Sonic Yoga Vinyasa Heat Live! Advanced

This is a good sweat-producer. It is, as you would expect, harder than his other tapes, but I think that might be more a function of the length than anything else. It’s about on par with some of Bryan Kest’s harder workouts. It’s a great power yoga workout to add to your collection, if you’re into such things. This is the kind that leaves you all “floaty” at the end. Grade A.

SOnic Yoga: Vinyasa Heat Live! Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Comparison For the benefit of those who are interested in the Vinyasa Heat Live! videos but can't decide which one(s) to get, I've made a brief comparison.

All three hover around 55 minutes long from the start of the practice until "Namaste". (54, 52, and 56 minutes.)

All are filmed in an all white room. The beginning tape was either filmed at night or in a room without windows. The intermediate and advanced tapes are filmed in the same room (with windows, so it's a bit brighter.)

The music (by Raven Recordings) is the same in all 3.

They feature 8, 18 and 12 exercisers respectively, but the beginning tape looks almost as crowded as the intermediate tape because they are crammed so close together. Many of the exercisers appear in all 3 tapes.

Lauren Hanna leads the beginner tape and Jonathan Fields leads the intermediate and advanced tapes. You can see Lauren reading the cue cards. She sounds *exactly* like a female version of Jonathan, from her cadence to her pronunciation. I found this kind of irritating. At least Jonathan sorta seems like himself (although frankly I think he's a poor imitation of Baron Baptiste.)

The advanced tape has virtually no form pointers or detailed pose descriptions. It is explicitly stated that you should know these before attempting the tape. There are a lot more descriptions, form points, and modifications in the beginning tape (as there should be.)

They all follow the same format. A slow motion sun sal A to warm-up, and then the sun sals begin. Do 3 As and then 3 Bs. On the second or third sun sal B you do a warrior 1, warrior 2, side angle sequence (this varies a leetle bit). It's pretty thigh cooking. Then other standing poses with vinyasas in between. They are *much* faster in the advanced tape.

Once you get to the floor, all feature locust, bow, bridge/wheel, pigeon, boat, tabletop/inclined plank, lying spinal twist, cobbler's pose, various core strengthening poses, and seated forward bend. Intermediate ends in reclined cobbler, but the other two end in corpse. Intermediate includes crow, which the others do not.

All have a few interminable down dogs.

The biggest difference between the intermediate and advanced tapes are the speed of the vinyasas and the one-legged planks and chatturangas he throws in. There are other minor differences in the sequences (tree vs. padanguthsasana vs. warrior 3 for balancing poses) but they all really are very similar.