Book Review: Beth Shaw's YogaFit - Beth Shaw

Beth Shaw’s YogaFit combines challenging conditioning work with yoga to improve your strength and flexibility, creating a total-body workout. Extended and updated, this highly acclaimed programme aims to increase your overall health, energy and vitality, while creating a stronger and leaner body, reducing stress, improving posture and increasing concentration.

What’s inside it?

Beth Shaw – president and founder of the largest yoga school in the world YogaFit, Inc. – has put together more than 100 poses into workout routines that you can use every day to create your own yoga practice at home.

As a yoga instructor in training, I took a special interest in reading through this book. I love it that it doesn’t just come from a Westernised physical-focused approach to yoga, but also delves into the traditional yoga philosophy for a more holistic view. The true aim of yoga is to bring together aspects of the mind and body, and extending your practice beyond the physical poses is what will give you the true benefits of yoga including self-love and acceptance, body awareness and stress relief.

In Part One, there are several informative chapters dedicated to the yoga lifestyle, breathing and preparing yourself and your environment for a physical yoga workout.

Part Two covers the poses. Each pose comes with colour images demonstrating the key focuses/safety points, advises how to get into the pose, what to focus on while in the pose, and some modifications (to assist beginners and address some of the more common injuries that may affect how you perform the pose).

Part Three assembles the poses into workouts targeted at increasing fitness and helping improve performance in specific sports. From beginner through to advanced workouts for general strength building, to focused sports-specific yoga programmes for a range of activities including swimming, running, cycling, golf, snowboarding and tennis, there is some great advice in these pages to help you get the most out of your yoga training.

The final pages for those who want to take their practice one step further include meditation techniques, yogic diet and nutrition, and some information on chakras.

Read it if…

You want to create an holistic yoga practice at home and want to go more in-depth than your standard workout DVD. Bear in mind that this book is a decent read and is almost like a mini textbook on yoga; but if you take the time to read it thoroughly, your practice will be much better for it.

I just wish that each pose came with the traditional Sanskrit name instead of only giving the English translation, but that’s just being nitpicky because I’d love to use this as a tool for my own teaching!