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Beyond the Mat: Yoga Stretches Out

 

By Don Oldenburg

 

It sounds like a yoga class. " And, forward fold. Lift the arms to

the sky. Take three breaths. . . . Lift, bend and extend. Now downward

dog. "

 

Except a disco beat is playing.

 

It looks like a yoga class. Thirty students move in slow motion as

they kneel on foam mats in a dimly lit ballroom.

 

Except they are each squeezing a grapefruit-size blue rubber ball

between their thighs.

 

What we have here is not yoga but YogaButt. And it's just one of many

yoga classes-with-a-twist at the recent DCAC 2004 International

Fitness and Personal Trainer Conference in Reston, where 1,200 fitness

instructors and exercise enthusiasts have gathered to flex their ideas

as much as their muscles.

 

Inside another ballroom, more than 100 students lie on yoga mats,

legs propped on 29-inch silver exercise balls. This is Louisville

instructor Lauren Eirk's Yoga-Pilates-Resist-a-Ball session.

 

There's also YogaBar for weightlifters; Water Art Yo-Tai Pilates,

combining submerged yoga with tai chi and Pilates; Hot Yoga, done in a

105-degree room; and Body Bar Buddha Bar, described as body sculpting

meets Cirque du Soleil.

 

Ripped biceps and steely abs are almost passe at this body-conscious

convention. The buzz is about the growing array of yoga-inspired

workouts that are reincarnating the ancient Hindu discipline into the

rage of the fitness world.

 

What used to be the domain of the granola-and-Birkenstock fringe has

turned into a hypercommercialized industry for the masses. The lotus

position has given way to an explosion of fusion classes that

hyphenate yoga with every imaginable exercise and body part. The

rolled-up mat of the old days has morphed into a multibillion-dollar

market of clothing lines, books, videos, music, lessons, props and

accessories. It's yogis gone wild at the gym.

 

Traditional yoga just never went mainstream, says Beth Shaw, inventor

of YogaButt -- and YogaAbs, YogaBack, YogaStrength, pre- and postnatal

yoga, yoga for seniors and yoga for kids. " It's off-putting to a lot

of people, it's strange, it's weird, a lot of people can't grasp it.

And, quite frankly, not too many people want to sit around on a floor

and meditate and do one pose and then rest for five minutes and then

do another pose. That's why we've invented things that are fun. "

 

Down the hallway, Lawrence Biscontini leads 75 students in his Yo-Chi

Glow session in a dark ballroom. They wear glow wristlets so yoga

positions blend with sweeping tai chi movements to become a sinuous

light show.

 

" The blend justifies the means, " says Biscontini, fitness director at

the Golden Door spa in San Juan, Puerto Rico, who also is introducing

Yo-Cycle, Yog-Opera and Yo-Step at the conference. " I call it

cafeteria fitness. "

 

" Fitness " and " yoga " were rarely mentioned in the same breath in 1893

when Calcutta-born yoga scholar Swami Vivekananda addressed a world

religions conference in Chicago and yoga gained its first following in

America.

 

Other masters from India visited over the ensuing century. But yoga

never grew in popularity until the Vietnam War era, when the

counterculture of the '60s embraced Eastern influences, from Beat

writer Jack Kerouac's " The Dharma Bums " to the Beatles' flirtation

with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation. Suddenly,

yin-and-yang symbols were everywhere, sitar music filled the air and

yoga was cool among the rebellious.

 

The Establishment linked yoga with hippie ashrams and guru worship,

however, and yoga couldn't keep pace with another revolution picking

up speed -- the Fitness Revolution, says Harvey Lauer, president of

American Sports Data, a New York research firm.

 

Fitness evolved from running in the '70s, to high-impact aerobics in

the '80s, to low-impact aerobics and walking in the '90s. As hippies

aged and transformed into workaholic, overstressed yuppies seeking

self-improvement, yoga started making new inroads.

 

By the new millennium, a " new, kinder and gentler world of physical

fitness " was emphasizing stretching, flexibility, balance and

relaxation, says Lauer. Mind-body practices such as tai chi, Pilates

and yoga fit the bill.

