YogaHealthtips
For Some People, Learning Yoga on CD-ROM is a Stretch
As if to lend weight to my contention
that your computer can, in theory, teach you anything, along comes a pair of
CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women demonstrate
these ancient Eastern techniques 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 often almost unattainable physical positions.
Wellness Yoga is a nicely designed program that packages 74
asanas, or positions, into several packages such as the Quick
and Easy Course, the Beauty Course and the Health Course.
The program consists 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 is a graph that displays the approximate duration of each
segment of the routine.
The practical difficulties of
using this CD-ROM 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 memorizing the whole procedure.''
This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or keep your monitor on
the floor, is likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual
learning of the poses could be more readily done with a
videotape.
On the other hand, you can hunt
around in the CD-ROM, choose from the positions you want to
learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you've
got a really big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This is a nice program,
well-made and instructive. My only complaint is that it does not
emphasize clearly enough that unless you are 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 the Frog, for instance
-- correctly. On the other hand, we can all do the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation, which
teaches a massage technique clearly related to acupuncture, is
another kettle of fish.
The theory is that
rubbing, kneading or poking specific points on the body, called
acupressure points, will make 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 more
accessible pressure points, but they are not all available to
your own hands and all the demonstrations show one person
ministering to another.
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