We spoke with yoga instructors and students about how and why the yoga business is on the rise in Central FL.

The students at Warrior One Power Yoga glide through their poses on brightly colored mats squeezed side by side in the narrow studio in Audubon Park.

The Orlando business, which celebrated its first anniversary last month, has been so successful that owner Kim King Zamoff sometimes has to add additional classes.

"I didn't really know what to expect, but we've been growing and thriving since day one," said Zamoff, 46, a former high-school English teacher who has been practicing yoga for 20 years.

Across Central Florida and beyond, studios such as Warrior One are springing up to meet the demand for all kinds of yoga.

There's yoga for pregnant women, yoga for children even yoga for people with addictions of any kind. One yoga studio recently offered classes at the Orlando Museum of Art.

"It's moved into the mainstream," said Richard Karpel, president and chief executive officer of Yoga Alliance, a voluntary registry based in Arlington, Va. "It's good for health, mindfulness, de-stress things people are looking for."

No government agency or trade group regulates or otherwise keeps track of yoga schools, and no Florida license is required unless the business also offers weights or other equipment. Schools must pay a small business tax to their county and city, if applicable.

But one gauge of the discipline's popularity comes from a study conducted by a marketing firm for Yoga Journal. It concluded that 20.4 million Americans mostly women were practicing yoga in 2012, a 29 percent increase from 15.8 million in 2008.

Zamoff worked as a yoga and exercise instructor for health clubs and yoga studios before she opened Warrior One Power Yoga in a strip shopping center in the neighborhood where she also lives.

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Yoga schools grow by leaps and bounds in Central Florida

We spoke with yoga instructors and students about how and why the yoga business is on the rise in Central FL.

The students at Warrior One Power Yoga glide through their poses on brightly colored mats squeezed side by side in the narrow studio in Audubon Park.

The Orlando business, which celebrated its first anniversary last month, has been so successful that owner Kim King Zamoff sometimes has to add additional classes.

"I didn't really know what to expect, but we've been growing and thriving since day one," said Zamoff, 46, a former high-school English teacher who has been practicing yoga for 20 years.

Across Central Florida and beyond, studios such as Warrior One are springing up to meet the demand for all kinds of yoga.

There's yoga for pregnant women, yoga for children even yoga for people with addictions of any kind. One yoga studio recently offered classes at the Orlando Museum of Art.

"It's moved into the mainstream," said Richard Karpel, president and chief executive officer of Yoga Alliance, a voluntary registry based in Arlington, Va. "It's good for health, mindfulness, de-stress things people are looking for."

No government agency or trade group regulates or otherwise keeps track of yoga schools, and no Florida license is required unless the business also offers weights or other equipment. Schools must pay a small business tax to their county and city, if applicable.

But one gauge of the discipline's popularity comes from a study conducted by a marketing firm for Yoga Journal. It concluded that 20.4 million Americans mostly women were practicing yoga in 2012, a 29 percent increase from 15.8 million in 2008.

Zamoff worked as a yoga and exercise instructor for health clubs and yoga studios before she opened Warrior One Power Yoga in a strip shopping center in the neighborhood where she also lives.

Continued here:
Yoga schools grow by leaps and bounds | Video

We spoke with yoga instructors and students about how and why the yoga business is on the rise in Central FL.

A study at Nova Southeastern University is set to examine whether yoga can help a hard-to-reach group: military veterans who have suffered from war's traumas.

Twenty veterans, who have served in battles from Vietnam to Iraq, will take two yoga classes a week for 10 weeks, with the expectation that they will also practice at home. Investigators will measure the effects of yoga's breathing and stretching techniques on practitioners' flexibility and stress levels.

Several studies have explored the effects of yoga on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But Debra Stern, a Nova physical therapy professor, said this study is the first to check whether the ancient practice can affect both stress management and physical function.

"The more stressed someone is, the more reluctant they may be to move about in general," said Stern, who will monitor the veterans with Nova professor Lisa Fuller and a medical team. "We are hoping to determine if there are physical changes that take place" through the yoga postures.

Long after their combat days, many veterans struggle with nightmares, edginess, anger and depression. Although many seek help from doctors and support groups, others are finding alternative methods such as yoga have proven equally constructive.

