As if to lend weight to my contention that your computer can, in principle, teach you anything, along comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.

Lithe young women illustrate these ancient Eastern methods 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 frequently pretty much unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga is often a nicely designed program that packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages such as the Quick and Easy Course, the Beauty Course and also the Health Course.

The program consists largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which just about every position is demonstrated in one window while described textually in an additional. 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 challenges of using this DVD are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, advises 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 maintain your monitor on the floor, is very likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of the poses could be much more readily done with a videotape.

On the other hand, you can hunt around in the DVD, choose from the positions you wish to learn, and collect them into personal groups. And possibly you’ve got a truly big monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.

This may be a nice program, well-made and instructive. My only issue is that it does not stress clearly enough that unless you’re as slender as the model executing the poses, you are not going to be able to do many of them — the Crow, the Heron as well as the Frog, for instance — the right way. On the other hand, we can all do the Corpse.

Shiatsu Relaxation, which teaches a massage technique clearly related to acupuncture, is one more kettle of fish.

The concept is that rubbing, kneading or poking distinct points on the body, called acupressure points, will make different parts of the body feel better. I am not ready to argue that premise, but the entire procedure seems shiatsu yourself is not clear, either; the program initially suggests you get some of your own extra accessible pressure points, but they are not all accessible to your own hands and all the demos show one person ministering to yet another.

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