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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted at 1:09 p.m., Thursday, August 23, 2007

Yoga? There's a DVD for You

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post

Yoga is like coffee — stimulating, but you can't just say you want some: You can order it fast, slow, hard, easy, with in-your-face meditation or with nary a word of Sanskrit. There are a half-dozen or more major forms, and while that provides the benefit of choice and change, it also increases the chance — particularly for beginners — of getting mismatched with a particular style or teacher.

A set of recent yoga DVDs demonstrates the point. If you'd like to pursue this at home, getting the right video will help you develop a routine; getting the wrong one may leave you so starved of prana you'll run out for a triple machiatto with an absinthe chaser.

I tried out five very different releases on a family vacation this month — four from the natural products company Acacia, and one produced as part of a Christian "Faith in Fitness" series that tries to sweep away the Hindu roots with biblical names for the poses (Jonah's Whale instead of adho mukha svanasana, a.k.a. the ever-popular downward dog), and a dose of Corinthians instead of om shanti shanti shanti.

Of all the videos, the clumsily named CHRISToga (I kept wondering whether Chris and his toga were from Sparta or Athens) did the best job of laying the groundwork for beginners. The index explained how the session would be organized, and the health advisories seemed more complete.

The DVD offers a pretty soft hour-long session, but keep in mind: If you don't want your workout punctuated with Bible readings (what John 3:16 has to do with neck rolling I have not yet figured out), then the presentation by Janine Turner and Mary Cunningham might be a bit of a turn-off. On the other hand, if you would rather trade Hindu or New Age dogma for another doctrine, CHRISToga could be a nice start.

Curiously, all four of the Acacia DVDs also state in some way that they are appropriate for beginners, which is just not the case for three of them — unless "beginner" includes someone who can spend in excess of five minutes standing on his shoulders and head. (I can't.). I give them two downward dogs on this point: Marketing should not get in the way of being open about what people are buying.

But Acacia's Yoga to the Rescue with Desiree Rumbaugh was true to its word — a well-organized and secularized introductory session that was light on the Sanskrit (no chanting, and the poses were referred to by their English names). Rumbaugh is not as much of a glamour-puss as some of Acacia's other presenters (that award goes to the alluring Maya Fiennes), but this video fit my slightly-better-than-beginner level and allowed my mother-in-law, Nancy, to tag along for fun.

I can't say the same for Fiennes's Kundalini Yoga to Detox and De-Stress. For Nancy, it was more like distress. Kundalini is a somewhat specialized brand of yoga that focuses on spinal exercises that are believed to release really cool types of energy that have something to do with Jupiter and the Aquarian age, but frankly I got a bit lost on that point.

Now, I liked these exercises: a really hard abdominal set ... lots of aggressive breathing ... extensive shoulder work that had Maya urging us through the "pain threshold." And I liked watching Maya. But this was not for "all fitness and experience levels."

The same goes for Transform Yourself With Jivamukti Yoga, featuring the creators of that particular style, David Life and Sharon Gannon. (And, no, I have not researched whether David Life is his given name ... why spoil a good story?).

Jivamukti is in the Vinyasa tradition — meaning pretty fast and pretty hard — with a thick overlay of chanting and meditation. Compared with CHRISToga, this was like jumping aboard the Black Pearl. What with Life's earrings and ponytail and tattoo, I was not sure whether we were going to exercise or fire up the hookah.

The cover of the DVD says it is for the "experienced beginner" and that it will "boost self-esteem." But there's no way I'd feel good about myself in traction, which is where I'd be headed about halfway through this workout.

That's when the shoulder stands begin, and shortly afterward it's straight up on the head — no caution, no coaching, no suggestion about using a spotter the first time you try it. This was a big spoiler for me, dominating the middle portion of what was otherwise an aggressive but manageable sequence of exercises.

Lastly, there is Fluid Power with Shiva Rea, filmed at the striking White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

Shiva is very lithe, and puts that to good use in a series of dancelike workouts. This is a nifty DVD — the richest of the five in terms of content. I cannot twist my arms and wrists around anything like Shiva can, but the six set routines have a lot to offer.

In addition, this release offers a programmable "yoga matrix" — a grid of subroutines, with guidelines for choosing among them. Click on them in the order you want them to run, and the DVD queues them up sequentially, letting you design a session that matches your level of expertise and the amount of time you have available.