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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Peter "Iron Yogi" Seamans: Yoga Without Pity
Om Wrecker (Cont.)


	THIS IS SPINAL TRAP: Seamans gets twisted across the street from Boulder's Flatiron Athletic Club. (Dan Winters)

IT'S HARD NOT TO ASK THAT when you're an hour into one of the most athletically demanding forms of yoga in the United States. Created three years ago by Seamans, Turbo Vinyasa is the latest entry in a crammed field of yoga spin-offs whose inventors hope to make millions—and whose evolving methods look less and less like yoga and more like some supercharged, over-amped Yank mutation. Yoga meets pro wrestling.

Seamans's routine, for one, is a fast-paced, excruciating series of poses uniquely suited to avowed jocks and anyone else who craves that near-death feeling. The physical exhaustion, coupled with a brief visualization at the end of class, can lead devotees to his brand of transcendence, Seamans says.

"I want my students to have the shittiest day," he explains. "They ran over the dog in the driveway, found out they didn't have a job when they got to work, came home and heard their mother has terminal cancer. I want them to experience all that, and then come to my class and be able to see the magic in life."

To that end, each 90-minute session starts with a 15-minute warm-up that morphs into an hourlong regimen designed to boost stability, flexibility, strength, and muscle tone, plus "reverse the aging process," Seamans says. (It won't give you muscles like the Iron Yogi's, though; for that you have to add weight lifting.) Seamans doesn't soothe students with serenity-speak or hector them about breathing techniques. Instead, he whips them through killer poses, like the leg-lifting urinating dog and the one-armed-push-up wishbone, done almost at the pace of aerobics. Should someone someday complete the class perfectly, Seamans vows to make it harder.

Sounds awful, but Seamans has plenty of fans, and his yoga style is the club's most popular. "I love it—everyone does," says 43-year-old Evelyn Dale, a 117-pound class regular who can squat her own body weight 12 times for ten consecutive sets. "We'd threaten his life if he ever said he was going to leave Boulder."

Seamans, meanwhile, grandly says his goal is nothing less than to save lives. "I want people to get to the point where there's nothing they can't do," he says. Turbo Vinyasa, he believes, can lead to connectedness and empowerment, a real-life kick in the karmic pants for millions of downtrodden chubbies.

"Eric!" he ranted to me one day inside the sterile beige gym office that he shares with other Flatiron trainers. "I feel like I've got the golden bullet, the magic cure, and I need to spread it—Billy Graham style!"

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