Bryan Kest Power Yoga Complete Collection

1. Energize - Beginner Level
Feel the power. Be the power. Unlock the strengthening, slimming, detoxifying and reenergizing of Power Yoga. Bryant Kest leads you in vigorous workout based on the robust Ashtanga style of yoga.

"If you're doing the best you can, you're doing this class perfectly," Kest explains. After instructions on proper breathing, the session begins, taking you and an on-screen class through a variety of flowing, dynamic exercises (salutation, lungs, balancing, spinal stretches and more) augmented by Kest's demonstrations of the poses.

2. Tone - Intermediate Level
Challenge your muscular strength aerobic endurance, flexibility, balance and mental stamina with Tone.

An innovative series of lunge moves provides the primary activity in this workout that emphasizes finding your personal edge - the maximal yoga pose that still permits proper yogic breathing. Kest guides you and an in-studio class in a total-body regime that helps maintain flexibility and suppleness while building strength and well-being. Features comprising various poses are described so that you can add elements as you become more adept.

3. Sweat - Advanced Level
Looking for an advanced yoga routine? Then get ready to sweat.

"This program is definitely challenging," Kest admits about this maximal power-up session that builds upon the strength, stamina and flexibility cultivated in the first two Power Yoga programs, combining a vigorous lung series with extended standing balance and floor stretch moves, the routine flows from one pose to the next while working toward total body/mind harmony. The brisk pace provides instruction, encouragement and commentary to assist you and the on-screen class.

Anyone wanting to get in shape like the stars need go no further than Bryan Kest's home-video workouts. Kest teaches wildly popular yoga classes in Santa Monica, California--so popular that stars like Rhea Perlman, David Duchovny, and Elisabeth Shue willingly sweat alongside the hoi polloi in Kest's packed, ancient loft studio. If you don't happen to be in the neighborhood, not to worry: Kest's yoga videos are nearly as good as being there. Volume 1, Energize, is a beginner-level class that nonetheless is smartly designed to provide challenges for all levels of users. Kest's Jersey-boy voice at first seems in contrast to the serene environment and inner-peace objectives, but it gradually becomes soothing and hypnotic in its own right. Stretches and strengthening moves are alternated with just enough repose to keep even first timers on track. After mastering Vol. 1, practitioners can go on to Volume 2, Tone, in which Kest turns up the intensity, holding a variety of twisting poses for long stretches of time. It's OK to take it easy, rest, or modify the routines to your ability, which is part of the reason the tape is so useful. You won't be turned off as a beginner-to-intermediate practitioner, but there's plenty of room to challenge yourself as an advanced athlete, too.

Volume 3, Sweat, is a slightly shorter version of the challenging class Kest teaches in person. There are still all the gentle, firm admonitions to listen to your body, not to feel competitive with anyone else in how you do the pose (and as long as you heed them, you'll do fine). But Kest combines the classic warm-ups and longer-hold poses with a rapid succession of sun salutes, which will be gratifying to the advanced yoga student, but may make a first timer feel as though he dropped in to a Rockettes rehearsal by mistake. But if you keep at it, the workout is very easy to follow, and Kest's gentle, gruff voice is so soothing you find yourself relaxing even as you're pushing your body to its limits. As long as you keep in mind his personal mantra--"If you're doing the best you can, you're doing this class perfectly"--you and Kest should have many satisfying years of workouts together. --Anne Hurley