 

Next, yoga went Hollywood. In 1998, Madonna released the CD " Ray of

Light " with a Sanskrit chant, touting her devotion to yoga. Two years

ago, supermodel Christy Turlington appeared in Vogue to introduce her

sexy line of yoga clothing. Yoga became a regular mention in celebrity

interviews, from Gwyneth Paltrow to Metallica.

 

By last summer, 15 million Americans were practicing yoga, 28.5

percent more than the year before, according to a Harris poll

conducted for Yoga Journal.

 

In 1998, Lauer says, the number was just 5.7 million.

 

With the masses comes big business, of course -- trendy yoga clothing

with labels such as L.L. Bean, Old Navy, Nordstrom, Land's End and the

Gap, meditative music, books and videos. Yoga researcher Trisha Lamb,

associate director of the International Association of Yoga

Therapists, in Manton, Calif., estimates that people are spending $20

billion annually on yoga.

 

YogaFit, the Redondo Beach, Calif., company that invented YogaButt,

began in 1994 with Shaw selling T-shirts and books out of her car

trunk. Now it's a multimillion-dollar corporation selling dozens of

YogaFit products, says chief financial officer Amy McDowell. It has

trained 50,000 instructors, licensed studios throughout North America

and this summer signed a contract to open 100 studios in Japan.

 

Basically, yogafuture looks bright.

 

At Gaiam, one of the nation's biggest makers of yoga products, sales

have grown 41 percent over five years -- despite the entry of giants

such as Nike and Reebok into the market. From 1998 to 2003, the number

of retail locations that carry Gaiam's products jumped from 5,000 to

30,000, according to the Broomfield, Colo., company. Over the past

three years, Gaiam sold 1.6 million yoga mats priced at $20 to $30.

" That math works out to $30 million to $50 million in mats alone, "

says marketing director Byron Freney.

 

According to Barnes & Noble, five or six new yoga books are published

practically every month. " Yoga is such a huge category in terms of

people's interest, " says editor Stephanie Tade at Rodale Press, which

last year paid a seven-figure advance for world rights to yoga master

B.K.S. Iyengar's new book, " Light on Life " (due out in October 2005).

 

" Yoga for the Rest of Us " -- targeting the out-of-shape and the

elderly -- ranked No. 2 recently on Amazon.com's daily top-selling

video list.

 

But if you still need evidence that yoga has struck a nerve in Middle

America: Wal-Mart and Target now carry hefty lines of instructional

videos, books and paraphernalia. Wal-Mart's Web site boasts 990 yoga

products; Target's has a mind-numbing 4,235.

 

" Consumer demand for yoga has increased dramatically, " says Dayna

Macy, communications director at Yoga Journal, the Berkeley,

Calif.-based magazine that has covered yoga for 25 years.

 

Since 1998, Yoga Journal's circulation has more than tripled, from

90,000 to 310,000. In the past year, the magazine's national

advertising has increased 35 percent -- including new advertisers such

as Target, Kellogg, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and General Mills.

 

 

" When you start getting advertisers like that in a yoga publication,

there's a reason for it, " says Macy. " Yoga is mainstream and they want

to reach the demographics of our reader -- female, twenties, thirties

and forties, high median household income. "

 

Yoga intersected with Madison Avenue when it expanded from the

incense-scented studios to the sweat-scented gyms, around 2000.

 

Last year, 2.2 million Americans were practicing yoga at commercial

health clubs, up from 400,000 in 1998, says Bill Howland, director of

public relations and research at the International Health, Racquet &

Sportsclub Association, a trade group in Boston. Eighty percent of

clubs now offer yoga classes -- twice that of six years ago.

 

" As little as three years ago, yoga was a very small part of the

group exercise market, " says Suzanne Olson, a Philadelphia fitness

trainer whose company, DCAC, has produced the fitness conference in

Reston for 13 years. " Now all the clubs have mind-body programs and

they're much larger than other types of group exercise programs like

step aerobics or kick-boxing. Now there's a yoga-Pilates studio

opening up on every corner. "

 

Yoga is on the schedules at D.C.-area fitness centers in one form or

another. Members pay their monthly dues and take as many classes as

they want -- a cheaper alternative to the typical $15 per class that

yoga studios charge. Fitness First's 14 centers offer 18 types of yoga

classes, from traditional beginner yoga to fusion classes such as

yogilates. Gold's Gym, which made its name on serious weight training,

offers something called Body Flow at its two dozen locations.

