Un-powerful yoga

Yoga and Pilates are all the rage, lately. Sting and Madonna have these serene workouts to… Yoga and Pilates are all the rage, lately. Sting and Madonna have these serene workouts to thank for their tight, toned bodies.

And, if you have to have Madonna’s body to kiss Britney Spears, sign me up.

“MTV Power Yoga,” the follow up to last year’s “MTV Yoga,” hosted by Lori from “The Real World: Back to New York,” strives to mix in a bit of cardio with the poses.

Oh, how it fails.

“MTV Power Yoga” is hosted by Kristin McGee, a certified yoga instructor. She launches right into the workout without a rundown of poses. If you want that, you have to purchase the DVD, as it is one of the “bonuses.” Come on, now, most beginning yoga students have no idea what “warrior one,” “downward-facing dog” and “lower chaterunga” are.

With all the concentration it takes to figure out how to get into and out of the positions, the workout is awkward at first. However, there’s a lot of repetition, so, as you get further into the 48-minute workout, things start to flow better.

And that’s another thing – the workout is 48 minutes long. In that 48 minutes, the only sweat I broke came from my apartment’s lack of air conditioning.

The calmness that comes from most yoga instructors is just tiring – though it is part of the inner-peace thing. The background music isn’t calm and mellow, like on most yoga videos. This is MTV. Up-and-coming pop-techno group Blue Six provides the background beats here. McGee’s voice is energetic, though, which is a plus.

There are three others doing the workout with McGee at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. You are instructed to follow the person with whom your level of experience most closely matches. For the most part, all four are doing the same poses, and, when there is room for variation, McGee points that out.

After 48 minutes of power yoga, there is a five-minute Pilates workout to tone and tighten abs. With power yoga, 48 minutes was too long, and, with Pilates, five minutes isn’t enough.

Having just gotten back into hitting the gym regularly, I expected to be pretty sore the day after trying a different workout for the first time, but I wasn’t. That tells me that my time was wasted. I struggle to move the day after a 20-minute Pilates workout with Denise Austin each time I get the urge to lengthen my body.

Perhaps the power yoga didn’t seem to do its job because I wasn’t doing the exercises correctly. Or maybe it’s just not as effective as it needs to be.