Yoga won’t make you slim, dahling – just deeply boring

SIGHTINGS of the elusive yoga orgasm or ‘yogasm’ have been recorded for many years, but last week the newspapers got into a Bikram sweat over a new report that found 20 per cent of women have achieved a climax while performing Downward Doggy-style.

Apparently, it’s all to do with flexing your pelvic floor muscles and having no distractions.

My feeling is that it’s probably just as well these women enjoy sexual satisfaction while doing yoga, as I doubt a man would date any of them.

There’s the ghastly Sweaty Betty Lycra, the fetid mat slung Robin Hood-fashion on their backs, the shiny, make-up-free faces, not to mention a sheen of smug self-satisfaction when they say, before the bill arrives for dinner: ‘Oh, I must get to bed, I have to be up early for yoga. I didn’t have wine so shall I just leave five pounds?’

Yoga doesn’t make you a nicer person: it turns you into a bore. Nor, according to another report last week, does it help you lose weight. A British cardiologist-led team accused food and drink companies of over-emphasising how sport can fight obesity.

The doctors conceded that exercise might fight heart disease and dementia, but clearly women who do yoga have brains beyond saving: they believe that just because they have been to a class they can sit down for the rest of the day, eat what they like and lord it over the rest of us. In fact, if you go to India you can see yoga gurus who are very, very fat.

Indians don’t do yoga to get great bodies, they do it to still their minds. But as we all know, the sort of women who frequent Triyoga classes in middle-class areas of London are making lists in their heads: pick up dry clean- ing and child; do Ocado order; bully husband. As for real sex with an actual man, they’d rather not muss up the professionally ironed bed linen.

Almost as bad as yoga freaks are cyclists – Twiglets in Lycra (copyright: Jeremy Clarkson) who swear at me if I drive up behind them with music blaring, and who frighten dogs and horses. I’m always having rows with cyclists, mainly because I yell at them, of a Sunday morning: ‘Shouldn’t you be gardening, or doing housework?’

Then there’s the walkers in fluorescent clothing who troop past my house with their trekking poles, and water bottles of the sort you see on the cages of rabbits in laboratories, using a track I tramp along, wearing flip flops and pyjamas, twice a day with my dogs.

It’s the seriousness of the walkers’ intent I can’t stand: the chomping on energy bars, the devices strapped to their bodies measuring the number of steps. I’d have more sympathy if they carried binoculars to watch birds rather than merely performing the myopic, aerobic equivalent of the selfie.

I was once an exercise nut. I would jog from my London flat in Barbican to Covent Garden, and subject my corpse to four hours of dance classes. I would do two hours of Pilates (the thinking person’s yoga) every Tuesday and Thursday evening. I would jog in the middle of the night, too, round London Fields. I was never afraid of being attacked as I stank too much.

THEN I experienced a seminal moment. I interviewed Paula Radcliffe (in Hyde Park, while she ran), who today will compete in her last London marathon. Rather than being a woman who glowed with health, she seemed sickly and cadaverous, with not an ounce of fat on her frame, a face etched with worry about being unable to conceive (running is very bad for women’s faces, breasts and ovaries), her calves riddled with holes from other runners’ spikes.

And I wondered what was the point of being super fit, given it had taken over every aspect of my life. I remember attending a dance class in Chelsea and overhearing a woman tell her friend she hadn’t exercised for a couple of weeks, and being aghast at her weakness.

That’s yoga nuts for you: unforgiving, self-centred, hairy arm-pitted, crusty footed, breath-taking narcissists. Yoga is exercise for lazy people.