Hyped-up activities that are actually shite.

[DarkestBerty]

Loads of my friends do yoga. It's really relaxing, they say. It's really mindful, they say. It's a good workout without realising you're working out, they say. It's a really nice community of people, they say.

So on Saturday morning I tried it.

It was bloody awful. Everything about it was bloody terrible. It wasn't remotely relaxing or mindful. I wasn't a very good workout and the people were cult-loke lunatics.

And I've felt a bit lightheaded, dizzy, and just not quite myself ever since.

Tell me about activities that everyone seems to have a wide-on for, but which you hated.

My NcT group is still solid after 22 years. Built on wine, nice tapas and dance.

Oh Lordy, NCT.

No, no, no.

watched Ridley the other night my stomach is still cringing from him singing at the end Redrec thank you for introducing me to Armstrong and Miller. so true

so agree on hot tubs

Oh, they do!

Surely they'd just walk 'with a friend or two' if that's what they'd prefer? It seems strange for you to imagine some of them weren't enjoying what they're doing as it sounds like they were enjoying chatting to their friends.

@LillyPJAs someone who enjoys nature and walking, after being merged with the group involuntarily for a bit, I did think this was one of those activities that sounds much better then it is actually in reality. May be you find me saying that strange, because you weren’t there?

I love nature and walking. I often walk with a group and if I want to be more 'alone', I either walk in front or lag behind. Walking with a group motivates me to walk further than if I'm on my own and we can share lifts so go further afield.

Group holidays.

Big city tourist attractions, like wax works, shreks whatever, London Eye etc why would I want to see a wax model of a celebrity over the cities unique parks/buildings/museums etc I don't understand why they have become must see tourist places when they are just overpriced time wasters with queues.

This really made me cackle 🤣 Might post pictures of us all picking up our pumpkins from the giant boxes in Sainsburys this year 😂

I'm one of the aforementioned autumn-loving hygge wankers, but I don't get pumpkin-picking.

Also, running - I refuse to believe anyone enjoys it. I've only ever seen totally miserable-looking people doing it. Most sports, really. I can't stand swimming. I used to enjoy netball. And I'm naturally quite flexible, so enjoy yoga.

Hen dos with everything-penis. Straws, ice cubes, games, trying to get as drunk as possible, as quickly as possible. Don't get me started on having a strange man gyrating in my face! Worst nightmare. I'd rather do a cooking class, spend a bit of time with my loved ones and then go home.

This isn’t an activity, but the over commercialisation of Christmas. I don't need, nor want, a ton of whatever tesco, boots - or worse, temu - etc have decided to hawk this year and yearn for a return to simpler years. Where we ate some nice food at a decent time and played games on Christmas day. I completely understand how ungrateful this seems (and the privilege also), but my mum goes completely over the top and we literally spend the entire evening opening gifts. We wait for dinner till my sister comes over, she's always 3 hours late and we don't finish eating till after 9. Some years, the kids have been so bored opening gifts that we've had to keep some for the next day. It's utterly obscene and I hate it.

It’s not exactly an activity, but I used to be baffled by the rash of pumpkin spice flavoured drinks and foods, at this time of year - pumpkin doesn’t really have a flavour, I thought. So I did a bit of googling, and learned there is a specific mixture of spices used in pumpkin pies etc in the US - so I assumed that there wasn’t actually any pumpkin flavour in these things, just a mixture of spices.

But today I saw a Whittard’s advert for pumpkin spice flavoured coffee, that actually does claim to have pumpkin flavour in it. But how can it have a flavour of something that doesn’t have a flavour?

I am baffled (not that it takes a lot to baffle me).

Pumpkin tastes like sour mashed potato to me.

This thread inspired me to go back to my old yoga class yesterday. I haven't been for over a year after an injury, followed by laziness. As soon as it started, I remembered that my favourite part of yoga is the nap at the beginning and end and I'm always quite disgruntled when the instructor requires me to start moving around.