About three years after he returned from Afghanistan, Mike Siers, director of a nutritional supplement company in Boca Raton, said he felt angry, confused and anxious, like "a ticking time bomb ready to explode."

"The triggers could be something as simple as driving down the road and feeling boxed in by having a car in front of me and a car to the side of me," said Siers, 32, who served in the Florida National Guard. "In those times, all I could think was to get away. I would break driving laws without thinking twice just to feel safe again."

He began taking classes in Boca Raton with Connected Warriors, which offers free yoga to veterans. He said he felt warmly welcomed by other vets and instructors who understood war's psychological and physical wounds.

Vietnam veteran Brian Wooldridge said he laughed when a friend suggested Connected Warriors. But he said yoga has helped him control his anger after the loss of part of his skull and part of his leg at 19.

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NSU study to check if yoga helps veterans with PTSD | Video

A scene from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

In a coffee shop in Eagle Rock, north east Los Angeles, the barista looks up from her iPhone, startled. One of the customers is prowling around on all fours like an ape. He's holding arm extensions to mimic a gorilla's long-armed gait, and he's snorting and grunting as he goes. By the time he returns to his seat, it's not clear whether he's going to drink his mocha or start beating his chest.

''It's a really great workout,'' he says, suddenly snapping out of character. ''I'm actually thinking of marketing those arm extensions. All the guys I taught, they were shredded by the end of the movie.''

Of all the strange jobs in the film industry, Terry Notary, 46, might have the strangest: he's Hollywood's go-to ape-movement coach, the only one practising in the world. And it suits him. A former gymnast and Cirque du Soleil acrobat from Marin County, in California, he's small, strongly built and, when he sets his mouth just so, more than a little simian. He also has the energy of a kindergarten teacher, never just describing his work when he can leap from his chair and act it out. Being an ape, he says, is ''super fun''.

Terry Notary plays more than 100 primates in the film, and taught the actors and stuntmen how to move.

Notary's first ape-movement gig was on Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes, in 2001, in which he taught Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter (Roth was a star student, Bonham Carter less so). He then spent several years as movement coach for various superheroes such as the Silver Surfer, Superman and the X-Men, as well as the Na'vi people in the 2009 3D spectacular Avatar. But, in 2011, he returned to apes for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and now the sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And these apes are of another class entirely.

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''With the Tim Burton film, we used ape suits and make-up, it was completely different,'' he says. ''But Rise and Dawn are all mocap. It's a totally different way of working.''

By ''mocap'', Notary means motion-capture technology, a method most often associated with Andy Serkis, who plays Caesar, the ape leader, and who made his name as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. Serkis and Notary are the world's leading mocap performers: in Rise, they played all the apes between them, and in Dawn they play several too, though Notary trained five other actors as well.

''Every morning, they'd put this plastic mould on my face with 52 small reflective dots on it, in a standard pattern,'' he says. ''Then I'd have this helmet with a chinstrap, with a camera attached so it's pointing in my face at all times - you just have to learn to look right through it.

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How to act like an ape

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A new book rethinks what it means to be old. Photo by Wendy Frew

Older age can be a time of growth and purpose, rather than illness and decline.

The quest for the elixir of life has led us down many paths. Everything from a diet of only fruit and nuts to indulging in a little bit of everything has been charged with the power to extend our lives.

But a new book by academic and clinician Dr Timothy Sharp suggests psychological health could be the key. Live more happily and you will probably live longer, posits Dr Sharp, who describes the extra years many of us are now living as the gift of a "third age".

"Properly enjoyed, this phase of life need not be one of illness or decline but rather, for the vast majority of us, one of growth, wisdom, maturity and more," he says in the introduction to Live Happier, Live Longer.

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The founder of the Happiness Institute and an Adjunct Professor in positive psychology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Dr Sharp has for many years been studying what makes us happy. But it was only when he was invited to talk about positive psychology at a financial planning conference a couple of years ago that he turned his attention to what happiness means for older people.

"A lot of the financial planners came up to me to chat and it became clear their goals in looking after their clients were similar to mine as a psychologist and life coach: advising people how to best live their lives," says Dr Sharp.

"Their strategies were mostly making sure people had enough money to look after themselves but they realised more than money was at stake."

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Be happy and you'll live longer