Last week, I received details of the second mission in Mission Samsung‘s blogger challenge and a certain word sent a shiver down the uneven musculature of my spine.
Exercise.
Exercise. The closest I’ve come to exercise is wearing a t-shirt with the word on it. Eggs are sides for bacon, amiright?
EXERCISE.
Honestly, I get tired just thinking about it.
But thought about it I did, and chose to try the exercise of yoga, for the legendary teacher B. K. S. Iyengar once said, “Yoga is the golden key that unlocks the door to peace, tranquillity and joy.” I also heard he used to beat yogis with a stick. No pain no gain, I suppose.
And so, I switched on the Samsung Smart LED TV, pressed the Smart Hub button and looked for a useful yoga app on the dedicated app store. “Store” is probably a generous word here. If you think of Android’s Google Play and Apple’s App Store as hypermarkets, then the one that comes with the TV is more like a stall at a weekend market. There is very little choice of apps in general, and even less when it comes to yoga apps. One offered a five-minute introduction before asking me to login to their site and take up a 15-day trial. No thanks. Another app had its screenshots with Korean writing. I know more about the Large Hadron Collider than I do Korean so that didn’t bode well. One had “Helper” in its name but didn’t live up to expectations.
With no peace, tranquillity, or joy to be found in the third-party yoga apps, I decided to try Samsung’s own Fitness app that came pre-installed with the TV. Thankfully, it’s better put together than the majority of the like-minded apps on the store. There are separate categories for specific muscle groups and exercise types, including yoga. You can sign in or create a Samsung account to track your progress and achievements in the different categories of exercise. Here’s an extremely quick look at the interface.
Aside from the Samsung Fitness app, you can also search for yoga exercises using the fount of knowledge that educates and entertains close to one billion unique visitors each month. The YouTube app is one of the very few apps that is a pleasure to use on the TV. In fact one can browse the YouTube app on a smartphone like Galaxy S4, and use the “screen mirroring” feature to play the YouTube content on the TV. It works the other way as well, where you can use the Samsung Smart View 2.0 Android app to beam the TV picture directly to your smartphone.
For this second mission, I got off the couch, and now you get to laugh. Check out some of my (bad) yoga poses below.
Triangle (Utthita Trikonasana)
Upward-facing dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana)
Head-to-knee forward bend (Janu Sirsasana)
And here’s my favourite one: corpse pose (and yes, it’s an actual yoga pose).
That’s it for mission #2 of Mission Samsung’s second blogger challenge. Keep in touch with further updates here and you can always track #MissionSamsung on Twitter.