so, I don't claim to be an expert but they seem a lot alike to me. Some of the yoga poses in the book are also like the Greer (blonde girl who does the breathing excercises and has just added the resistance bar to her workout) as well as in the pilates workout. I am enjoying pilates but it is a long haul before I will be able to do them without modifications on most of them. HTH
Well, there are 4 different kinds of yogas. One of them does focus on stretching and most importantly breathing. I'd say yoga, over pilates, which tends to be more fast paced in my experience. When you go to buy a tape, just get a yoga one that doesn't look all "dance-a-fied" I have MTV Yoga (the red tape, not the new dance-a-fied blue one) and it's perfect for stretching. -Apryl
I love Yoga. The stretching and flexibility is amazing. It's great for posture. Yes, you will not be able to do the poses. However, the body awareness it generates is amazing. Suddenly, the five pounds you've just lost has made a significant difference. It makes you feel like you know where your body is. The focused breathing and meditation is phenomenal.
I strongly recommend that you take a class though. Tapes are great if you know what you're doing. Injuries are easy to do when you don't have someone watching your poses.
Also, a local dance studio here offers ballet for non-dancing adults. It's a stretch and posture class that I love going to. The women come from all shapes and sizes.
My YMCA offers a great stretch class that is not yoga related. I know there are a lot of tapes out there for just stretching and nothing else.
I take a fitness yoga class once a week at the Y, and I LOVE it. The important thing is to find a good teacher. One of the first points our instructor made was that yoga was about working with your body the way it is today...no competition, even with ourselves, and we should honor our bodies and not push too far.
I just bought Yoga for Dummies last night. I like them both for strength and flexibilty. Just get the quality out of the movement always instead of try to keep up with a tape. Good way to check your form.
I started taking a yoga class two weeks ago. It's definitely stretching; my back approves though.
I agree that a good teacher is, like, critical. Even with 100 lbs still to lose, I can do a lot of the poses, sometimes it's child poses, but sometimes the full pose.
I sweat in this class, and I must admit, I look a lot like an elephant in shorts and a tee shirt. But my teacher has complimented me on my progress, and has loaned me some tapes she used to learn -- the living arts living yoga tapes, and several yoga zone tapes. They are dynamite!
And she also teaches a mixed yoga and pilates class; she feels that the two work really well together.
You know there might be a base for flexibility. The first time I did Pilates I did the whole tape and it was hard (the Side Kick Series is the worst) but I finished it. Same with Yoga. Found out after watching me do Pilates my husband thought it might be fun. I mean Rolling like a Ball, looked pretty easy when I was doing it. Apparently he felt like a turtle left on its back. Hearing this story I had to laugh, some things look easy but they take practice and building up to it. How many months had I already been working out before I even tried Pilates? 6, 7? Anyone who thinks they are going to go from zero to 80 in 6 seconds flat are thinking of the wrong sort of chaise.
Yoga is much easier to pick up working with an instructor, rather than a tape or book. However, if you're going to use a tape, I'd recommend one aimed directly for beginners, and taught by someone who has a deep background in the type of yoga you're interested in. Yoga's roots include significant spiritual (not necessarily religious, just spiritual) underpinnings, so some yoga instructors/tapes/books come from that direction. A good portion of the yogic realm now is made up of non-spiritual, flexibility-focused practice. And still a third portion is aimed at cardiovascular fitness. What's worse, sometimes you'll see the same keywords associated with more than one of the three perspectives!
My introduction to yoga was from that second perspective, flexibility-focused practice, which is what you seem to be aiming for right now. I'd recommend you check out beginners materials taught by either Alan Finger, Suzanne Deason, or Patricia Walden. Rodney Yee is a great instructor, but he's presented beginners materials for all three perspectives! and so you could readily end up with one that doesn't fit with your needs.
And that's really the main point I wanted to make: Don't judge yoga or your ability to practice it by your first experience trying to pick it up. You may not be working with the right materials for your specific needs and interests. For example, in the last few years a lot of people had their first exposure with yoga from the Oxygen channel. They've been running a show called Inhale, with Steve Ross. I love it, but that's because I've been doing yoga for over three years, and I'm relatively fit (now). For a beginner, or even someone who's been doing more gentle yoga for a while, the power yoga (or "Viniyasa") that Steve Ross practices is a bit much.
My introduction to yoga was a class I took while travelling for work. The hotel I was in didn't have a workout room, but they had an agreement with the fitness club next door. So hotel residents could use the club and take their classes. It was amazing! Some of the poses were definitely difficult for me to do, and I felt like a WHALE. But the instructor helped me modify a bit. And by the time we did the laying-on-the-back relaxation pose at the end of the class, I felt unbidden tears streaming out of my eyes. The instructor came close and told me that it was okay... sometimes the body reacts that way, as a release, to yoga practice, especially at first.
Since then, I've tried to follow some tapes, but I don't practice it regularly like I should. I focus more on cardio and strength training right now. One of the things I'm looking foreward to when we join the health club in September is that they have regular yoga classes.
As to tapes, I have AM/PM Yoga, which is good for beginners.
Dumb question about Yoga
