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22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Emphasis on the postures, but inadequate explanations, June 10, 2004
As someone who has been practicing yoga for years and teaching for almost two years, I can sympathize with a lot of the issues that Shaw surfaces in her book. In a nutshell, many people who are curious about yoga and want to take advantage of its physical benefits are either intimidated or turned off by what they perceive to be the rest of the "yoga lifestyle" and feel as if Yoga with a capital Y is an all-or-nothing proposition. To the extent that Shaw's book opens the door for those people, I applaud her. I also find her statement that she feels she has a mission to contribute to society by sharing yoga admirable.However, I feel like she unnecessarily insults "traditional yoga" several times in the course of the book. For instance, she writes in her preface, "What separates YogaFit from other forms of yoga is that YogaFit speaks directly and without pretensiousness to everyone, but especially to the needs of amateur and professional athletes." And later in the same paragraph, "...YogaFit holds the answers to all of these [sports-training] problems without boring you to death." Reading these words, I can't help but get the impression that Shaw is convinced that she is the only one who can deliver the goods to athletes and fitness enthusiasts; Baron Baptiste will be interested to hear that. One of the other notable aspects of the book is that Shaw can't seem to decide whether YogaFit is a form of yoga or something else altogether. She refers to it as an accessible, demystified form of yoga, then later has a full page chart contrasting the difference between YogaFit and yoga. Curious, since she went to great pains several years ago to have her training program recognized by Yoga Alliance, a registering body of yoga instructors and schools. The most glaring inconsistency presented by the book is that while Shaw's focus is clearly on the postures, her instructions are lacking. While I don't think one needs to spend paragraphs describing how to enter and hold a pose, some things are worth mentioning, like hip placement in the warriors and not locking your elbows in postures such as Tabletop and Upward Dog. Finally, the instructions that she gives for some of the sequences are difficult to understand in some places, and she appears to work sides unevenly (for example, in the YogaFit Classic sequence, you're doing more Pyramids on one side than another). Having said all of that, I do like the postures that she chose- most of them are basic and appropriate enough for both beginners and more advanced students.
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by Sam Murphy
DVD ~ Beth Shaw
by Dr. William Kent Larkin
