Ohh, that achy back! Fournet’s DVD offers help
Posted on Monday, December 3, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/209570/
Don’t let the title of Andrea Fournet’s new DVD fool you. Yoga for Backs does not require any advance knowledge of yoga, nor even a single minute of yoga experience.
Never heard of downward-facing dog ? No worries. If you can sit on a couch, you and your back can benefit from this helpful DVD. Even if your back doesn’t hurt, the stress-release is almost automatic and makes the series worth doing daily as a preventive.
A certified yoga instructor, Fournet is the owner and director of Arkansas Yoga Center in Fayetteville. She has taught yoga in Northwest Arkansas for 14 years and is trained in Anusara, Iyengar and Viniyoga traditions. The DVD includes poses she has been teaching for years.
But unlike so many yoga DVD instructors, Fournet does not assume her viewers know a down dog from a hot dog, nor does she assume they care. Her goal is to make yoga accessible to those who need it, and she respectfully practices alongside her viewers rather than lead them through a gutwrenching, sweat-inducing, showoff workout.
“The health of our spine is so important to the well-being of our whole body and mind,” Fournet says. “When we suffer any kind of pain or discomfort or tension in our necks and backs, if affects us emotionally, mentally and physically.”
She says she produced this DVD at the request of her students, including those who watch Yoga With Andrea on Jones TV / Cox Cable in Northwest Arkansas, those across the state who used to watch her every Sunday afternoon on AETN (and miss her ), and those who attend her classes at the Yoga Center.
“People need gentler and slower yoga moves to help release stress in their bodies and help them heal from injuries,” Fournet said. “People are scared of yoga because they think they have to be flexible.
“ They see all these complicated poses, and that’s not what yoga is.”
She notes that new students need not be flexible and sometimes get hurt trying to rush into complicated poses without proper preparation. Rather than bringing flexibility to yoga, students become more flexible as they practice.
Yoga for Backs begins slowly with a 27-minute session that works on upper backs, necks and shoulders. Soothing music composed by Bryan Fowler, an instructor at Fournet’s center, is the backdrop as she quietly brings viewers through a series of simple neck and shoulder stretches and twists.
Nothing technical here. Just tilting the head and shrugging the shoulders. There is no pressure to perfect the poses, either. Fournet encourages participants to alter everything she presents to fit their needs.
“Work with your body on all these poses,” she says, adding that if something doesn’t feel right, stop. Viewers are reminded several times during the DVD that “modifications are welcome.”
The first session is conducted entirely from a couch. But once learned, the stretches could be practiced just about anywhere, including a car, your desk or the kitchen table.
The second section of the DVD offers 28 minutes of poses for lower backs and hips. Fournet moves to the floor for this section, but the work is still very simple. Viewers with tight hamstrings will find this work effective as the lower-back work loosens the legs.
More advanced yoga students will find the slower pace of this DVD a luxury as they are allowed to pay attention to details and feel a pleasant return to those first days of discovering the poses.
But perhaps more important, new students will not feel threatened by what Fournet is teaching. And she gives just the right amount of instruction and background information without becoming chatty or appearing to want to fill up every second of the DVD with her voice.
She seems to know exactly what’s going on in your living room, too. Just about the time something begins to ache, she addresses it and suggests a change.
“This yoga is slow and easy and starts with your neck and goes all the way down your back,” she says. Yoga for Backs is $ 24. 95 (including tax and shipping ) using Pay-Pal on Fournet’s Web site www. aryoga. com or $ 20 at the Yoga Center, 1949 Green Acres Road in Fayetteville. If the DVD leaves you wanting more, Fournet offers 20 classes a week at her center, and her show airs on Jones TV / Cox Cable 22 in Northwest Arkansas 13 times throughout the week. (She says the broadcast is her community service; she is not paid to produce the show. ) More information on classes and broadcasts along with a free downloadable flier on yoga for feet is available at her Web site.
Fournet welcomes questions at yogalady@aryoga. com, or (479 ) 521-9642.