These are outstanding examples of local Taiwanese yoga masters. I had no idea Taiwan had such excellent yoga. It seems that yoga is everywhere in Taipei these days. But from the ads, most of the teachers are young women who had no muscle tone to begin with, so becoming super flexible wasn’t such a big deal to them anyway. Doing yoga isn’t difficult when you hyperextend your elbows all the time naturally.
It’s great to see true masters of the body here in Taiwan.
Anybody know who these guys are?
3 responses so far ↓
1 mo // May 8, 2007 at 5:56 pm
umm… i’m going to disagree here. while they do have tremendous control of their bodies, in terms of yoga asanas, there are basic mistakes. for example, in the first few seconds of the second clip, the guys does the sitting forward bend with his feet flexed downwards, whereas any serious yoga practicioner will tell you that the feet must be flexed upwards.
this seems to be a common phenomenon lately in china. most people who come from flexibility demanding backgrounds, such as sport wushu, or ballet, learn a few poses, usually from someone who also isn’t trained correctly, and become yoga teachers. at the yoga studio where i teach, almost all the teachers are more flexible than i am. and yet most of them don’t have proper alignments, don’t know the how & why of each asanas, and can’t hold them for more than a few seconds. the poses are meant to be held for minutes at least. this is clearly seen in their students, who after even one year of practice still cannot properly do basic asanas like the headstand or triangle.
2 chessman71 // May 8, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Mo,
Ha! You think these guys are bad? I’m serious when I say that they really are much better than most anything else I’ve seen here. They may be wrong technically (I’ll bend to your judgment on that), but you should see the other yoga teachers here. I’m serious when I talk about hyper-flexible women simple becoming yoga teachers. It’s terrible.
I’m guessing the first guy is self-taught. What did you think of the second one? Was he better?
3 mo // May 8, 2007 at 9:02 pm
the second guy looks like he had some training, his asanas are more standard than the first one. it’s still wushu yoga though (for lack of a better term). if you look at his front and side splits, you’ll see that he brings his arms back like a bird (eagle claw style). i’ve never seen this, and i doubt it’s classical yoga. it looks more like something he or his teacher added to give more of a “wow” effect. he performs the asanas like a dance, trying to be graceful. problem is yoga isn’t about that, it’s about maintaining certain alignments and muscle locks in the poses. i also don’t like how he comes into certain poses, it looks very geared towards making an impression to the spectators, and doesn’t resemble any of the yoga styles i’ve seen.
i’m sure there are worse in taiwan dave. it’s pretty much the same situation here in the mainland. it’s a lot like the chinese wushu phenomenon, people going around learning a few forms and claiming to teach the style. actually the few yoga schools here in shanghai that have serious teachers aren’t very popular, probably because they don’t conform to the chinese idea of what yoga is, which is much more in line with the videos above. my students freaked at first when i had them hold the shoulderstand for 2 minutes, which should be very easy for people who claim to have practiced yoga for one year.
that being said, i wish i had that kind of flexibility. it would make me much more credible :).
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