For Some People Learning Yoga on CD-ROM may be a Bit of a Stretch

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As if to lend weight to my contention that your personal computer can, in theory, teach you anything, along comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.

Lithe young women show these ancient Eastern methods while mellow-voiced narrators speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.

Yoga Dvd

Most of us are familiar at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its normally almost 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 as well as the Health Course.

The program is made up largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which each and every 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 just about every segment of the routine.

The practical problems of using this DVD 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 additional readily done with a videotape.

On the different hand, you can hunt around in the CD-ROM, decide from the positions you wish to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you’ve got a truly big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.

This can be a nice system, well-made and instructive. My only criticism is that it does not stress clearly enough that unless you are as slender as the model executing the poses, you’re not going to be able to do many of them — the Crow, the Heron as well as the Frog, for instance — properly. On the different hand, we can all do the Corpse.

Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage process clearly connected to acupuncture, is another kettle of fish.

The theory is that rubbing, kneading or poking precise 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 further accessible pressure points, but they are not all accessible to your own hands and all the demos show one particular person ministering to an additional.

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