sometimes sort of emulate the guy, or the pregnant lady, I usually get totally distracted watching the host talk while the boneless women contort themselves into forms I'd hoped never to see a human being assume. On one episode today they went from sitting cross-legged (which is about as far as I can go, since my hips, knees, and back hurt even doing that), to the full lotus position (with feet over the thighs), to reaching each arm across their back and holding the toes of the feet. So picture your right leg over your left thigh, while your right arm reaches around the back and holds the toes, and you then bend over to put your head on the floor. And they did that with both arms, which required their shoulders to move pretty much straight backwards.
"Ewww!" I exclaimed. Then followed that with another hearty "Ewwwwww!!!" I would have to literally double or triple the length of most ligaments in my body to even approach that pose, not that I'd want to. Seriously, if they pulled a mangled corpse out of a suitcase on CSI in that pose, people would change the channel in disgust.
Freak show poses aside, they never hold any of the postures long enough for me to get any stretching and breathing use out of them, so I'm thinking Breathing Space Yoga is useless to me at this level. I'll have to spend six months on beginner DVDs and poses, and maybe by then I'll have sufficient flexibility and knowledge of the poses to try and follow along.
Conveniently enough, a good friend of mine has a lovely new wife (we attended their wedding in Chicago a few months ago), and by a happy coincidence, she's a certified yoga instructor, something I did not know until
I posted about Yoga last week, and he replied in comments. He's also handy with a DVD burner, and hopefully I can prevail on him to mail me some useful beginner DVDs, perhaps with some advice from his wife on how best to ease myself into this discipline.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
