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Outside Magazine September 2004
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Peter ”Iron Yogi” Seamans: Yoga Without Pity
Om Wrecker (Cont.)

MESSIANIC QUALITIES ASIDE, Seamans's talents are firmly based in reality. Vogue voted him one of the nation's top 50 personal trainers in 1996; former clients include enlightenment mogul Deepak Chopra and motivational maestro Anthony Robbins. He's a champion drug-tested (read: non-steroid-using) bodybuilder who won the 40-and-over masters division in California in 2001. He's also a certified instructor in nutrition, massage, anatomy, physiology, exercise science, movement studies, and, lest we forget, yoga.

And Turbo Vinyasa—if all goes well—just might go global. This month, Seamans is advertising his teacher-training courses with a blitzkrieg of press releases sent to fitness centers from Costa Rica to Canada, in hopes of developing an international client base. He's also making two DVDs about his methods, and writing a book, The Tao of the Iron Yogi: Tuning the Human Instrument, Mastering the Human Experience, and Finding God in the Human Race, which he says he may publish himself. His business plan: to fill the void between what he calls "superficial health-center yoga" and "press-a-ruby-into-your-forehead, stinky-vegetarian yoga." Turbo Vinyasa squarely targets overachievers and gym-going men—two of the largest untapped demographics in the ever-expanding yoga universe.

Fifteen million Americans regularly practice some form of yoga. In the next 12 months, according to a 2003 Harris poll, 35 million people—many of them men—are expected to try it for the first time. Already, some 85 percent of U.S. fitness facilities, from YMCA to Crunch, offer yoga classes—more than double the percentage in 1995. And demand is growing, particularly for extreme, testosterone-addled yoga, the kind packaged with the words Power or Hot or, well, Turbo.

"Americans like a hard, sweaty yoga practice," says Hillari Dowdle, editor in chief of Yoga Journal, the Berkeley, California–based bi-monthly. "They like it to be exercise."

Seamans knows this is his hook but wants to make clear that there's bliss to be had as well. "Some gal, maybe 40 pounds overweight—was a cheerleader but then had three kids," he says, spinning one of his many transformation parables. "You watch that housewife hit the bird of paradise on the first try! She never thought she could, but she's been breathing, moving, sweating, producing endorphins, and then she looks up and sees her leg above her head and says, ‘Ho-leee shit!' That's the magic."


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