90 minutes is a long time

A friend of mine gave me her P90X yoga DVD to try out in exchange for my opinion of it. I have heard a lot about P90X–that it is incredibly challenging, that it yields results, that most people give up before the results (because who has 90 free minutes?), and that the yoga is particularly challenging.

So I was a little nervous to get started…

:-/

My immediate reactions are:

1. 90 minutes is an eternity.

2. A countdown clock on a yoga move seems counterintuitive to the practice.

3. They could have done this in an hour.

4. That instructor is kind of aggressive… and competitive.

5. Is this over yet?

My yoga studio does do a 90-minute class option and if I were there I wouldn’t have even noticed the time passing. But there’s just something about a fitness DVD that makes the seconds crawl by. Perhaps it was the countdown meter at the bottom of the screen counting down each 60-,45- or 30-second move.

The countdown bothered me a bit. I’ve never heard that counting down the time you have left in a pose is wrong and I know that my instructors often count quietly to themselves as we hold, but something about that clock glaring me down just felt wrong. Especially when aggressive instructor man started yelling the countdown at the beginner-level student.

Whaa?

Need I channel Tom Hanks circa A League of Their Own and tell this man, “THERE’S NO YELLING IN YOGA.”

Seriously though. There’s no yelling in yoga. In addition to yelling, trainer guy seemed to me to be competitive and also quite condescending when interacting with the students and speaking down to his audience. Perhaps that’s just me. I’d predict he is a fantastic trainer but is not quite suited for yoga teaching.

The first 45 minutes of the video were good–standard sun salutations and warrior series followed by balancing poses. But the last 45 minutes seemed to just drag on and on from one slow stretch to another. Again, I feel like if I’d been in a studio I wouldn’t have noticed, but I actually fast forwarded through this part of the DVD.

I’m glad that people like P90X and I’m sure the entire system yields results. I also like that people think that the yoga DVD is the most difficult. I was expecting to find something really wild but since I’ve been practicing yoga for about a year now, I can confirm that that’s just how yoga is. This DVD, though excruciatingly boring, is not more difficult than the others I’ve reviewed.

Does everyone believe me now that yoga is not easy stretching? Hooray!