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Yoga is Flexibility

As fitness coordinator for Bally's Total Fitness and program director for the National Fitness Centers in Knoxville and Sevierville, Jennifer Murrien, 30, oversees the large squad of aerobicizing, high-stepping, kickboxing, ab-blasting, buns-crunching fitness instructors whose job it is whip the flabby into shape through high-energy aerobics and shaping classes. Eight of these instructors are huddled around Murrien's teaching platform in National Fitness' frosty aerobics room, hanging on her every word as she distills 5,000 years of yoga history down to a two-hour teacher training session—introducing them to words like asana, pranayama, and meditation, most of them for the first time.

Just as it wormed its way into national consciousness, yoga has found its way into our fitness centers—bumping step aerobics and kickboxing classes out of their prime-time slots and creating an unprecedented demand for yoga instructors, many of whom are and will increasingly be repurposed aerobics instructors. Aerobics organizations like American Aerobics Association International (or AAAI, read "triple-AI") are now certifying yoga instructors after weekend workshops. Other health clubs, like National Fitness, are training their own—which Murrien is doing tonight.

This is the closest thing to controversy in the yoga world—studied yoga instructors in time-honored yoga systems like Iyengar and Kripalu and Sivananda feel that many health club instructors lack the foundation necessary to teach safe and effective yoga. After all, yoga poses can lead to injury, as this writer well knows (having sustained her one and only yoga injury at a health club yoga class, no less).

But Murrien sees it another way. "I think there is a big difference between practicing yoga at a yoga center or a retreat, and practicing it at a fitness facility," she says. "What we do at fitness facilities is create classes that appeal to the public, and classes that will work with aerobics and weight-training. We have to choose asanas that the general public can do."

Murrien urges her teachers to leave difficult and potentially dangerous poses like shoulderstand and headstand off the menu in their formal classes. That's a good thing, since after tonight's basic "master class," some philosophical discussion, and a breeze through more than 30 poses in less than 30 minutes, the students in tonight's class will become teachers.

When it comes to finding a good yoga class, it's caveat emptor, especially in fitness facilities. At some health clubs, yoga might be considered a glorified stretch class; at others it might be the real deal. It all boils down to the skill of the instructor.

Morgan McDonald, for instance, is a yoga instructor for both Trainer's Edge and Fort Sanders Health and Fitness Center. She studied for years before becoming a teacher, and underwent a rigorous two-year certification process from Asheville's notable Iyengar-certified yoga instructor, Lillah Schwartz. McDonald is knowledgeable and precise, and her classes rank in quality among the best in Knoxville.

"If a person is looking for a yoga teacher, they need to find out what style of hatha yoga that teacher is teaching," she says. "They need to ask whether that teacher has a regular daily yoga practice and attends continuing yoga education classes. It's really up to the consumer to observe a class and decide if the style of yoga and the teacher's personality and method of delivery is right for them."

And that, she says, holds true even if you're only looking to add flexibility training to your workout menu.