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For Some People, Learning Yoga on CD-ROM is a Stretch
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| Sunday, December 21, 2008 |
As if to lend weight to my assertion that your computer can, in theory, teach you anything, along comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Soft young women demonstrate these ancient Eastern techniques while the gentle voices of narrators sleepwalking more talk about music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Most of us are familiar with at least the concepts of Yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its often almost unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga is a well-designed packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages such as quick and easy courses, beauty and health courses.
The software consists largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which each position is demonstrated in a text window, while described in another. A narrator reads the 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, kicking and dragged screaming into English from its Japanese roots, advises the user to practice that first raised watching the screen and memorizing the whole procedure.'' This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or keep your monitor on the ground, is likely to be difficult. It is clear that the real learning of the poses could be done more easily with a videotape.
On the other hand, you can hunt around in the CD-ROM, select the positions you want to learn, and collect personal groups. And maybe you have a large screen and a wireless long-distance mouse.
It's a nice program, well done and informative. My only complaint is not emphasize clearly enough that unless you are as thin as the delivery model of the set, you will not be able to do a lot of them - the Crow, the heron and the frog, for example - - properly. 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 other parts of the body feel better. I am not prepared to defend this principle, but the whole procedure seems shiatsu is not clear whether 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 to another department. |
posted by neptunus @ 5:03 AM
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