Updated May 01, 2014.

Authentic Yoga is a iPhone/iPod app from alternative medicine expert Deepak Chopra and yoga instructor Tara Stiles. Chopra gives a series of video lectures on understanding yoga philosophy and provides narration throughout the application. Stiles demonstrates the yoga asanas. The app offers a large selection of yoga routines for balance, flexibility, strength, and body awareness, each at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels.

What Works

The highlight of this app is the video instruction of individual poses. The videos look great, the poses are easy to see, and the directions are clear. The best use of this app is as a portable index of yoga pose videos. I also like the photography that illustrates the sequences because it shows how to get into the more complicated poses step by step.

What Doesn't

While it's great that this app offers such a wide variety of routines, their presentation doesn't serve them that well. It's interesting to hear Chopra recite the benefits of a pose once, but I don't need to hear that doing a high lunge can relieve constipation every time I do it. Since Stiles is the yoga teacher (and, in fact, is Chopra's teacher), I would prefer to hear her instructing as well as demonstrating the poses. It would also be amazing if the sequences could be in video form too. Finally, the early version of this app is plagued by quite a few bugs, which hopefully will be resolved in later updates.

Conclusion

It's great that these two well-respected experts have entered the yoga app marketplace, because you can actually trust the information they are presenting.

Their routines do offer an improvement on the virtual flash-card model offered by most other yoga apps, but what really sets Authentic Yoga apart is the use of video. If this is the new standard for yoga apps, things could soon get very interesting.