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Outside Magazine September 2004

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

SEAMAN'S LIFE STORY proves as much. Born in 1958, son of a traveling sporting-goods salesman and a stay-at-home mom, he struggled through high school and dropped out of the University of Colorado after one semester. By the late 1970s, his greatest physical feat was polishing off an extra-large pizza and a half-gallon of Mount Gay Rum. He fed a 50-pound gut, smoked two and a half packs a day, and made ends meet by selling shoes at Gart Brothers Sports Castle, in Denver, a job his father found him.

"His butt was so big that if you ever needed shade, you knew where to stand," says Bret Glass, his roommate at the time and a friend to this day. "Seriously, he was a Taco Bell–eating pig."

Glass, a safety on the Colorado football team, got sick of Seamans's sloth and, one day in 1980, dragged him to the gym. "I remember it like it was yesterday," Seamans says. His legs collapsed after a couple of squats. His shoulders gave out after seven reps on the military press—with an unweighted bar. The next morning he woke up so sore that he could barely turn off his alarm clock.

But he was hooked by the healthy masochism. He called in sick to work. Quit the Marlboros cold turkey. And went straight back to the gym to lift weights. Four months later and 40 pounds lighter, he snagged a job managing the Atlantis 2000 health club in Boulder.

For the next 18 years, Seamans moved back and forth between Colorado and California, competing in bodybuilding competitions; buying, operating, and selling gyms; and working as a personal trainer and health educator. In 1997, both his personal and professional lives took off. He married Marisol Terán, a Venezuelan kickboxer and cyclist. He began training Chopra and Robbins and taught a 2,000-client-per-month Spinning class, the largest in the world, at the Personalized Workout club in La Jolla, California.

The bottom fell out in 2000, when Seamans lost $250,000 during a contract dispute with the other investors behind Personalized Workout, in which he says he was supposed to have part ownership. That same year, he and his wife were divorced. Dejected, he took a job marketing a line of work gloves and tried to get his life in order. Just a few months later, he happened to drop in on a yoga class at a gym called Cardiffit, in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.

"At savasana, the relaxation pose, I started seeing colors at the point between my eyebrows—purples, greens, golds," he remembers. "When the instructor, this little Brazilian girl, told me those were the chakra colors, I knew I would be a yoga instructor."

Not long after, he flew to Nosara Yoga Institute, in Costa Rica, for a one-month teacher-training course and stayed, he says, nearly 11 months, practicing six hours a day. Soon, Seamans began braiding his spiritual and jockish smarts into a yoga of his own, one that was strenuous enough to offer the benefits he found in both yoga and weight lifting. The goal was to create as many "big bang" postures as possible, involving what he calls the "holy trinity" of athletic performance: stability, flexibility, and strength.

When he'd strung together enough poses for an hour-and-a-half course, he called it Turbo Vinyasa. In 2002 he started teaching at Flatiron. The Iron Yogi was born.

These days, Seamans says he earns more than $100,000 a year, primarily from $85-per-hour private personal-training sessions, but he still chooses to live in the sparsely decorated caretaker's quarters of a multi-million-dollar estate ten minutes outside of Boulder. (A family friend and personal-training client offers it to him rent-free in exchange for his looking after the property.) The apartment, about 350 square feet, is attached to a deteriorating barn and is humble indeed: mint-colored shag carpeting, sloping ceiling, thin wood paneling. Two beanbag chairs face the medium-size TV in the tiny living room.

Why does he eschew worldly things? "I'm a simple guy," he says. "I have everything that's important to me."

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