Podcasts: A Portable Yoga Alternative

I’ve been doing a lot more traveling in the past few months and find myself often out of my natural settings. At first, I told myself a variety of different excuses as to why it was inconvenient to keep up my regular yoga practice. Things like; “it’s too cold to go outside,” “I’m too busy to find a local studio,” “I don’t have my mat with me” and probably the most absurd “there’s not enough floor space in my present surroundings.” Come on, please!

As if you need any more space than that of your yoga mat. So after escaping, avoiding and denying my body and mind, I’ve finally started looking for new reasons to go beyond my usual yoga practice routine and try new ways of doing yoga.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll share with you a few of my insights and findings as I look to the alternatives of your friendly neighborhood studio, where “everybody knows your name.”

Some of you may know I’m a total techie and when it comes to gadgets and gizmos, I’m usually an early adopter, constantly striving for the cutting edge.

So two weeks ago when Apple released their new 2.2 iPhone software with ‘Over the Air Updates‘ I was so excited to be able to begin streaming or downloading podcasts directly to my phone without having to tether my iPhone back to my Mac just to update and download the latest podcast materials.

After some careful exploration of yoga podcasts, I found several that were perfect to get me back into my yoga routine (more on these next week).

At first I was a little skeptical as to how I was going to pull off the logistics of doing a full yoga practice off my iPhone (or iPod), but it actually turned out quite well.

I simply placed my iPhone on the couch at a slight angle against a pillow during the standing poses and directly in front of me during sitting poses. I happen to have the first generation iPhone, which is a little on the quiet side, but if you have a new G3 iPhone, the speaker volume is almost twice as loud. My surroundings were quiet so it worked perfectly for me even without any earphones.

Once you find a few sessions you enjoy, keep them on your iPhone or iPod and after 2-3 workouts you won’t need the visual anymore and you can switch to using earbuds (headphones) and just attach your iPod to your waist or your arm and you can simply follow the guided experience.

So, whether you’re going to be traveling or you just want to supplement your regular yoga practice, head on over to the iTunes directory and load up yoga video podcasts. You don’t need an iPhone, you can use anything from an iTouch, iPod, Apple’s Shuffle, any third party MP3 player, or you could even just use your laptop if necessary.

[tags]yoga practice while traveling, yoga DVD, yoga with iPhone, yoga podcast, alternative yoga exercise[/tags]