Namaste Yoga is the regular yoga series seen on cable’s FitTV. They show a few episodes a day, and from what I can tell, this is the only yoga show currently on FitTV.

The initial concept was by (surprise) a guy, and the show’s yoga flow is directed and narrated by Kate Potter. Kate, however, is never to be seen in the show. I suppose by lowering her voice to a throaty whisper that’s limit of the “sex appeal” she provides – otherwise, she must not be attractive enough to appear herself.

Instead, Namaste Yoga relies on three hot young women as the draw. In each episode, two must be wearing short shorts, one wears a leotard, and all three are required to have large tracts of midriff showing. Fake boobs are mercilessly absent, but who needs those when you can take in the tight buns of these women as they sensuously arch into “down face dog.”

With Kate’s overly done throaty voice and the three hot babes, this is less of a yoga training show and more a new age form of soft porn. I can only imagine that most of the audience for this is either horny, lonely men, or women who don’t have a clue that there’s more to yoga than this.

But let’s get to the actual yoga. In spite of my initial reservations, I did try two Namaste Yoga episodes to see how they made me feel physically. I could put up with hot chicks and Kate’s lame attempt at a bedroom voice if the yoga was decent.

Sadly, it was not. The first session I got through OK but it felt fairly tame in terms of its intensity. The pacing of the second went so fast that I finally quit in the middle since it just wasn’t worth the bother, and I was frustrated that I was expected to move out of the poses so quickly.

This particular video involved jumping from standing up to plow pose to a forward bend and back up and down again. You barely had time to enter plow pose before she told you to move out of it again. Not only did I find this to be useless in terms of the yoga benefits, but potentially dangerous to yoga newbies. Plow pose puts extreme pressure on the neck and it’s not something you want to be messing around with like this. Let’s not forget that the majority of Americans are also overweight so expecting them to flip their legs up behind their heads and back again in the span of a second is just pushing it.

That Kate is rushing the yoga is no surprise though – she’s got less than 30 minutes to craft a routine, which is then interrupted by commercials. I found the commercials to be jarring (I would not mind slow, meditative commercials if I’m getting a free yoga class), but that wasn’t the killer for me. Commercials gave me a second to sit in a forward bend or other pose for a little length of time.

It’s just that this yoga series is all flash and no substance. The yoga isn’t great, the vocal direction consists mainly of sexy little soundbites (“Let’s try” seems to be one of her favorites), and the speed makes your head spin.

The production values and locations are what some folks rave about Namaste Yoga. Yes, the cinematography is beautiful, but it’s also distracting. During the asanas, the models (I’m not going to call them “teachers”) are often seen switching from a beach to an industrial setting to a forest during the same pose. This is more a yoga music video than a class. What happens is that so much attention is paid to the lush scenery (and lush bodies) that you really don’t get a good viewing of how to do the poses properly.

Not that you’d have time anyway – you’d need a Tivo with a freeze frame to actually see what’s happening. Yes, it’s that gripe about the quick pacing again. If you are completely new to yoga, I have no idea how you’d even get through an episode of Namaste Yoga.

“Flow” yoga has gotten very popular lately. I’m not a huge fan of it, since I like to sit in a pose for a while and really feel the stretch and develop my endurance. But to me, Namaste Yoga went beyond a flow class to become a full on speed yoga session.

To me, this yoga series is so useless I will skip it completely and turn to home videos or my own series of poses when I need to practice at home. This is what often turns me off about yoga. We’ve got a so-called qualified celebrity yoga teacher out there putting out crappy McDonald’s yoga. Namaste Yoga removes all the benefits of yoga and makes it no better than the cheesy aerobic videos of the 1980s showing off shiny tights reaching into women’s buttcracks.

A preview is available on YouTube. Note that one of the most articulate comments on this clip is “that girl is HOT.”

What a joke.

Update, August 2008: After over a year, I have finally turned off comments on this post, because nobody has anything intelligent to say and I’m tired of the idiotic responses here. A common charge in these less-than-insightful comments is “you’re jealous!” These guys don’t seem to get that I’ve had a slender body my entire life, and believe it or not, being an attractive female isn’t the end-all and be-all of existence.

I think a lot of these guys are coming here because they are searching Google for pictures of the “babes” on the show. Seeing their hostile, sexist responses here is reason number one why I find this type of yoga-exploitation to be a bad trend for yoga in general. (And there are some really bad comments I didn’t even approve!) I don’t want yoga to be about hot babes and sex. If you think this is not an issue, search “yoga” on YouTube and look at some of the creepy stuff that comes up.

Bottom line: If you can’t possibly fathom why I might find this type of video to be a little disturbing, then you really don’t need to waste my bandwidth commenting here. Please go vent somewhere else. Namaste!