Yoga is not Expensive
How not to spend money when picking up (and downloading) yoga
If you're looking to start yoga, you can easily spend a lot - but it's even easier not to spend money.
Yoga has long since reached a critical mass in terms of pop culture saturation - forget its status as fringeworthy trend, we now have the vicissitudes of Yoga for Everybody: power yoga, kundalini, vinyasa, anusara, Hot Yoga, yoga for kids, for moms-to-be, for runners, for the injured, for weddings, and yes, in the true barometric measure of cultural overkill, there is ‘doggie’ yoga.
Fortunately, this makes it very easy to find a good studio if you’re looking into taking up yoga. An average one-and-a-half-hour class will cost somewhere between $10 and $20, the rates going down as you pre-pay for classes or buy a pass for a set time period (many studios offer introductory discounts).
This can make a month of once-weekly yoga classes about equivalent to paying for a gym membership – and while some gyms include free fitness classes, including yoga, with membership, these can be harder to fit to your schedule and skill level. However, the nature of yoga is such that you do not have to venture far off the map to find pay-what-you-can classes, or anywhere at all really, since many mainstream studios, as well as community-based groups, offer such classes. A quick search on Google will offer plenty of results.
Getting the Equipment
While neatly dodging the bullet that is the hysteria of sport-shoe marketing (shoes are verboten in the yoga studio), the sheer amount of yoga-related products on the market is somewhat overwhelming. But when starting yoga, simplicity rules: buy nothing. Wear the workout clothes you probably already own and use the mats at the studio or gym (free or about $1 to rent for a class). That’s it.
After a few classes, buy a yoga mat if you think you will continue with the practice. This won’t be cheap, especially if you want a non-plastic or earth-friendly variety, but cheap is, after all, a relative term. At this point, we’ve missed the boat on haute yoga, which peaked sometime around the 2003 season when Louis Vuitton debuted the Dhanura yoga bag and monogrammed mat, part of its Epi leather line, at a modest cost of $1,300 US.
Downloading classes
Having started classes, you will also quickly notice a strong overall encouragement to spend money on CDs, DVDs, videos, and mp3 and video downloads. If you can make it to the studio three or five times per week, then you won't be tempted, but that's expensive, and not an option on most schedules. Downloading videos or mp3s from the Internet is indeed a good way to complement a once- or twice-weekly class in the studio, even enabling yoga to be practiced the recommended one time per day. But before paying for anything try out Yoga Today. It's a free daily download (that's every day - including weekends and holidays) of a one-hour class. It’s supported by a few ads that run before every video (if you download, rather than stream, the video you can skip them) and a tied-in media player (which you have to download if you want to save or automatically download classes). The class cycles between three instructors and a wide variety of skill levels and styles – it’s often appropriate for beginners and consistently offers clear and detailed instruction on poses.
