Product Description

Power up your body and mind with Power Yoga: Strength, a fast-moving flow sequence that works arms, back and abs to build strength that¹s balanced throughout all the large and small muscles. Renowned instructor Rodney Yee guides you in a session that targets your entire upper body as you experience his distinctive, signature style of Power Yoga. Rodney shows you step-by-step how to confidently do challenging arm balance poses for core strength, more defined lean muscle and a greater sense of balance. Feel the empowering effects of using your body¹s own weight to add strength-building resistance to each move. Rapid sequencing designed to increase power adds a fat-burning aerobic benefit for a complete, satisfying yoga workout. Small movements create big results, strengthening and fine-tuning upper body muscles you may not even know you have. Gain a new sense of body-mind power that comes from the inside out ‹ strength you¹ll feel and see in everything you do. A complete 24-minute workout filmed along the stunning Maui coast: awaken and warm up body & mind with Sun Salutations, boost upper body strength and burn fat with fluid, fast-paced sequences, finish with guided relaxation and feel focused, energized & empowered.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9843 in DVD
• Brand: GAIAM AMERICAS
• Released on: 2004-11-09
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 30 minutes

Features

• Power up your body and mind with Power Yoga: Strength, a fast-moving flow sequence that works arms, back and abs to build strength that s balanced throughout all the large and small muscles. Renowned instructor Rodney Yee guides you in a session that targets your entire upper body as you experience his distinctive, signature style of Power Yoga. Rodney shows you step-by-step how to confidently do

Customer Reviews

Good short Power Yoga routine for building strength
First a few words about myself so you can more easily judge if my opinion might be helpful to you or not. I teach Power Vinyasa Yoga at a local Hotel Spa Fitness Club. I train every day and prefer complete Power Yoga Flow Routines that challange your overall bodystrength a lot and still contribute to every aspect of Yoga (meaning the meditative aspects, proper breathing, inner awareness and so on).
Since I'm german my english spelling is pretty bad, sorry for that!

About the DVD:
The routine is about 25 Minutes long but still offers you quite a challange for the short time. I can't do 60 to 90 Minutes of Yoga every day, so I'm glad to own a couple of shorter programms for the days in between or for early in the morning.
Rodney Yee is a hihgly skilled Instructor with a very gentil and calm manner and an interesting style of Yoga. His voice is always soothing, but still encouraging.

The programm on the DVD is specially challanging for upper body strength but still working the whole body. It's fluid and, regarding the short time, complete.
The only one little thing I can critizise is that the verbal instruction is somtimes not absolutly in line with the instruction on screen. From time to time Rodny on screen is movin just a little to fast compared to his verbal instruction. But that's not very important and doesn't cause any problems, so I can still rate this 5 Stars.
If your looking for a short physicaly demanding Power Yoga routine, this is for you. It's not suitable for absolute Beginners since Rodny moves pretty fast from Pose to Pose and some are to challanging for an absolute beginner. I would recommend it for intermediate to advanced students.
If your interested in more Power Yoga, check out my other reviews about Power Vinyasa Yoga DVDs. To see al DVDs I recommend check out my listmania list. Let my know if you found the reviews helpfull. I truely hope so!
Namasté

Beginners Be Ready for a Challenge!
Whoa, Rodney, this is for beginners? OK, yes, I feel great after doing the workout. But this is definitely not for anyone who has never taken a yoga class and who doesn't know at least the basic poses. How anyone can support their body weight doing the legs-elevated poses (e.g., pendulum pose) is beyond me. This will probably prove to be especially difficult for women without extremely strong arm and shoulder muscles. I found myself doing modifications on those poses because my jaw dropped watching Rodney Yee doing them effortlessly and calling them "simple."
This is very fast-paced, also, but it seems less so after doing it a few times.

Power Yoga: (Aerobic Pace and Arm) Strength...
The Good: Delivers a decent arm/shoulder workout. Puts in a few arm balances. Gets into the workout fast.

The Bad: Pacing is very fast, few poses are held for more than a couple seconds. Apart from a few arm-balances, not much to look forward to.

The Verdict: With only 20 minutes to work with, Yee gives your arms and shoulders an aerobic-yoga workout. Unfortunately, the practice is so short and fast paced, that it stands to be nothing more than a yoga-supplement to a more complete workout.


Full Review: I've been using Yee's "Power Yoga: Full Body" for a while now, and thought I'd put some mixture into my routine. As always Yee's calm delivery makes this easy to listen to. I nearly didn't have to watch the DVD before first attempting it, as it's not that difficult to follow-as long as you can move quickly between poses. No, really. Move FASTER!

The pacing of the routine is going to turn some people off, plain and simple. "Power Yoga: Full Body" is medium paced, while this is fast paced. Very fast. In fact, you barely have time to hit a pose before moving to the next. The only poses that you'll spend any time in are the arm-balances, and downward-facing dog.

It's a short, accelerated, 20 minute aerobic workout for your upper body, shoulders, arms, and reportedly abs. Realistically, I felt it in my arms, and to some extent my shoulders. After doing to routine a couple of times, I was able to keep pace easy enough, though admittedly I felt like I was really rushing through an otherwise enjoyable yoga practice.

The workout itself is brief, jumping straight into sun salutations (which remain for the entire workout), lots of up/downward-facing dog, standing forward bend, mtn pose, lunges, and a few arm balances and chair poses. You do two or three seated poses, then go into a short relaxation pose.

The obvious question here is why would Gaiam/ Yee make such a short "Strength" video? I mean, I did 20 minutes of Intermediate yoga and then had absolutely no problem knocking this one off. In no way am I saying that this workout is easy, but that it really is only worthwhile as a supplement to another routine I'll do before/after it.

In many ways, I just don't feel the workout was constructed well. Why cap a yoga practice at 20 minutes? Apart from a few arm balances, and a lot of downward-facing dog/sun salutations - this really isn't that inventive. Why didn't they put in at least another 10 minutes of arm balances... handstands, shoulderstands, forearm-stands, headstands, something, anything more? I think they could have slowed the pace back down to medium fast and added a few more strength poses to extend the time to 30 or 40 minutes, creating a fuller experience without losing the spirit of the practice.

I like Yee's instruction and delivery, and the DVD is a unique yoga workout-but I can't give it more than three stars. It's fast pace, and brevity make it of limited use to me.