Compare and Contrast

This week we take a look at another workout that seeks to combine two disciplines in one workout. In Yogalosophy, instructor Mandy Ingber pairs yoga poses with similar toning exercises.

Unlike last week’s selection, Yogalosophy has only one instructor, which I hoped would help it feel less disjointed. Also, it has seriously awesome background music. I went into this workout with high hopes.

There are two workouts on the DVD. A 35-minute express workout, and a 55-minute Fully Loaded Challenge workout which adds sun salutations, strength and balance segments, and a stretching cooldown to the original 35-minute workout.

Both workouts start kind of abruptly, with no real sense of where you’ll be going. Once I discovered this, I stopped to watch the intro segments by Ingber and by celebrity endorser Jennifer Aniston, but both of those intro segments were under 30 seconds long and didn’t provide much insight.

The bonus features where Ingber describes her philosophy (her Yogalosophy) didn’t really give me the clarity or direction I was looking for either. Mainly I learned that Ingber is enthusiastic, if a little shallow and kooky.

So, I went back to the workouts. The longer workout starts with 8 minutes of sun salutations, which were tough to follow. Ingber is not the best at describing what she’s doing, so if you’re not currently facing the TV, it can be hard to tell when you’re supposed to move on to something else.

She suggests that if sun salutations are not your thing, you can do some other kind of cardio warmup instead of the sun salutations. I second this recommendation; I just marched in place while she did sun salutations.

After this warmup, she moved on to the 3-minute Rock Block, which featured a variety of warrior poses. This was easier to do, if only because you could position yourself to face the TV.

After the Rock Block, there is a 3-minute Balance Challenge, which was brutal to do, but easy to follow, and then we finally get to the main event. The 35-minute Yogalosophy workout is where Ingber starts to alternate between yoga and strength exercises.

Unfortunately, there was just not enough of a difference between the two kinds of exercise. Ingber was very careful to pair the yoga poses with their equivalent traditional exercise, so there was a sameness to the moves throughout the workout.

Crescent pose was immediately followed by lunges, which are basically just coming in and out of crescent pose. Chair pose was immediately followed by squats, which are basically just coming in and out of chair pose.

If the exercises are virtually the same, what’s the point in having both types of exercise in one workout? It’s just a study in contrasts that doesn’t offer that much contrast.

One other aspect of the workout that really frustrated me is that while Ingber would sometimes suggest modifications for beginners, she invariably suggested them during the second set of the exercise in question. So, by the time beginners learn the best way for them to do the move, it’s already more than half over.

The longer workout rounds out with a 6-minute stretching segment. This is pure yoga, without accompanying traditional exercises, and was one of the better segments of this workout in terms of instruction.

Both workouts contain a lot of mixed messages from Ingber. There is plenty of the standard supportive chatter about doing what’s right for you and your body, which contrasts sharply with her long monologue about inner thigh gaps. She talks about how appearance isn’t everything, but that is clearly what drives her. She has a mantra to guide her in her yoga practice, but the mantra is about how hot her posterior looks.

I guess I wanted a little more contrast in the exercises, and a little less contrast in the instructor’s message. I’m not sure that awesome background music is enough to offset the sometimes frustrating instruction in Yogalosophy.