Yoga

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good. But on most days, Siri is deaf. Not just any deaf, she’s so deaf that I’ll be screaming at the top of my voice to get her to effing wake up. Eventually I figured, maybe if I used a headset, things might get better. So I picked up a $75 Beats headset. Excellent headset actually. Stays snug fit in my ear – something the default iPhone headset doesn’t for me. Apparently, I don’t have the generic ear that the rest of the world has. Turns out, though, Siri doesn’t care if I used a Beats headset because it still depends on hearing me properly. Incidentally, Beats has a small button that I can press to summon Siri. The problem for me, though, is that I need to start the timer after I get into the pose. When I am in the pose, I can’t move around my hands much. So summoning Siri with a button is a non-starter. ...

As usual, I have started running another experiment.But this is only two days young. I should wait for another month or so to see if I really hold this up. The routine is the SAVERS routine that I came across in techcrunch or mashable recently. The actual routine is like this: Sit in silence; Meditate Affirmations Visualizations Exercise – my usual yoga Reading – currently “War of the worlds by H.G.Wells” Scribe – for the first time, am writing a journal with pen and paper. Each of the steps, except exercise is about 5-10 mins long. Overall it costs me about an hour or so to finish. But the best part of this is, I don’t touch my iPhone or mac until this is done. And usually, there are some tasks like watering the plants and replacing dry plates and cutlery back in their aisles. Then I have only enough time to give myself a bath and start for work. Of course, I don’t wake up that late either. I just managed to start work quite early on both these days. Maybe most other days, I ll have a lot of spare time. ...

I got this idea as I was in the middle of my yoga session. I have this app called “noizio” installed in my mac. There is nothing special about this app and there are many variants on this app as well. It can generate ambient noises like being present in a cafe, beach, grass, etc. You can choose if it is raining, windy, thunderstorms, riverside and others. It works quite well, especially if you like to work in a noisier environment. I don’t, but I just installed it for seeing what options I can get 🙂 ...

I wrote about needing a good exercise timer here. I am using the yoga timer app that I downloaded and am reasonably happy with it. I hate quite a few things about that app. I could give feedback and make it better, but the app has a paid version. So chances are the paid version has these fixed already. Besides, it doesn’t do many things it claims to. So am quite unhappy with it. ...

I have recently got on an exercise regimen to fight my back pain problems. It is sort of like Yoga but in a controlled manner. I don’t know if its fun, but it definitely helps to keep pain away. Typically, I’ll need to do 4-6 exercises twice a day. Each exercise is repeated three times and lasts 30 sec each time. Pretty simple, right? You need to keep aside about 30 minutes twice a day to take care of this. So far I am able to keep up. ...