As if to lend weight to my contention that your personal computer can, in concept, teach you anything, along comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women show these ancient Eastern procedures while mellow-voiced narrators speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Yoga Dvd
Most of us are familiar at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and its typically pretty much unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga can be a nicely designed program that packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages such as the Quick and Easy Course, the Beauty Course as well as the Health Course.
The program comprises largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which just about every position is demonstrated in one window while described textually in another. A narrator reads that same text aloud. In addition to the usual tape-recorder buttons to pause, stop and restart the action, there may be a graph that displays the approximate duration of just about every segment of the routine.
The practical problems of using this CD-ROM are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, recommends the user to First practice forming the pose while watching the screen and try memorizing the whole procedure.” This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or continue your monitor on the floor, is very likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of the poses could be more readily done with a videotape.
On the different hand, you can hunt around in the CD-ROM, choose from the positions you would like to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you’ve got a actually big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This is a nice system, well-made and instructive. My only issue is that it does not stress clearly enough that unless you are as slender as the model executing the poses, you are not going to be capable of do many of them — the Crow, the Heron and also the Frog, for instance — properly. On the some other hand, we can all do the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage method clearly connected to acupuncture, is yet another kettle of fish.
The theory is that rubbing, kneading or poking particular points on the body, called acupressure points, will make other parts of the body feel better. I am not prepared to argue that premise, but the entire procedure seems shiatsu yourself is not clear, either; the program initially suggests you obtain some of your own further accessible pressure points, but they are not all accessible to your own hands and all the demonstrations show one individual ministering to one more.
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