Yoga Videos
In the winter, I find
myself drawn to yoga. There's not much I can do in the garden
when the ground is frozen solid, and when it's 10 degrees outside I
just don't want to be out there. The perfect time to clear my
mind and stretch some muscles with yoga.
Although I love yoga when I do it, I've had less luck finding a way to
incorporate yoga into my weekly routine. A few years ago, I took
a class, which was useful for learning the basics but quickly turned
into a pain in the butt --- I hated driving half an hour to feel
uncomfortable about exercising around other people.
So I dropped out of the class and got a book --- Light
on Yoga. The book turned out to be intense --- just what I'd
want if my goal was to become a full time yogi, but a little harder to
handle for a lighthearted hobby. I found it difficult to learn
new poses, straightening out of contortions to read the next paragraph,
and the book didn't help me come up with a thirty minute series of
moves which I could do regularly. I also had a hard time finding
the poses I already knew since the names weren't in English.
A couple of
weeks ago, I seem to have hit the mother load. I'd
tried a few yoga videos before and found them to be annoying, but a web
search turned up Shilpa Shetty's instructional yoga series. She
has a fifteen minute "quick fix" routine (which is actually eleven
minutes long), and then a series of other eight to ten minute
routines. I had no idea until today that the teacher is actually
a Bollywood actress; instead of being glitzy, I found the series calm
with just the right level of instruction.
You can start out by watching the
introduction, then run through the "15 minute quick
fix",
the sitting
asanas (poses), and the back asanas.
I only do the latter three at the moment, though I can tell that within
a few weeks I'll have those down pat and might add in some of the
following: stomach
asanas, pranayam
breathing, neck
and shoulder asanas, and standing
asanas.
If you don't want to be tied to the internet, you can use Tech Crunch's
website to convert the youtube videos to files you can download to
your own computer. I think the videos of hers which abound on the
internet are pirated, though, so if you want the real deal you should
probably buy
the DVDs.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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