Customer Reviews

Yoga to Go: A Take-It-With-You Guide for Travellers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...And if you don't have a yoga bookshelf, this would be a good place to start. YOGA TO GO is a well-written, handsomely produced (and very inexpensive!) yoga manual that works well as a general primer for yoga novices, but which also has something new to offer the more experienced: specific advice for how to continue your yoga practice while travelling. That is, how to use yoga to counteract the usual array of discombobulating travel-related irritations (bad food, long hours in cramped seats, time changes, lost sleep, etc.). Carino's book also offers simple and sage advice on some peripheral topics -- such as how to eat well in places where the only options seem to be Burger King and Taco Bell; and how to meditate on a plane while the guy seated next to you drools on your shoulder.

Carino's writing style is fluid and accessible and should appeal equally to those for whom yoga is a spiritual pursuit, and those for whom it is primarily an exercise regimen.

This is Paula Carino's first book. I hope we can look forward to more from her.

The visual appeal of this book -- its small size, heavyweight paper, and crystal clear photos -- all add to the top-notch instruction and sage advice for yoga either on the road or at home. The book consists of five chapters, focusing on postures, routines, and advice for achieving optimal wellness while on the road. The poses are photographed clearly, and the best part is the modifications recommended for beginners. This is the perfect complement to a beginning yogi or yogini's library, and I certainly intend on taking the book with me when I travel. The recommended routines are simple enough to perform in a hotel room, while the book itself will inspire me to look after my health while traveling. Highly recommended.

I bought this for my wife after it was recommended by a friend and she is very pleased with the book. She now uses it every day with help doing yoga routines as well as assisting with sleep problems.
Highly recommended.

I love to travel and having this book by my side is going to make every trip evenmore enjoyable. I am planing take this book on every journey I make.

Like most people interested in yoga, I have a few yoga books in my library. I got Yoga To Go by Paula Carino hoping for information specific to traveling and maintaining a yoga routine. While the book does that to some degree, I found its space taken up by too much extraneous information. The book could have been trimmed to be much smaller - therefore fitting in a purse or pocket. That would have been GREAT! Instead, it contains unnecessary information and becomes something only suitable for a backpack or actual luggage toting.

First, the good. The book does specifically talk about the situations you are likely to encounter while traveling. It talks about the stress of missing a flight, of waiting in line, the cramps of being seated for several hours running. It talks about the dearth of healthy food in many terminals, and the cramped size of the hotel room. These are exactly the situations I got the book to work through.

The book provides some solutions for these situations. If you are stuck at a bus stop in a not-so-great part of town, take time to people watch and observe just what this neighborhood's people are like. Get into a conversation with another person here - someone you might not normally talk with. You might learn some amazing things!

There are many, many pages of poses, all with clear photos and long descriptions including modifications. If you've never heard of a pose, this book will help you out.

But this leads into some of my disappointment with the book. Do we really need **153 pages of poses** (I am not kidding here) in a "easy to carry travel book"? They're not even broken out by situation. It is really like carrying a full, regular yoga book with you. I would much rather have had this be MUCH smaller (and therefore the book much more totable). Maybe 2-3 pages of "poses for waiting in line", 2-3 pages of "poses while waiting in a terminal/station, 2-3 pages of "ideas while in an airplane" and so on. You could quickly flip to the situation you were in and find a solution. As it is, you have to go digging through the huge selection to figure out what works best where you are.

If we're talking about actually being IN your hotel room - heck, you bring a travel mat and do your normal routine! That's not a big deal. And you don't need a "travel sized book" in that situation. You just back your normal yoga book, or a DVD for your laptop.

She recommends taking flammable substances - candles, incense - and lighting them in your hotel room. I don't imagine most hotels would be keen on this - and cruises expressly forbid it! She would have done much better to discuss the array of NON-flame involving options such as battery-powered tea lights, smelly jellies, a handful of coffee beans in a ziplock bag, and so on.

Even if you say "this book is for my in-room yoga and isn't really a travel book", I found it not as great as other books I own. She will show a series of photos up front, and then have multiple pages of description so you have to flip back and forth at each step to see what the photo was for that stage. It's a bit cumbersome.

In the dining area, I've written many, many articles on healthy dining while traveling. She misses most of the standard key ideas. She sort of mentions "look for salads", then starts pushing vegetarianism and then tells you to bring vegetarian meals from home. In most travel situations that simply isn't going to work (if you even are a vegetarian).

Finally, some of the information is simply incorrect. She talks about the myth of eating turkey causing sleepiness because of the tryptophan in it. That myth was disproven years ago. Yes, there's tryptophan in turkey - but the amount isn't enough to affect the human body. The REAL reason people fall asleep after Thanksgiving is that they just ingested tons of carbs - potato, yams, stuffing etc. - and after the brief sugar rush, their blood sugar levels crashed. So if you wanted the Thanksgiving effect to get you sleepy, you shouldn't eat turkey - you should load up on carbs and then let yourself crash (assuming you don't have blood sugar issues to start with!!)

Anyway, I really liked the idea behind this, I liked the photography, and I liked some of the advice provided. However, there are WAY too many poses shown and the resulting thickness of the book is far larger than any travel book I own. If she did a second version with half (or less) of the poses, arranged more logically for its purpose, then I would go for the five stars. As it stands right now, it is missing its target mark.

Author Paula Carino designed this book as a yoga guide for travelers, but it actually makes an excellent manual for those practicing at home as well. Rather than just focus on asana, the physical practice of yoga, Carino begins by reviewing all eight limbs of hatha yoga, discussing how the both the yamas (ethical practices) and the niyamas (moral observations) might apply to travel. However, the majority of the book does center around the third limb, the postures.

All of the postures are beautifully demonstrated with full color photographs featuring yoga instructor Zelina Blagden as a model. Carino provides detailed, easy-to-understand instructions for each pose, beginning with simple seated and warm-up postures and moving through a full range of asanas including backward bends, forward bends, inversions, standing poses, spinal twists, and relaxation poses. The information she provides includes the Sanskrit name for each posture, breathing instructions for the pose, modifications to the pose, and benefits of the pose. Several different types of breathing exercises (pranayama) are also introduced.

Once Carino has presented the postures, she moves on to Chapter 3, "Creating Your Practice." Here Carino combines the poses to form various routines which would be appropriate for practicing on the road (but which would work for home practice). For example, she offers a 20-minute "Morning Energizer" routine as well as a 30-minute "Good Night's Sleep" routine. She also suggests practices to address common problems experienced while traveling, including Headache, Nausea, Aching Back, and Colds. Finally, Carino suggests postures specific to the type of travel--eg, stretches for plane, car, or train travel. The last two chapters of the book are brief; they cover Eating Well on the Road and Travel and Meditation.

Not only is this book an excellent source of information, but it is also extremely attractive: as mentioned above, it is filled with full-color photos as well as cute, colorful illustrations designating each chapter. In addition, it is printed on a thicker, clearly more high quality glossy paper (ironically, however, this makes the book rather heavy for its size and actually less suited to travel). Although I might not actually bring this book with me when traveling (it is a bit heavy and bulky for that purpose), it definitely has some great information for practicing yoga on the go, and I would recommend it for those practicing at home as well.