Go with the flow …

Today’s selection, Shiva Rea: Flow Yoga for Beginners, is a 70 minute yoga practice, broken into 5 sections: Foundation Flow (15 minutes), Beginner’s Backbend Flow (20 minutes), Relaxing Flexibility Flow (10 minutes), Beginner’s Standing Pose Flow (20 minutes), and Shavasana (3 minutes).

The first segment, Foundation Flow, starts out with a few minutes of ujjayi breathing. I know what ujjayi breathing is, but I like that instructor Shiva Rea uses the ‘official’ name for it, and explains it in detail for beginners. At this point, I’m thinking that I’m going to be able to handle this workout.

After the breathing, we move into the more active part of the yoga practice. She is not mirroring the poses, but I still think I can handle it. Then she introduces three new yoga concepts, using the ‘official’ Sanskrit name for each of them, in the space of a minute. That’s right, folks … 3 new Sanskrit words in 60 seconds. They don’t go for short words either.

I’m a little confused at this point, but still trying to keep up. Rea is the only exerciser in the video. She will occasionally do modifications to the poses, but usually doesn’t tell you about them until you’ve been struggling with the standard version of the pose for a bit.

Of course, it is yoga, so you can’t always see what the instructor is doing. This is unfortunate, for those times when you can’t remember what chaturanga dandasana is. Rea relies a lot on just giving the names of the poses, rather than instructing by describing what you should be doing.

At one point, she has us do child’s pose, but she explains that she likes to call it ‘wisdom pose’ instead, because you need the wisdom to know when you should step back from the workout and do child’s pose. So then, throughout the workout, she sometimes calls it child’s pose and sometimes calls it wisdom pose. As if remembering one name for the pose is not enough. At least both her names for this pose are in English.

All of this is in the first 7 minutes of a 70-minute workout. This is the point where I’m not sure I’m going to make it through. That proved to be true; I did not get through the whole workout in a single sitting all week.

Rather abruptly, the DVD switches to the second segment, Beginner’s Backbend Flow. There was some repetition of poses from the first segment, but done in a less intense/advanced way. I found this segment easier to do than the first one.

I wondered why we didn’t start with the beginner segment. I started to wonder if these were separate workouts and weren’t meant to be done together and/or in that order.

After this second segment, I called it a day. The next day, I started where I left off – at the beginning of the third segment, Relaxing Flexibility Flow.

The thing I noticed right off the bat about this third segment was that, while it was purported to be ‘relaxing’, the music sounded like what they play in movies when the stupid girl is going into the dark basement where the serial killer is waiting. It was the opposite of relaxing.

This was also the segment where Rea announced she was not showing her full range of flexibility, so we would be comfortable with where our bodies were as beginners. She said this from her position with her forehead resting against her ankles. Seriously.

The segment itself was not too difficult to do – and no, my forehead got nowhere near my ankles – but the music made me really tense, so this segment was not a winner for me.

The fourth segment was ironically called Beginner’s Standing Pose Flow; it was ironic since you didn’t stand up at all for the first half of it. The segment started out with a lot of switching between downward dog, lunge and plank/chaturanga. Then you do some interesting warrior 2 pose variations where you are on your knees. Ten minutes into the segment, you finally start doing some standing warrior 2 poses, rotating between that and downward dog, lunge, and plank/chaturanga.

All the segments seemed to have a lot of switching between downward dog, lunge, and plank/chaturanga. It all starts to feel kind of the same by the time you get to the fourth segment.

The workout finishes off with a short savasana (relaxation pose) segment. She explains that you can stay in the pose as long as you want, and that the music will just eventually fade out. 42 seconds later, it fades out and is replaced with loud jungle drums music while the credits roll. Not super relaxing.

I found myself pretty disappointed with the production of this DVD. The music choices, the order of the segments, how they played back to back even though they seemed like separate workouts, the over-reliance on technical terms, the modifications described so long after a pose was started …

Shiva Rea is a world-renowned yoga instructor, and she had some very interesting pose variations on this DVD, but the whole thing was packaged in a way that made it virtually inaccessible to beginners. I really wanted to like this workout, but instead of going with the flow, I felt like I was swimming upstream.