New workouts

Title:

Shiva Rea Core Yoga

What’s the goal?

To harness your sacred strength and to activate your full potential and/or to imagine yourself far away in a tropical paradise or perched atop mounds of white sand as you oscillate your neck and let your arms be creative.

So you imagine that your living room alternates between Hawaii and White Sands National Monument, with you gyrating and stretching in solitary splendor - willowy, fierce (in a nonaggressive manner) and so dedicated to being creative that by doing 108 pushups you might create ... I don’t know what, maybe world peace.

Who’s it for?

Intermediate yoga-doers who collect Shiva Rea discs and are nonaggressively thinking right now that it’s sort of disrespectful to call them “yoga-doers.”

Format:

This disc repackages parts of three earlier workout DVDs as a convenient mix-and-match matrix. The menu page lets you select as many of the repurposed chapters as you wish to perform and then play them as one continuous workout.

Options include three chapters from the DVD Creative Core Abs (eight, 10 or 17 minutes in a world full of white sand); two chapters from Creative Core & Lower Body (nine or 13 minutes beside a verdantly tropical mountain brook in Hawaii); and two chapters from Creative Core & Upper Body (eight or 25 minutes near the same brook); and two minutes of sprawling with your eyes closed beside that lovely Hawaiian trickle.

Necessary gear:

sand, waterfalls, a drummer with dreadlocks and a doumbek ... just kidding. She uses a yoga mat and her beautifully conditioned body.

Floor space required:

Imagine the dimensions of your mat cubed and then add some width for creatively flailing arms.

Can I do it barefoot?

Yes - assuming you can do it at all, which is far from a sure bet.

This is no beginner’s workout.

Developer’s credentials:

Shiva Rea has a master’s degree in dance anthropology.

She took up yoga at age 14 while trying to figure out why her surfer father named her Shiva.

According to her biography on the DVD, she is a student of “the Krishnamacharya lineage, tantra, Ayurveda, bhakti, kalaripayattu,world dance, yogic arts and somatic movement” - which taken altogether mean she sometimes calls postures by their Sanskrit names and often says things like “So now hips are flowing towards the earth.”

To be fair, her descriptions, all in voice over narration, are generally perfectly clear and very detailed - only sometimes are they flat-out weird.

Music style:

classy world-music-type tribal percussion and/or exotic jingling and flutes.

Distractions?

Other than not actually being in Hawaii?

Price:

$16.99

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 06/25/2012

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