{"id":103,"date":"2015-03-29T21:33:52","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T04:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/?p=103"},"modified":"2015-03-29T21:33:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T04:33:52","slug":"a-m-yoga-for-your-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"A.M. Yoga for Your Week"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Sssshhhh! Your eyes are too loud!<\/strong><\/p>\n

This week I’m reviewing Rodney Yee’s A.M. Yoga for Your Week, breaking a five-week tradition of reviewing DVDs where the instructor is wearing a blue tank top on the DVD cover. Rodney Yee is, of course, shirtless on the cover of his DVD. Rest assured though, he is faithfully wearing a blue tank top in the Wednesday segment of the DVD. I know you were worried.<\/p>\n

A.M. Yoga for Your Week features five different yoga workouts, each running 20-25 minutes, and each with a different focus: standing poses, twists, back bends, forward bends, and hip openers.<\/p>\n

For me, that approach really got this review started off on the wrong foot (although it was undoubtedly a left foot!). The workouts were just too focused on a specific area. On the twists day, all you do is twists for 20 minutes. It got pretty repetitive and boring. In general, I’m in favor of repetition in exercise – if the instructor is doing the same thing over and over, it makes it easier to catch up when you get lost.<\/p>\n

In this case, though, I’d have risked getting lost more often in order to not be bored to tears. I would have rather seen 5 workouts that each incorporated a different standing pose, twist, back bend, forward bend, and hip opener. Then I would feel like I had variety in the workouts, but each workout was still complete.<\/p>\n

Even with the endless repetition, I had trouble following these workouts. Yee is the sole exerciser on the DVD, he does not mirror the poses, and he provides no modifications for beginners. He doesn’t even mention that you can put your foot at your ankle during tree pose if you’re not Gumby-esque enough to rest it on your thigh.<\/p>\n

The hip opener workout was the most difficult for me to follow: it had a very quickly-moving flow sequence that was tough to keep up with, rotating rapidly between cobbler’s pose, wide angle forward bend, staff pose, and half boat. The feet were flying! If I was flexible at all, I’m sure I would have accidentally kicked myself in the head at some point during this sequence.<\/p>\n

To top it all off, the camera was continuously panning around in all 5 workouts, and the scenery moving behind Yee made me a little motion sick. This was especially troublesome during balance poses.<\/p>\n

Yoga can be difficult to begin with, because you spend a lot of time in yoga poses where you can’t see the TV. The best yoga DVDs are backed up with rock-solid verbal instructions. Here again, A.M. Yoga for Your Week missed the mark.<\/p>\n

Yee used a lot of unusual phrases to describe what you were supposed to be doing in the various poses. I kept getting distracted from the workout while I tried to figure out what he meant and what I should be doing.<\/p>\n

Some of my favorites: “draw your arms up into their sockets”, “energize both feet”, “feed your arms and legs into your spine”, “move the muscles closer to the bone”, “scoop the energy of your legs underneath your pelvis”, “deepen the back of your knees”, and the most mysterious instruction of all, “quiet eyes”.<\/p>\n

What? Now my eyes are too loud? What does that even mean? Clearly I’m not enlightened enough, or I would know these things.<\/p>\n

The DVD case mentioned a bonus Meditation Guide, but all I found was an interview with the instructor. I was kind of disappointed not to see this. I’m not sure if his discussion of meditation during the interview counts as a ‘guide’, or whether they meant the couple of minutes of relaxation pose at the end of each of the 5 workouts.<\/p>\n

Of course, the DVD case also promised a “workout appropriate for all levels” and “daily variety for your yoga practice” … so perhaps I should not base my expectations on anything said by GAIAM’s marketing department.<\/p>\n

I’ll probably get hate mail for dissing Rodney Yee, the undisputed king of yoga DVDs. This yoga practice may be just right for someone else, but it was not for me. I suspect it will be a struggle for other left footers too.<\/p>\n

CORRECTION: On closer inspection, it turns out this is not the DVD where Rodney Yee is shirtless on the cover. In my defense, he is twisted to the side and wearing a skin-colored tank top. Also in my defense, it is practically the only Rodney Yee DVD on the market today in which he is not shirtless. Seriously, I found no less than eleven different shirtless Rodney Yee DVDs with a quick Google search.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sssshhhh! Your eyes are too loud! This week I’m reviewing Rodney Yee’s A.M. Yoga for Your Week, breaking a five-week tradition of reviewing DVDs where the instructor is wearing a blue tank top on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[41,12,42,32],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-relaxation","tag-days-of-the-week-workouts","tag-gaiam-dvds","tag-rodney-yee","tag-yoga"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/AMYogaForYourWeek.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82LSK-1F","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/84"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}