Mar
As if to lend weight to my contention that your personal computer can, in principle, teach you anything, along comes a pair of DVDs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women demonstrate these ancient Eastern techniques while mellow-voiced narrators speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Most of us are accustomed at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its normally pretty much unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga is often a nicely designed program that packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages such as the Quick and Easy Course, the Beauty Course and also the Health Course.
The program comprises largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which each position is demonstrated in one window while described textually in another. A narrator reads that very same text aloud. In addition to the usual tape-recorder buttons to pause, stop and restart the action, there may be a graph that displays the approximate duration of every single segment of the routine.
The practical issues of using this CD-ROM are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, advises 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 most likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of the poses could be further readily done with a videotape.
On the other hand, you can hunt around in the DVD, decide from the positions you wish to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you’ve got a really big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This is a nice program, well-made and instructive. My only complaint is that it does not stress 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 different hand, we can all do the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage process clearly connected to acupuncture, is an additional kettle of fish.
The principle is that rubbing, kneading or poking specific points on the body, called acupressure points, will make some other parts of the body feel better. I am not 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 additional accessible pressure points, but they are not all offered to your own hands and all the demonstrations show one particular person ministering to an additional.
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Tags: learn yoga, yoga, yoga DVD, yoga video
