Basic Yoga for Everybody: 84 Cards With Accompanying Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Make up your own rules to use the cards
Review: 84 cards, each one illustrating an asana (posture), are classified by color and number. For example, the "2" orange cards are side bends, and the "4" greens are back bends. The slim book that accompanies the asana cards instructs the user to select one card from each category in order to design a series. However, this instruction is contradicted a few pages later by a "rule" that says to perform forward bends ("5" blue) after back bends, twists, and side bends. The cards also provide alternate postures, usually involving more movement while in the posture. This was somewhat different than I am used to. (Maybe this is a German thing? ) The chapters in the bok on breathing exercises and mudras (hand positions) are clear and helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Great Idea, Useful In Many Ways, But Not Well Executed!
Review: I gave this Yoga Card Set 4 Stars in spite of my comments in the Title.

Overall I really do like the way the structure of the set works. Their are many really interesting poses, some I've not seen before (and I've been doing Yoga daily for 7 years, have a great teacher, a library of Yoga books and over 70 videos).

I like using the idea that she grouped "like" poses by colour, these are categorized by the type of movements they use (forward bends, back bends etc). This helps a lot with structuring the sequence of the poses and gives a lot of room for creativity in structuring one's practice.

The little companion book is nicely written and clear as far as how to use the cards and considerations for sequencing. However the cards themselves are not very user friendly. The pictures are vague drawings and often don't seem to be showing what the written instructions often indicate. Even the instructions themselves are not very clear on many of the cards either.

What would have been nice is if the book had each pose with a detailed description of the pose plus photographs, then the cards could just be used as summaries. Unfortunately because you are limited to the small amount of instruction on the cards you don't get enough information to work with.

As a person with a lot of experience with Yoga I feel that at least sometimes I can "read between the lines" to a point and yet there are still some things that leave me confused. I think someone without any experience of yoga would be completely lost.

Still, I gave the four stars because I have found benefits to this set overall in spite of it's shortcomings.

Namaste

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: I read the little book it came with, which I did like, but the cards I did not. Very good idea, but the illistrations are hard to understand. And the directions don't coincide with the pictures. I am going to try Tim Clark's yoga cards, "create your own yoga program."

Rating:
Summary: yoga cards are a good idea, ...but not these
Review: What a great idea! So, I bought the cards and opened the nicely marketed package to find hard to understand illustrations and non-descript type. This product could be helpful for the ultimate beginner, but I would not even recommend it for them. I was very disappointed with the content of the cards and the intangibility of the text. What was the purpose and where is the teaching?