Water births! I feel like they are so hyped up, loads of women saying how the pain completely vanished as soon as they got in the water 💦 It didn’t 😆 I was in just as much pain as I was out of the water and I also ended up with leg cramps and pins and needles from kneeling in one position for ages. They are definitely over rated lol.

I'm 41 and my parents still go for dinners/pub nights with their NCT friends! It probably helps they live in a small town so most of us "babies" went to the same schools etc, but it's still a pretty good record!

I didn't see my NCT group once I'd gone back to work, so it's not all "friends for life."

Where are you going though abroad for that price ?! 😂

I went to Madrid for a week for less than £600. My brother arranges his own local transport and can travel around Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and other eastern European countries for 3 weeks for even less than that.

Christmas markets in the UK, especially Lincoln. Shuffling around in the world's biggest mosh-pit whilst freezing cold. Why? However, the Salzburg Christmas markets were genuinely magical and very snowy.

Ski-ing. Paying through the nose to exercise in fugly clothes at altitude. How is that a holiday?

Bottomless brunches. I hate Prosseco. If it was limitless Grey Goose Vodka & tonic I might be interested?

My NCT group just hated one another on sight. We met about twice after the babies were born. The only thing we bonded briefly over was annoying our old-school hippy NCT teacher who came to one meet-up, because she'd presented the 'cascade of intervention' as a Very Bad Thing, and most of us had had thoroughly medicated births and were vocally praising modern obstetric medicine.

We may have had the same nct teacher. She devoted one session to home births.
Silence and cats bum faces all round.

i don’t like that bit in the yoga class when they do the chanting in Hindi. It feels like appropriation. And they never translate it so you don’t even know what you’re chanting.

I think she was from Dorset, and had been parachuted into our north London weekend because the usual teacher had to drop out. She had a long plait and knitted, and said 'cascade of intervention' in the same bleak tone as you would expect a newsreader to use for 'Rwandan genocide'.

At the post-babies get-together, she actually went around with a notebook, asking everyone exactly how their births had gone (by which she meant 'Did you give birth without intervention/epidural/CS?' To which we nearly all said, cheerfully, 'No!', so she was quietly disgusted and put her notebook away.

Sanskrit, more likely.
I learned yoga through doing astanga yoga, with a fairly traditional teacher. She had us do the opening and closing chants and gave us a printout in Sanskrit and English, so we could follow/learn the Sanskrit and so we knew what it meant.

The appropriation thing is an interesting question. I have some reservations about it, but also some of the Indian yogis who played the biggest roles in introducing yoga to the European/Western mainstream did come over with the deliberate intention of sharing yoga with the West, so it's not like it was stolen from them by colonisers or something, which I would feel really uncomfortable about.

I think it's analogous to saying a Hail Mary or something, isn't it? Yoga is essentially a spiritual practice as it was originally intended to prepare the mind for meditation. I practised yoga for many years, but now I think I prefer to do a stretch class as there is none of the "spiritual" overtones and none of the competitiveness to bend your body where it shouldn't bend in order to keep up with the ballerinas at the front.

There's no dogma in yoga; you don't have to believe in a specific higher power as you do in religions. The chants basically express respect for the teachings and the transformative potential of yoga and wish for peace and happiness for all beings. T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the 'original' Indian yogis whose teachings and students influenced the West, used to suggest that students dedicate their practice/give thanks to 'your highest principle', which could obviously mean anything to anyone.
I taught yoga for a while and used to suggest at the end that students say thank you to 'whoever or whatever you need to say thank you to'. (My teacher was in the Desikachar tradition and I was quite influenced by him). Spirituality can look like many things to different people and a good teacher will teach in a way that
models and encourages that idea.

A good yoga teacher won't encourage competitiveness or make students feel that anyone has to 'keep up' with anyone else. They should remind students that everyone works to their own level of 'honest effort' (as a teacher of mine used to term it), and give modifications and variations and perhaps props to enable everyone to have an experience of the poses regardless of physical limitations or specificities.
It is of course human and natural to look with envy at/feel self-conscious around the person sitting easily in lotus, or doing a handstand, or whatever, but part of the discipline of the practice is to work on accepting and welcoming your body and your level.