For Some People Learning Yoga on DVD is a Bit of a Stretch
As if to lend weight to my contention that your personal computer can, in concept, teach you anything, along comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women demonstrate these ancient Eastern procedures while mellow-voiced narrators speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Most of us are acquainted at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its usually virtually unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga can be a nicely designed program that packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages such as the Quick and Easy Course, the Beauty Course as well as the Health Course.
The program consists largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which every single position is demonstrated in one window while described textually in another. A narrator reads that exact same text aloud. In addition to the usual tape-recorder buttons to pause, stop and restart the action, there is a graph that displays the approximate duration of every single segment of the routine.
The practical difficulties of using this CD-ROM are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, recommends the user to First practice forming the pose while watching the screen and try learning the whole procedure.” This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or keep your monitor on the floor, is likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of the poses could be additional readily done with a videotape.
On the some other hand, you can hunt around in the DVD, decide from the positions you desire to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you’ve got a really big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This can be a nice program, well-made and instructive. My only issue is that it does not emphasize clearly enough that unless you are as slender as the model executing the poses, you are not going to be capable of do many of them — the Crow, the Heron as well as the Frog, for instance — correctly. On the other hand, we can all do the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage method clearly connected to acupuncture, is another kettle of fish.
The principle is that rubbing, kneading or poking certain points on the body, called acupressure points, will make different parts of the body feel better. I am not well prepared to argue that premise, but the entire procedure seems shiatsu yourself is not clear, either; the program initially suggests you find some of your own more accessible pressure points, but they are not all available to your own hands and all the demos show one individual ministering to another.
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