Technology Puts a New Twist on Yoga Classes
“Ooooommmm.”
By all appearances, I had begun to worship my computer. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of my darkened study, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and chanted at the monitor.
“Ooooommmm.”
Halfway across New York, a dozen people added their voices to mine, filling the room. Quite possibly, others joined us from Oregon, Japan and Oklahoma.
It was the start of a most unusual yoga class, one that took place both in a traditional yoga studio and, simultaneously, everywhere in the world via the Internet.
The class is one of several dozen offered each week by New York Yoga, a 10-month-old studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The center (www.newyorkyoga .com) claims to be the first and only source in the world for live online yoga classes.
Somewhere between 6 million and 18 million Americans practice yoga, according to polling data. Celebrities claim to take classes, and practically every neighborhood fitness center offers them. The 5,000-year-old tradition has, particularly since the early 1990s, become part of American fitness culture. Now, it’s accessible to anyone with a computer and high-speed Internet access such as DSL or cable.
“The object with New York Yoga was to take people like Alan Ripka, a typical professional Upper East Sider, and get them to take yoga,” said Alan Ripka, a lawyer who conceived the studio with his wife, Shelby Ripka, and partner, Tom Salshutz, about 18 months ago and opened it in February. “No more secrets. No more mysteries. Totally mainstream.”
For $5.99--compared with the $20 fee for in-studio classes--students can log on and exercise with their favorite New York Yoga teachers while at work, out of town, in their pajamas or when the baby’s asleep. And unlike exercising with a videotape, book or compact disc, the live-action sounds and images guard against the repetition and boredom often associated with working out at home.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Melanie Posey, an analyst who tracks video and audio streaming trends for IDC, an international technology firm. Most companies that employ the streaming technology--often used to access news clips, university courses and global radio programs--allow users to control the images directly. It is rare to have live action online that the user does not control, she said.
New York Yoga is exploring ways to archive classes so students can play them back whenever they want, Salshutz said.
Even without it, some students are hooked.
“I’m in a city with tons of yoga studios and I’ve tried a lot of them, but with this you don’t have to deal with someone’s sweaty feet in your face,” said Nina Harrison, a graphic design student in Amherst, Mass., who takes several classes a week. “You don’t have to get ready, you don’t have to drive. I can just be doing my work and go right to the computer.
“At this point, I prefer it” to a in-studio class, she said.
Yoga practices, as the workouts are called, integrate challenging physical movement--from deep stretching to calisthenics-type programs--with mental goals of increased concentration and emotional clarity. So being in a room crowded with people grunting and heaving through their practice can be alternately inspiring and distracting.
Logging on to the service was easy. After giving my credit card number and e-mail address, I soon saw an on-screen image of the studio, where students were laying out their mats and doing warmups for a Level I/II class with teacher Karen Schwartz.
The camera, mounted high on a wall facing the instructor, shows the students from the back. About a third of the room is pictured. (Those I talked to later at the studio told me they didn’t know, or didn’t care, that the classes are broadcast worldwide. Some were eager to log on themselves, though they live within a few blocks.)
I found myself chanting in front of my computer--and feeling a little strange.
I occasionally practice yoga at home, either on my own or with audio instruction from a compact disc program. But focusing on the computer screen was initially disorienting. My thin purple yoga mat looked out of place surrounded by the clutter of papers and books at my desk.
A few minutes later, having cleared the space, I lay on my mat and discovered that there were dust balls under my desk. Distractions, distractions.
I soon confronted some of the online program’s imperfections: On my 15-inch monitor, the image of the class was about 5 inches by 7 inches, far too small to provide online participants with the details of each pose. More than once, I wished the camera could move a bit to one side or zoom in for a close-up.
Pat Murray, the computer technician who set up and maintains the Web site, said the studio is working on enlarging the image.
Murray said streaming video and audio are well-suited to yoga: Virtually no other exercise is so slow that it could be effective updating its image just two times per second, compared with 30 times a second on television.
The video was not only a bit jumpy, but also lagged about five seconds behind the sound, which was clear and easy to follow. So I found myself taking the class by “listening, with an occasional glance,” as Murray put it. I’ve practiced yoga for about six years. Because I have memorized many of the names of poses and how to get into and out of them, this was not unlike a normal class for me.
But this raises an issue. The online option may be great for newer students who want to try yoga but don’t want to go to a studio. But the lack of detailed images will make it tough for them because many poses are difficult to describe.
For example, in class, Schwartz repeatedly described a subtle upper-body adjustment--opening the shoulders to protect ligaments by pulling down the shoulder blades and rolling out the upper arms.
Huh?
If I had been in class, I could have figured this out by looking at her and other students, and she might have adjusted my shoulders directly. Instead, I winged it.
“There is absolutely nothing that replaces the experience of the class,” said Mary Dunn of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York and a 25-year veteran of yoga instruction.
Ideally, live classes enhance the “dynamic relationship between teacher and student,” she said. “You obviously don’t have that with a book or a Web site or a video.”
Dunn does not teach at New York Yoga and has never been on the site. If she did online classes, she said, she would be conservative in her teaching and take a general approach.
But online classes at New York Yoga are scarcely altered to accommodate remote yogis, according to the studio’s owners and the teachers themselves. Teachers tend to forget the camera is there.
Most yoga poses are tough. Some are downright risky. In one class I took at the studio, the teacher instructed students to come out of a shoulder stand--the signature yoga pose in which the legs are high overhead and the weight rests on the shoulders and neck--by rolling over in a backward somersault. I was concerned I would strain my already stretched neck. I was glad to be in class, where the teacher could lift my legs and help me through it.
Injuries, said Russell Kai Yamaguchi, who taught that Ashtanga class, “are bound to happen.”
“They can happen even when you [the teacher] are there, so you can imagine that it’s going to happen even when you’re not there. Someone’s going to try a headstand and fall on a table or something.”
Still, minutes into the online class, my limbs were warming, my mind focusing and blocking out distractions. I was doing poses I otherwise would avoid and holding them longer than if I were practicing on my own. Relying on the teacher’s pacing was undeniably relaxing--one less thing to think about. In other words, I was getting the normal benefits of practicing under a teacher’s direction.
“I just participated in my first class,” wrote one student on the site’s guest book. “How incredible to have the opportunity to take a class in New York while my baby napped and I stood in my living room in Tulsa, Ok[lahoma].”
Another young yoga enthusiast, contacted online recently, plans to take classes through the site in coming weeks because there are few teachers in his hometown.
He’ll be logging on from Estonia.
David Hollander, a New York Yoga teacher, echoed the sentiments of several teachers when he said: “There are folks who think [online classes] commercialize yoga too much. My feeling is that anything that further democratizes this practice and brings it to more people is a wonderful thing.”
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Erin Texeira is a freelance writer. She can be reached at etexeira @aol.com.
