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Dave Farmar (photo courtesy Dave Farmar)
You’re dying to get to a yoga class, but your graveyard hours at work make it nearly impossible. Or you have to stay at home with the baby. Or you’re intimidated by the prospect of practicing with a group of people. Or maybe you’re just volunteering in Tanzania.
Dave Farmar would like to invite you to his class. For free. Via iTunes.
Since 2007, this Denver instructor has been making his Baptiste Power Vinyasa Yoga classes available in podcast format on a biweekly basis. Nearly 100 classes have been posted to date, typically from 60 to 90 minutes in length, and are available for download on iTunes at no charge. In the Fitness and Nutrition category, they typically rank in the top 25 (this week reaching 12) and will soon have reached a half million downloads.
“I wanted to reach out to a lot of students,” says Farmar, “and find an audience to get what I’d received from yoga.”
Farmar began practicing yoga after an injury to his hand curtailed his usual fitness routine. But his life was changed forever after holding “frog” pose for twenty-five minutes at a Baron Baptiste training in 2005. He had had no intention of ever teaching yoga, but long-suppressed feelings surfaced to tell him that he had no desire to either continue his career as an architect or move to Washington, D.C. to pursue a job working in politics. Thus began his new life as a certified Baptiste Power Vinyasa Yoga teacher, who now leads workshops internationally and assists the likes of Baptiste and Seane Corn. Farmar discovered that yoga could take him to a “wonderful place.” “It brought me a lot of peace,” he enthuses, “and I wanted to share what was so inspiring.”
Farmar got the idea to start podcasting from his friends Alanna Kaivalya, Phillip Urso, and Corn, who were already making recorded classes available online. His is a low-tech operation, however, using a digital pocket recorder, so he makes his podcasts available for free.
Thus far, Farmar has heard from fans in many parts of the world, including Antarctica, South Korea, Tanzania, Venezuela, Australia, Japan, and Vietnam. One student in New Orleans practiced along with Farmar’s podcasts until some of the yoga studios could be rebuilt post-Katrina.
Susan Sherman, a constantly traveling airline pilot, writes: “Regular yoga practice is a crucial part of managing a chronic back injury and being able to sit in an airplane all day. Thanks to your podcast, I can turn any hotel room into a yoga studio! Being able to choose a shorter or longer program also makes it easy to fit into the time I have available or around another workout."
For Farmar, recording the podcasts makes classes just that much more fun.
“I’ll be teaching a class to four or five people, and I’ll know four or five thousand people will get to enjoy it.”
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