Gaiam Yoga Journal's Yoga for Strength with Rodney Yee

Yoga Journal's Yoga for Strength with Rodney Yee

This was my second workout of the day. This morning, I did a workout from Gaiam called Rodney Yee's AM & PM Yoga for Beginners. I did both of them. I didn't think I was going to get a second workout today because hubby came home early from work. At 2:00 PM (my normal weekend workout time) he volunteered to go into the bedroom so I could have my workout time. He's such a swell guy! The DVD jacket says that this workout has menus so you can jump right into the workout, but I must not be very bright because I couldn't find them. It started off with a bunch of advertisements. I hit my title button on my remote and then I was given an option to see the interview and an option to do the workouts. When I clicked for the workouts, it went to a video showing Rodney doing yoga. It was amazing to watch him, but I had a limited amount of time, so I started to fast forward hoping it was just a short segment. It seemed like an eternity! 

When I got past that, I got to the first workout. He talked about the workouts first and gave a description of them. He made it sound like I would get to pick which one I wanted to do, but I wasn't given an option to pick one. It just went right into the first workout. 

This was a lot slower than some of the other ones that I've been doing from him. He was also much younger in this workout. He still had the long braid though. He talked a lot less in this one and we held poses longer. There were things in these workouts that I just couldn't do, but there were things that I was able to do that surprised me! I don't really remember everything we did, but I feel amazing after doing it. My butt feels like I did a boat load of squats. 

The first workout started off with a Vinyasa section. We did four different sequences. They were all pretty similar. They involved Down Dog, Plank, Up Dog and some sort of standing pose in the middle. Nothing in this segment was very hard. Once the Vinyasa stuff was done, I think we did some relaxing on our backs which is why I thought the segment was the first workout. The editing in this thing was a bit rough. He was standing one second and then seated the next. So after the relaxing stuff, we held some poses instead of doing a flow. I don't remember them all, but I know we did some Triangle and what I call Right Angle, but he called a Side Stretch or something like that. There were more, but I just can't remember them. My memory sucks. None of them were crazy hard or anything and we didn't hold them so long that I couldn't do it. After we did those, we did some relaxing stuff again and the segment was over. 

The second workout had some standing stuff and some seated stuff. This one didn't have a flow section. It was pretty much just what I was looking for. I like the flow stuff, but I really wanted to do one where we just held some poses. We held Down Dog for 2 minutes in this segment. I actually broke out of it before he said that time was up. This workout was sort of broke up into two sections. The first one was leading up to shoulder stands. We did Down Dog a lot! We also did it with our elbows bent and our forearms on the floor. I think I've done this before, but it was called Dolphin. I could be wrong though. We did this a few times and touched our heads down to the floor. This segment was hard on my shoulder. I had pain in my shoulder, but I'm not sure what was causing it. I wasn't very fond of the segment. Then we sat on some blankets in front of  chair. We moved to Plow position with our feet on the chair. He just magically moves into Plow position. I had to just keep rocking on my back to get enough momentum to get my butt high enough. My lower body just weighs too much to magically float into Plow. Once we were in Plow we were supposed to lift up one leg and then we switched and then they both went up and were were in a shoulder stand. I actually did a shoulder stand. It wasn't pretty, but I did it! After the Shoulder Stand, we did some relaxing and some stretching. Some of the stretching was awesome! It's more stuff that I'm going to add to my nightly routine. Not necessarily every night, but I'll rotate them in. We used a strap and stretched out one leg straight up. Then we stretched out an arm to the side and lowered the leg to one side and then the other side. We did that with each leg. That felt amazing in my hips. I can still feel it. 

Then we did the next section which was more holding of different poses. One of them required two blocks. Well, you might be able to do it without the blocks, but I couldn't. He said to use the blocks, but he didn't use them for the second time we did the pose. We were seated in a cross legged pose and put our hands on the blocks. Then we were supposed to lift ourselves up off the floor and balance just on our hands. I got some lift, but I didn't get all the way off the floor. We also did a Crow position. I never understood why it was called Crow when we were doing it in PiYo, but it was a modified version of it. When you do the full version, you do sort of look like a bird. I put as much weight as I could in my hands, but I didn't get off the ground. However, I was able to get my arms into the correct position this time. When I tried this position during Daily Burn, I couldn't get my knees up high enough onto my triceps to even attempt this move. Progress baby! We did more Triangle and that Side Stretch from the first workout. We also did Exalted Warrior and Brave Warrior. I get so confused with all of the Warrior poses and the different names. Exalted Warrior just seemed like Warrior 1 with a bit of a back bend to it. Brave Warrior was just like Warrior 3, but with our hands forward instead of back. We also did a Half Moon Pose. Oh and Boat Pose. I suck at Boat Pose. There were probably a few more poses, but I just don't remember them. Some of this stuff was hard, but I really enjoyed it. I did a shoulder stand! 

Overall, I'm glad I did this workout. I was really looking for a workout where we held poses instead of just doing a flow and this workout did that. I feel like I did an amazing leg day and I barely broke a sweat. I didn't have to deal with bouncing around and nothing was too crazy terrible. 

BodyMedia Screen Shots

This DVD was really confusing for me so I thought the first workout was done, but it wasn't. I had stopped my workout tab on the BodyMedia device so I started it up again. The first two are the first workout and the third is the second workout. The first workout was sort of in two sections so each one is a section.