THE SEVEN YOGA TYPES YOU WILL INEVITABLY MEET ON BALI

Female? On Bali? You’ll likely end up doing yoga. And when you do, you’ll encounter these seven types.

The Insanely Bendy Pensioner

Slender, graceful and defiantly unbotoxed, this 70-something lady has a poise to which we all aspire. As she effortlessly adopts full lotus and pushes up on her hands, everything, from her middle fingers to her heels, just seems to sit right. She’ll tell you, later, that she “only” started in her 50s.

The Straight Man Realising This Is More Difficult Than He Thought

This well-muscled chap has worked out that yoga is a great way to meet women. He has also assumed that, because girls do it and he’s reasonably fit, yoga will be easy. It will take approximately two minutes of Vinyasa stretches to disabuse him of this notion, and after class he’ll be too embarrassed to stay for ginger tea.

The Scantily Clad Hot Girl

Yoga is nothing if not inclusive, so outfits come in a range of styles and sizes, to suit all body shapes, especially those with no unsightly lumps or body fat. This girl has shape, so she flaunts it, not just by wearing full makeup, which doesn’t run because she’s the only person in the class not bucketing sweat, but by fine-tuning her flawless abs in a top and shorts that are considerably more revealing than your bikini.

The Passive-Aggressive, Mildly Pervy Yoga Teacher

As this chap moves around the class delicately adjusting poses – an unrotated hip here, an insufficiently taut thigh there – it’s extraordinary how he manages to settle on the really, really hot birds. He’s a bit like that drama teacher who was always “disappointed” when the class started throwing chairs around, crossed with that PE teacher who left after that unpleasantness at the local pool.

The Full Vegan

Between the green juices, the sugar-free jamu and the odd colonic, this chick’s diet is mostly liquid, fully vegan and typically raw, if you exclude the Botox and filler. Unfortunately, she’s well past the age at which minimal body-fat works as a look: the tendons in her scrawny arms stand out like cables, but the skin lacks the elasticity to keep up. Her yoga wear is flawless, though, and, from a distance, she looks like she could be modelling it.

The Face-Planter

Rendered entirely unembarrassable by childbirth and/or decades of big nights out, this middle-aged lady will give anything a go – up to and including face-planting, hopefully avoiding the domino effect. She doesn’t have a yoga outfit, or indeed her own mat, and has been known to scrape a T-shirt off the top of the laundry and hope. She will laugh when someone slaps a mosquito during meditation, AKA nap time, while time out means collapsing, not the child pose.

The Perpetual Beginner

This woman looks like a rabbit caught in headlights as she struggles to figure out whether there’s more to downward dog than sticking your bum in the air, what the fuck this chattanooga thing the teacher keeps going on about is, and how on earth she’s ever going to do that on one arm. She’ll come every day for a fortnight then not return for a year.

Thanks to Beth Scupham for the lovely Mandala Yoga image, via Flickr’s Creative Commons.