 

On a recent Friday morning, a dozen women move fluidly through a

series of positions in Margie Weiss's Body Flow class at the Ballston

Gold's Gym. Their average age is about 35.

 

Borrowing from yoga, tai chi and Pilates, and done to easy-listening

pop, Body Flow workouts promise to increase strength, endurance and

flexibility while reducing stress. In the first four days of August,

says Weiss, 444 people took Body Flow classes at the Ballston gym.

 

" This Body Flow thing is awesome, you just kind of relax and do your

thing, " says Weiss, 55, mother of Olympian figure skater Michael Weiss

and a fitness trainer for 30 years.

 

Christina Moore works out at this gym five days a week, doing step

aerobic classes and Body Flow. " I'm a gym rat, but when you get to my

age, you find that doing all that stepping and stuff, you really get

kind of sore, " says Moore, 54.

 

People like Moore are the reason yoga is going mainstream, experts

say. It's the baby boomers returning to the gym for easier, gentler,

low-impact exercise and the hope of staying forever young.

 

" You have someone turning 50 every eight seconds! " says YogaFit's

Beth Shaw, who " at not even 40 yet " has stopped running and doing step

aerobics. " I don't do things that are going to pound me. Why? Because

I'm interested in longevity and maintaining my joints and staying

youthful and supple. "

 

Is fitness yoga just yogalite?

 

Yoga is a philosophy of life, not just a sweaty workout, some

traditional yoga practitioners say.

 

Para Darin Somma, who teaches a traditional Vinyasa yoga at Capitol

Hill Yoga and at 18th and Yoga , is concerned about the " shallowness "

of commercialized yoga. He has seen yoga magazines with articles about

yoga and sex, yoga and washboard stomachs, yoga and Madonna, he

laments. " They had nothing about the deeper study of yoga. "

 

That deeper study is " self-realization, " says Yoga Journal's Macy,

suggesting that six-pack abs probably don't qualify as spiritual.

 

Traditional yoga emphasizes relaxation and restoration of the spirit,

says Bob Patrick, president of the Mid-Atlantic Yoga Association, in

Silver Spring: " This requires that the practice include elements of

stillness, easy, relaxed breathing, and attention to what the body is

actually doing. . . . This would be difficult to achieve in a program

that is exclusively a workout. "

 

Another concern is whether fitness instructors-turned-yoga teachers

are qualified. " Are they educated in the yoga tradition or are they

just educated in fitness and trying to make yoga fit into their

fitness world? " asks Hansa Knox, president of Yoga Alliance, a

Reading, Pa.-based organization whose mission is to make yoga teaching

a certified profession.

 

Yoga Alliance doesn't certify YogaFit's weekend-trained instructors

who study 18 hours, but it does YogaFit's 200-hour-trained

instructors.

 

At the fitness conference, Richmond yoga teacher Ram Bhagat teaches a

class called Soul Yoga " to remind people to connect with the essence

of yoga -- to unite the mind, body, spirit and soul. " Without that,

" people are just getting an appetizer, " he says.

 

Lauren Eirk, the Yoga-Pilates-Resist-a-Ball instructor at the

conference, says she has practiced traditional Ashtanga yoga for

years, but today: " If I go into a class and say, 'Ardha baddha padma

pascimottanasana,' they're going to go 'What?' "

 

And YogaFit's Shaw, also trained in traditional yoga, has little

patience for criticism of the fusion workouts. " Yes, they sneer, they

scorn, they snort, " she says. " To be honest with you, some of the most

rigid people I've seen in my life are yoga people. "

 

Spirituality is an individual thing, she says. " To me one of the most

spiritual of experiences is just to be in a state of calm and clarity

of the mind. The oneness of spirituality is what we're all looking

for, and that we can get through this practice. So is it spiritual?

Yes. "

 

In other words, YogaButt, designed to improve the most unenlightened

of derrieres, may not be quite what the yoga masters of old India had

in mind, but who's to say self-realization can't start with a firm

behind?

 

 

 

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