Yee of Little Faith.

by Alexa on July 29, 2008

Allow me to clear up a misconception about my love of exercise:
True, after I have finished, I feel calm and rejuvenated and proud of my Soreness of Virtue. Frequently during this period I can be heard making wild proclamations about my intention to take up running, or something equally outlandish, as I bob around the apartment on a springy cushion of endorphins. Even during exercise, I am often almost joyous, though certainly some of this is a by-product of feeling smug.
BEFORE, exercise, however, I hate it, just like any good American. I am getting better at remembering the after part in order to trick myself into getting started, but when I said exercise was possibly my favorite part of the day, I meant a collection of moments some during, but mostly following the event itself, and I want to make it clear that I in NO WAY look FORWARD to putting in a DVD and lurching around like a damn fool when I could be eating a bowl of berries in heavy cream. But I cannot deny that I like it once I have gotten past the initial shock to the system.
I would like to officially register a complaint, however, about the lack of timely—and by timely I mean immediate—change in my shape following physical exertion. It’s a good thing I enjoy the process, because otherwise I would be VERY PERTURBED about the fact that the sight of my naked thighs still serves as an effective reminder that I never did read Moby Dick, and whatever happened to that copy from high school?

Beyond a grudging fondness of exercise in general, what I have recently discovered—or rediscovered, really—is a fondness for yoga. I started doing yoga in elementary school, from a book of my mother’s, and with the exception of the breathing part (breathing has always been a challenge for me), I enjoyed a pleasing level of competence at the activity on and off for the next 15 years. There was even a time, long ago, when I thought about becoming a yoga teacher. It seemed like a nice sort of job to have, one that would leave me time for my writing. And then I met Scott, and one thing led to another, and suddenly it had been four years and fifty pounds since I found myself in Upward Facing Dog in anything like a regular fashion. I have returned to yoga now, but only in the privacy of my living room. I am not ready to be confined to a room for 90 minutes with a flock of sinewy young yoginis.
Truthfully, yoga probably isn’t the best exercise for someone looking to lose weight, even the Vinyasa sort I have been doing lately. But it doesn’t inspire the same dread as, say, a treadmill, and afterward the Soreness of Virtue is pleasantly diffuse. During yoga I come as close to calm as I get, and the familiarity of the poses builds my confidence.

HOWEVER. The video I have been doing lately is one I got at Target, called “Power Yoga,” featuring a shirtless ponytailed man named Rodney Yee. It’s about an hour long, and Mr. Yee does the routine outdoors in a peaceful natural setting, never speaking or acknowledging the camera in any way. Instead, he leads you through the poses via soothing, hypnotic voiceover. The poses are all ones I have done before, though the last time I did most of them my belly was concave and slung between my hipbones like a hammock, so several times I have had the startling sensation of running into a piece of flesh during a twist or bend that simply was not there before. But most irksome, for me, are the many repetitions of the Standing Forward Bend.
As I have noted before, I have a short torso. A very short torso, attached to long legs. The only time I have been able to touch my toes was when I was nineteen and doing ballet and Pilates four days a week. My earliest memories of gym class involve me sitting with my legs spread in a triangle, utterly failing to reach even the top of my foot with my outstretched arms. That common PE evaluation that required you to sit with your feet against a box and lean forward, sliding your fingers down a numbered board? I failed that too.
When I was very young I drew people as giant heads, with legs protruding directly from the neck area, and arms protruding from the middle of the legs. With the exception of that last part, my drawings of myself came close to physical accuracy. So, to sum up, here is a picture of me:

And here is a picture of Rodney Yee:
Rodney
Note the differences.
Now, here is a picture of Rodney Yee doing a Standing Forward Bend:
rodney2
And here is me doing the same:
me2
You see the problem. I suppose I should accept that the laws of physics do not permit me to contort myself in this manner without the aid of Photoshop, but I am finding such acceptance hard to come by. The form of yoga I practice is known as Pointlessly Competitive Yoga (Stressana, in the Sanskrit), born of my high pain threshold and inability to physically excel at anything else. Everyone has seen an instructor demonstrate a basic pose, and then follow it up with “More advanced students can try this variation,” said while calmly wrapping her arm around her thigh like a tourniquet. A sensible student would chuckle bemusedly and ignore her, but I see that twisted arm and think, “If human anatomy is capable of such a thing, so am I!” And then I wind my arm around my leg, cheerfully breaking the bone in three places. But with the standing forward bend, no amount of brute force will induce my lips to kiss my knees while my palms fondle the floor. So for now, this part of the video is an exercise in accepting my limits as much as anything else. While I’m at it, maybe I’ll accept that my thigh fat will never drop spontaneously from my bones. And let’s be honest: I’m NEVER going to read Moby Dick.

Yee of Little Faith.

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