Yoga day #...ummm....?

Oops, I was supposed to post yesterday but I was soooo tired, I was reading an issue of Yoga Journal that promised to talk about Sex and Yoga, which was not nearly as lascivious as I hoped but was was still very interesting. Then, I fell into a deep sleep.

Day one of my Yoga Challenge went okay, I guess. First I needed to carve out an area to do the yoga in, and that took a while and it was rather humid out (it's been pretending like it's going to rain for several days now) so that made me a bit hot and cranky without even putting in a dvd.

I did everything I could think of to delay doing yoga, checked my sales transactions one more time, got a glass of water, picked out what I wanted to wear (something that made me really hope UPS wouldn't show up at the door), petted the cats...

Okay, I didn't really pet the cats. They were sleeping and I wanted to keep it that way, otherwise they'll be meowing at me and climbing on me the whole time. They're just so fascinated any time I'm actually on the floor.

I sorted through my yoga dvds and decided maybe I didn't have enough and could procrastinate by browsing amazon should order some more just in case. What I conveniently forgot until afterwards is that I have a small box of exercise dvds that I liberated from their cases, and some of those are yoga dvds, so I had more than I thought.

Finally I actually did some yoga. I chose "Yoga for Health with Jenny Cornero - Depression & Gastro-Intestinal Disorders" for my first day. The reason I have that video is because I was looking at possibly taking a class or lecture from Jenny and I wanted to check out one of her dvds first and she doesn't seem to have that many. The reason I chose it on Wednesday was because I figured it would be easy.

The first thing I noticed once we got past the hold and release your nostrils while breathing segment was that I really need a pedicure. I guess the video was okay. Jenny has an accent that is a little hard to understand sometimes, and she would start doing something and then get up and start correcting her students. I would have preferred she stay and do the poses with the rest of us...every time SHE stopped, I felt a strong urge to stop, too.

Halfway through the dvd, my carpet was obviously as bored as I was, and it started trying to engage me in a conversation about how I REALLY should get a Dyson vacuum. I tried to tell it we're in the middle of something spiritual here, and talking of worldly goods that cost hundreds of dollars like a Dyson was REALLY not appropriate but it just gave me a dusty stare and said "What-ev."

I don't think I would do this dvd again. It wasn't really too hard, but it was hard to understand and not really spectacular. It also made me realize that I've lost a lot of flexibility, so yesterday (day 2) I thought maybe I should do something to limber up first. Since there wasn't time to order a new dvd, like maybe this one...

I decided to try a dvd I already had called "Ballet Conditioning".

Ballet Conditioning had a really fabulous setting and very good production values. The chick doesn't talk as she's doing the movements, she talks as a voice-over in this really sort of sexy voice that was fun to listen to. The only thing is...although the cover says:

"Use fluid movement to stretch and strengthen your way to a graceful, sculpted dancer's body"

It doesn't really tell you the emphasis is on the "strengthen" and not the "stretch". Probably I should have figured that out on my own by the fact that it said "conditioning" in big letters. Oh well. I tried to be a trooper and did quite a bit of the exercises but I was afraid I'd be too tired by the time I started yoga, so I started trying to skip ahead to the stretchy bits. I didn't find too much, so I eventually put in another dvd called "Ballet Boot Camp Stretch". The "boot camp" part was what had scared me away from this one in the first place, but I decided to be brave.

This time I was not shy about skipping through looking for the "good" bits. This dvd has poor production values and actually the stretching part was quite meager. I tried to do one bit that was called "Splits Preparation -- learn how to do the splits", and I must say it should really just be called "jam your knee into the floor for a minute and then do the splits if you can, haha!"

By this time, I was tired, it was dinnertime, and I didn't feel any more limber and if it takes me this long to do yoga every day, I'm not going to have time for anything else. It was time FINALLY to pick out my yoga dvd. I picked "Yoga for Inflexible People", which allows you to pick from a bunch of different routines which are supposed to help you increase flexibility! So, I didn't need those dumb ballet dvds, I guess. I chose a 45 minute routine and although I only had a bench and not a folding chair, this one worked out really well for me, it was the perfect amount of challenging, gave me a really good stretch and I would totally do it again.

Now I still have to do my yoga for today, day 3...