For Some Individuals Learning Yoga on CD-ROM is often a Bit of a Stretch
As if to lend weight to my contention that your personal computer can, in theory, teach you anything, along comes a pair of DVDs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women demonstrate these ancient Eastern procedures while mellow-voiced narrators speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Most of us are familiar at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its usually almost unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga can be 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 position is demonstrated in one window while described textually in another. A narrator reads that 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 each segment of the routine.
The practical problems of using this CD-ROM are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, recommends the user to First practice forming the pose while watching the screen and try memorizing the whole procedure.” This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or keep your monitor on the floor, is very likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of the poses could be extra readily done with a videotape.
On the other hand, you can hunt around inside the CD-ROM, choose from the positions you would like to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you’ve got a truly big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This may be a nice system, well-made and instructive. My only criticism is that it does not emphasize clearly enough that unless you’re as slender as the model executing the poses, you are not going to be able to do many of them — the Crow, the Heron and also the Frog, for instance — properly. On the other hand, we can all do the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage procedure clearly related to acupuncture, is another kettle of fish.
The principle is that rubbing, kneading or poking distinct points on the body, called acupressure points, will make other parts of the body feel better. I am not ready 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 more accessible pressure points, but they are not all obtainable to your own hands and all the demonstrations show one person ministering to another.
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Filed under: Wellness
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