Is Yoga Out of Control? (Yes)
Laughter yoga. Nazi yoga. Donation yoga with Dave Matthews playing in the background. Thank you, yoga. That's enough.
Hippie yoga. Celebrity yoga. Charity yoga. Yoga books. Yoga while eating. Yoga on the road. Yoga in the park. Yoga as a nontraditional workout for athletes in traditional sports.
Yoga people have become the new "Let me tell you about my workout" guy. And nobody likes that guy.
Perhaps yoga's fatal flaw was that everyone thought it was something new. Yoga was supposed to be the anti-workout; the anti-gym; the spiritual, holistic, ancient, anti-body-obsessive version of exercise. After years of media scrutiny, it turns out yoga is the anti-interesting.
Sure, every sort of workout is painfully dull to hear about because, guess what, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR WORKOUT. ("Super Squats" is just an unamusing running joke that confirms this point, over and over). This has been well understood since the 80s, when men quickly learned that the onset of the national "fitness craze" did not mean that women would sleep with them if they droned on about their bodybuilding regimen. Yoga's big mistake was to presume that it was somehow different. Of course we would never dream of boring the fuck out of the world with an endless stream of trend stories and features on jogging around a lake or jumping rope or engaging in a thrice-weekly six week program of 20-rep squats, escalating the weight five pounds each session and finishing it off with a three-round circuit consisting of a push, a pull, and an ab exercise. But yoga, its aficionados erroneously assumed, was sufficiently deep and nuanced that its endless varieties warranted endless coverage.
It is not so.
Look, I'm sure yoga is fun and, you know...cool, doing all the stretches and the poses, and things, with the heat on, while you're meditating or chanting or just listening to a few of the laid-back stylings of the Dave Matthews Band, etc. Bully for everyone and their hobbies! But we must remind the yoga fans that infest the features department of every media outlet that, despite their personal enthusiasm, the vagaries of the latest yoga trends hold no more interest for the world at large than do the technical aspects of a properly executed hang clean.
Save it for Yoga Fancy.
