Buti yoga best way to unwind away from US politics

This is Hollywood's new tribe.

What they're doing is called Buti yoga. It incorporates plyometrics, that's short explosive movements to improve muscle elasticity and to sculpt and tone the body.

The high-intensity workout fuses yoga with tribal dance and short fast bursts of cardio conditioning.

Under the strict instruction from class leader Bizzie Gold, the next hour and a half is spent rocking and gyrating the body with interval training which participants say is producing successful results.

Members of this class claim say they've seen extraordinary results in a short period of time.

Formerly a competitive skier, Buti creator Bizzie Gold spent years teaching more traditional Hatha-based yoga in Hawaii before deciding a less serene routine would suit her better.

Gold combined elements from everything, yoga, tribal dance, plyometrics and body conditioning and even bits of circuit training.

She's been perfecting Buti yoga for a couple years and now it seems her acolytes in Beverly Hills just can't get enough of it.

The classes based at Yoga Blue in Pasadena are completely booked according to Gold who is convinced this is because this workout gets results in half the time of other less arduous routines.

Gold says: "It's an overall body sculpting workout. You feel intense emotional release. You feel stretching, flexibility, fat burning, but you're also getting muscles in places in your body that you didn't even know you had. The main thing they tell me after their first class on top of limping is that they say that they're finding muscle groups that they didn't even know that they had. Muscle groups that you would never get in a traditional exercise format. It's because we are doing so many hip circling and really focusing on squeezing core muscles that you would never do unless you were belly dancing, or doing African tribal dance. "

The moves are taken from various styles that focus on an intense shaking of the hips.

Going through yoga sequences, Buti incorporates hip circles of varying speeds to warm-up the body core and engage the quadriceps and gluteal muscles.

The music is a big part of the intense calorie burn and includes anything with a strong bass line, everything from Miami Booty Dance and Brazilian Funk to Hip Hop and African Tribal.

The dance styles used are dynamic and there is no choreography.

Terri Ross, 40, from Manhattan Beach has been doing it for two months and absolutely loves it.

She says: "I would consider myself a fitness enthusiast and honestly I'm addicted to it. I dance. I used to do yoga. I box. I go to the gym. She incorporates all of that so I feel like I have everything aside from the fact that it's a lot of power. It's a lot of strength. It's sexy and invigorating and for me. It's just a huge mental release."

Candy Silvasy compares it to playing.

She says: "It's just like playing. It's not like working out. It takes al the fun things you used to like to do as a kid, wiggling and full of energy and full of life but then you also do the gross things you don't like to do like push ups and a of that so you get the strength and a its benefits but you have so much fun."

The bass beat and dance may seem to be quite removed from the serenity of traditional yoga, but centre manager Tara Napoli insists the workout still has yoga at its heart.

She says "Yes absolutely we're getting the benefits of yoga because as you're going through these plyometric skiIIs and booty shaking, but you're also doing Vinyassa flow at the same time. You are breathing and are getting into our own zen. It's just more an upbeat kind of dance zen instead of being so linear like most yoga poses are which were originally created for men, making it very masculine. It's incorporating the shakti, the feminine force which is extremely expressive and creative and vibrant and really amazing."

The class focuses on stretching each muscle group to get a faster recovery time.

Fitness expert JiIIian HesseI has been a Los Angeles based master Pilates trainer for over thirty years.

Hessel's written a paper on her comparative studies on Pilates and yoga and argues this fusion of methods is fulfilling a growing demand.

She says: "Yoga can be a bit inaccessible for folks because usually it's not done to music. Music is a universally happy event for people to workout to so suddenly you get a beat going and you get a group energy going and yet there are centring aspects of yoga that are integrated. Also, people don't have time anymore so when you have a fusion workout that combines cardio with flexibility and having fun in a group, I think it's terrific."

At the end of the class all is suddenly quiet and members take part in a five minute yoga-based "savasana", or meditation.