Do the Wave

This week’s DVD, Sura Flow, is billed as restorative yoga with circular and wavelike movements. I figured I could use something restorative after the last couple of weeks of intense workouts, and this certainly fits the bill. Instructor Sura has a quiet, soothing voice, and the movements are gentle and wavelike.

The DVD has 6 segments that can be mixed and matched, or you can use preset workouts that string together multiple segments.

I tried out the shortest preset workout for my first  day. It started with 6 minutes of centering, which was primarily sitting and focusing on one’s connection to the earth. Then we moved on to an 11-minute segment called “5 Elements Healing”, which turned out to be just an extra long shavasana pose. The next segment was a 10-minute Guided Meditation … and that was the end of the workout. The 27-minute workout with no actual exercising.

After that, I paid more attention to what was in the different workout segments, to make sure I actually got a workout.

All 4 preset workouts have the centering, the shavasana, and the meditation, in that order. As I learned on day one, that’s all that is in one of the presets. There is also a preset that inserts a seated yoga segment after the centering, and a preset that inserts an ‘active’ yoga segment after the centering.

I found the seated yoga segment easier to follow than the active one, mainly because I was able to see the TV for more of the seated poses.

Some of the moves were still a little confusing, even in the seated segment, particularly one she called ‘leg swimming’. In this pose, you lie back and stick one leg out while the other knee comes up by your chest, then you switch … but while you’re doing this, you’re also moving the legs side to side in a wavelike manner. It’s even more complicated than it sounds.

In addition, her description of the leg swimming move was out of sync with her demonstration of it on the screen, which made it even harder to follow. I still can’t get this move right.

The final preset inserts a ‘full practice’ after the centering. The full yoga practice seems to contain the same poses as the seated and active segments, but all mixed together. It also includes a few new poses, including a plow pose with leg bicycling movements which (you guessed it) are somewhat wavelike.

In all the workouts, Sura offered a few modifications for poses, but generally just verbally. There were no other exercisers on the DVD to demonstrate modifications.

She used a lot of terms I hadn’t heard before, and that weren’t really explained during the workout, but you could get the general idea from what she was doing. Some examples are’ hara’, which appears to be referring to your core; and ‘10% release’, which seems to instruct you to go another 10% further into the stretch.

Some of the terms were a little more out there; the ‘dark water moving down through your grounding cord’ was one of the weirder ones.

Odd terminology aside, Sura has developed an interesting mix of yoga, Pilates, tai chi, and meditation. It seems very relaxing on the surface, but there’s a decent core workout in there too.

A lot of flow yoga is very intense and fast-paced, while a lot of restorative yoga is too still, like taking a nap in a series of unusual positions. Sura Flow is a nice balance between the two.

The pace is slow, but you are still moving. Sura has designed thse exercises to mimic the constant movement of waves. Bonus points for having water in the background that does not have any actual waves … workouts set at the beach always make me have to use the bathroom.

Instead, we get a beautiful, relatively still lake to look at, and relaxing music to listen to rather than the sound of running water. Very serene.

Usually I play the workout in the background while I write the review, in case it reminds me of some aspect of the DVD that I had forgotten to discuss in my review. In this case, though, just listening to the workout made me so relaxed I wanted to nap instead of writing.

This would be a great workout to do at the end of a stressful day. If you can’t actually go to the ocean to relax, you can just be the ocean instead.