Artistic Yoga is exhilarating but over hyped

My wife and I recently completed a one-month course of the strangely named "artistic yoga" promoted by Bharat Thakur. Strange because while the classes were taxing and exhilarating, there is nothing intrinsically artistic about a one hour sweaty workout that is more PT than ballet.

If you live in Bangalore (or any other metro, I imagine), you can’t miss the hype around artistic yoga. There is a relentless barrage of testimonial-driven advertising with people claiming to have lost 4 to 5 kilos in a month.

Classes are held at several locations across the city and at Rs 3000 per head per month they attract customers in large numbers – our class had 25 people though half of them turned out to be regularly irregular.

The classes were interesting and fun. We had one-hour sessions starting at 6.15 a.m. in the mornings from Mondays to Thursdays. Under the supervision of an excellent trainer (take a bow, Priyamvada), the sessions started with breathing exercises and then exploded into a nonstop and ever changing series of kriyas, asanas, and bandhas (see the excellent artistic yoga website to know what these are). Each session concluded with Shavasana to wind down and cool off.

The artistic yoga philosophy is to change the exercise mix every day to surprise and shock the body. This prevents boredom and shatters complacence. Think you aced the Surya Namaskaras yesterday? Surprise, we’ll be doing something completely different today!

The sessions were invigorating. I’ve always considered myself reasonably fit. In the winters I walk and jog, and in the summers I swim. But over the years, I’d slipped into a groove. Beyond my fairly gentle exertions, I’d let myself slide a bit and had arrived at a point where I was five kilos over my ideal height-weight. Not alarming but not desirable.

Artistic yoga beguiled with its promise of rapid weight loss. The rational part of me knew that this was rubbish. I’d read all the right books (the Mayo Clinic website is an excellent example) and knew that diet control had a greater role to play than exercise in weight loss.

And yet.

Never underestimate the power of advertising. If the message is something you want to hear and is drummed into you often enough, chances are that you will succumb. In my case, I wanted to believe that exercise at a significantly higher level of intensity than I was used to would burn enough calories to melt the fat away.

It didn’t. One month of vigorous physical workout later, my weight has remained rock steady. Oh sure, I am on an exercise high and feel more supple and agile but that can’t hide the fact that I have lost zero kilos. Zilch. Nothing.

Someone apparently did. A woman in our class, just four days into her course, announced that she’d lost two kilos. We clapped politely but there were many raised eyebrows.

And that’s the problem with artistic yoga. It survives on unrealistic claims. As an exercise regime, it is splendid. It is yoga in name but a far cry from the slow rhythmic asanas that one learns in school or in conventional yoga classes where the emphasis is on perfecting the pose and regulating your breathing at each step.

Artistic yoga is yoga on steroids. In our one-hour sessions we hardly paused. We went from warm up to asanas to bandhas to winding down in one continuous cycle. The emphasis was on never letting up, on doing ten more Surya Namaskaras -- after the first ten or twenty. In one of our more frenetic classes, we actually did 50 of them at a stretch at marching speed -- lousy for technique but great for burning calories.

And therein lies the danger. Like all promised miracle cures, the incessant hype around artistic yoga can kill it by discrediting it. I find it hard to believe that any exercise regime can survive for long by promising a five kilos-a-month weight loss. You can have all the advertising and testimonials you want but for every one success, there will be twenty dissatisfied customers and they will spread the word and the bubble will burst. Like the many miracle cures before it (think TABE clinics, magnet therapy, memory pills and the hundreds of ridiculous products on the teleshopping channel), artistic yoga will self-destruct if it does not do a course correction.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the company is using weight loss as a canny siren song to differentiate itself from the other hundreds of yoga classes in the country. Maybe once the reaction against this positioning sets it, the promoters will latch on to something else. Time will tell.

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