The Power of Hatha Yoga: Challenging Series
by Naader Shagagi
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DVD details
Actor: Naader ShagagiDirector: Naader Shagagi
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Digital Sound, NTSC
Running Time: 55 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-11-07
Studio: Yoga Kingdom Sanctuary
DVD Reviews of The Power of Hatha Yoga: Challenging Series
DVD Review: poor body dynamics, plus technical problems with the DVD
Summary: 1 Stars
Let me preface this review by saying that my yoga background includes exposure to lots of video instruction and over 7 years of practice. I have experienced a wide variety of instructional styles, and am fully aware that the original yoga sutras don't specify much about body dynamics, leave a lot of room for interpretation, and therefore there's not a "correct" way to practice the asanas. However, the cross-pollination of sports medicine, anatomical studies, physical therapy, and the dedicated practice of hundreds of yoga teachers with backgrounds in similar areas has contributed valuable information about body dynamics that reduces the risk of injury to the beginning yogi or yogini as yoga gains popularity in the West.
It is from this perspective that I tell you Naader Shagagi does not teach body dynamics "properly" and that if you are new and don't know better, you could hurt yourself following his instruction. A good example of this is in cobra pose; he simply tells you to look up and arch your back. If you watch what he's doing, his upper back is actually curved slightly forward and he's hyperextending his neck and lower back, the places where the back bends most easily. Cobra is suppossed to open the harder-to-bend-back areas of the spine in the upper back, hence a better way to instruct would be to tell the student to reach their sternum forward, not bend their neck back. Another dangerous example is that he's constantly telling the student "lock your knees" in asanas where the knees are supposed to be straight or close to straight. This not only endangers the knees, but it lends a rigidity to the poses that is counter to one aim of yoga to which is to enliven the body. In downward dog, for instance, if you lock your knees, it limits the forward pelvic (dog) tilt, and the pose hits a static limit instead of continuing to be a dynamic stretch. If you allow the knees to remain slightly bent, pull up with the quadriceps, and get your hamstring stretch from the forward pelvic tilt, you preserve the dynamic tensions of the pose without pushing against the limits of your skeletal structure, risking cartilidge damage. These are just a couple of examples, but I could go on. To be fair, some of the differences are probably just stylistically peculiar to Naader's teaching. For instance, in Parsvottanasana (the wide-legged standing forward release over the front leg), he tells you to bring your forehead to your knee instead of aiming the sternum towards the knee. I would have thought this was just plain wrong until he mentioned that this stimulates the thyroid as in shoulderstand. It's just a different stretch, that's all. Still, the crowning gripe about this Naader's instruction is that he takes corpse pose (which for some reason falls in the middle of the session if you play the DVD straight through) as an opportunity to go on at length about his yogic philosophy which keeps the the mind occupied in logical apprehension of what he's saying which rather defeats the purpose of corpse pose, that is, to release thought along with all muscular tension and experience a meditative state. To top it all off, the DVD had some technical problems, and digital "stuttering" (I don't know how else to describe it) in the two DVD players I tried playing it in. I unfortunately also purchased Naader's Ultimate series which I am returning unopened to Amazon.
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