Are Vibrating Yoga Pants the Key to Perfecting Your Practice?

Whether you're a seasoned yogi or a beginner easing into a practice, yoga classes are a place where you can find community, strength, and learning, both through a yoga teacher and your own body.

But when you take an instructor out of the picture, does your practice suffer? Are your poses no longer properly aligned? 

If so, there may be a solution.

Nadi, an innovative invention that electronically syncs athletic wear to your movement, allows yogis to communicate with their pants to better their practice. 

Are you intrigued yet? 

Wearable Experiments(We:eX) aims to bring together the functionality of modern technology with their wearable inventions. Their mission is to “bring together fashion and technology with a functional design aesthetic.” So, Nadi pants—We:eX's latest brainchild from Billie Whitehouse, designer and director, and Ben Moir, co-founder and technical director—were born to bring your yoga practice to a new level, in style.

According to We:eX's recent press release: 

Using a custom developed language that allows skin to become the interface, Nadi encourages the user to correct form and posture by issuing haptic vibrations. With gentle pulses, feedback is given to help adjust posture and achieve fitness goals. Nadi is accompanied by an Android app, which demonstrates the areas on the body needed for adjustment. The frequency and intensity of each vibration changes based on the body position and angle, and is illustrated in poses within the app. This real time tactile technology aims to change the way we interact with ourselves.

The pants (pictured above) certainly do not appear to be hooked up with wires or at all interrupted by the technology running through their seams. In fact, they actually look kind of cool, and pretty sleek (imho). Linking up with an app—that will soon be available for both iPhone and Android—the pants track your movement, form, posture, and positioning. 

The pants also release a gentle vibration when you've missed your mark, in an effort to keep you in line the way a yoga teacher would in a studio or one-on-one class. So, for the yogi who likes to practice at home, this could open up a whole new world when it comes to private practice.

In an article for Fast Company, Ben of We:eX tells reporter Jessica Hullinger: "The nice thing about haptics [vibrations] is you process them subconsciously. So if you’re in the flow of yoga, you don’t have to look at a screen and engage your attention on the screen or listen to a voice instruction."

Skeptical? That's understandable. While a possible great tool for a personal home practice, it's hard to imagine vibrating pants having as great a touch as our favorite yoga teacher making an adjustment in person. 

So I reached out to my yoga instructor, Meghan (Mila) Vitrano, a teacher at Prasada Yoga, to weigh in on the vibrating pants. While an interesting concept (and one she would like to try out herself), Meghan feels the pants could potentially be a bit discouraging to those at a beginner level. “As a beginner you're coming into your own, and learning how the poses feel, and working to get it 'right,'" she says, "a beginner using the pants might find that the continuos vibration could be off-putting and discouraging, when compared to the more nurturing correction and instruction from a yoga teacher.”

On the flip side, Meghan does see how these could help to avoid injury, and believes that yogis at an experienced level of practice might find these pants to be a perfect fit, especially those who practice on their own. 

So, if you're all about "good vibes only" where do you stand on the Nadi pants? Would you give them a try? Tell us how you feel in the comments below. 

Photo courtesy of Karin Bar

Originally published on YOGANONYMOUS — January 15, 2016