Picture someone doing yoga. Your mental image no doubt involves a woman.
She’s probably young, right on and just a little bit posh. It’s a
stereotype-but then nobody can blame you for assuming Britain's yoga |
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Yogi Flair But John Kelly, a 33-year-old cheeky Cockney cabbie, is doing just that. He's never been to an Indian temple, doesn’t like joss sticks and was only introduced to yoga four years ago after his wife talked him into joining one of her classes. Yet he's invented a device that could take yogis by storm and open up the discipline to a new wave of people who would previously have found the required postures too daunting to even try. The invention is simplicity itself. As beginners tend to have great difficulty performing most yoga stretches, many instructors encourage them to use straps. These help by enabling new and inflexible yogis to stretch themselves as far as possible-trying to touch your toes while sitting on the floor is a lot easier when there's a strap around your feet that your hands can work their way along. But, for John, this wasn’t good enough. ”I still find a number of moves difficult,” he's says. “Even with a strap, its tough because you have to keep taking your hands off it to work your way along and its easy to lose your grip. There's one posture where you try to touch your hands together behind your back. I was getting nowhere with it for ages.” To solve his problem, he took an 85cm-long strip of thick leather , cut 16 rectangular holes out of it at regular intervals and started using that instead. ”The holes made it so much easier for me to move my hands along the belt, ”says John. “I had something for my fingers to grip and I was soon doing moves I previously found impossible. Driven to distraction So he decided to see if others would like it. He called it a Yoga Ladder Strap and began dropping off home-made samples while driving his fares around the capital. One recipient was Kathryn Szrodecki, who runs Portobello Yoga in West London. She was unsure about it at first but soon saw the straps potential. “A lady came to one of our classes with a number of these straps, saying the cab driver who'd dropped her off asked her to take them in. “ she says. ”I left some in classes and told people to give them a go. They immediately had great results.” Apparently, the strap does far more than help you grip. “It helps relax the muscles, “says Szrodecki. “With a traditional strap, you have to make a fist to hold it, which means you tense your wrist, arm muscles and shoulders. This Ladder Strap puts the stress entirely on the fingers, enabling you to relax into a stretch and go further with it. By relieving shoulder tension, it also helps you with breathing.” Stretching the point It seems so simple a solution, it’s a wonder it wasn’t thought of before. For Szrodecki, though, there's a simple explanation. “Yoga is very elitist,” she says. “A lot of yoga people will only do what was prescribed by yogis thousands of years ago and sneer at new ideas. “Also, a lot wont like the fact the strap is made of leather and not eco-friendly. But it’s the best material to use and I'm for anything that makes yoga accessible. Yoga isn’t yoga unless everyone can do it.” The Yoga Ladder Strap will be on display at the Yoga Show at London's Olympia, running Sep 16 to 18, and can be bought at www.yogaladder.com Press announcement 13th September 2005.
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