Stand up and spread your feet about 40 inches apart. Turn your left foot to a 90-degree angle from your right and flex your left knee so it is directly above your left ankle. Now twist left like a corkscrew until your shoulders face that left foot. Or go as far as you can. Then raise both arms directly overhead. Try for straight up with your upper arms almost touching your ears.

Good luck.

This pose is called “Warrior I.”

You are now practicing yoga.

Harder than it sounds? More and more Lompocans are discovering why it is called “practice.”

Judging by the magazine rack, yoga has touched down after its voyage from India to mainstream America. According to “Yoga Journal,” 16.5 million Americans practice - an increase of 30 percent since 2002. “Yoga Journal” itself started in 1975, printing 10 pages and 300 copies. Now it publishes 160 glossy color pages with scads of ads and circulation at 350,000.

Tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams practice yoga, as do (deep breath in) Michael Strahan of the pro football champion New York Giants, NBA basketball stars Shaquille O'Neal and Kevin Garnett, San Francisco pitcher Barry Zito, swimmer Ian Thorpe and golfer Annika Sorenstam (breathe again). Hall of Famers Jerry Rice and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were into yoga long before its popularity spiked.

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In the Santa Maria and Lompoc valleys, growth has been less spectacular but steady, according to Vicki Forman, who leads four classes a week in Lompoc and stages her own local TV show on yoga. “It took off five to seven years ago coming into the gyms,” she says, calculating the years as carefully as she might critique your Warrior I. Since the city Recreation and Parks Department began yoga in 2000 two private studios and the YMCA have also opened classes.

Forman, a Lompoc city employee, teaches after work at two of the venues. She found yoga in 1995 on a fluke. She was a fitness instructor simply looking for another marketable subject.

“It was just something I was going to teach,” she explained in a recent interview over coffee. ”But as I learned more and more it became part of my life.”

In her 40s, Forman does not look like a mother of two adult children. Her light-brown hair nearly touches her shoulders. She stands just 5-foot-3, but being slender she appears taller. She insists she has a tendency to gain weight, though that is not apparent.

Yoga emphasizes calming of the mind through relaxation and controlled breathing.

“It's lowered my blood pressure 10 points,” says Valerie DeMille of Lompoc, one of Forman's students. Yoga's (in place of “its.")

Its poses and stretching build flexibility, balance, and trunk strength. Forman takes care to caution students before some poses that could aggravate injuries.

Yoga is believed to have originated 5,000 years ago. It was used by Hindu holy men to train their bodies for long periods of meditation. When Western students found it, the practice grew as a form of exercise.

The low-key Forman speaks quietly but her list of yoga benefits carries the zeal of a converted sinner. “It's become a passion, a love, for what it has done for me physically and emotionally,” she confides, citing carpal tunnel syndrome and stress as her onetime demons.

The intense devotion of yoga's adherents, its use of Hindu terminology and emphasis on relaxation can rattle some Christians. Forman, a Christian herself, had one student complain, “I don't want to hear Indian music. I want to maintain my Christianity.”

Forman smiles. “It's not a religion. It's more a science. People who practice yoga can devote their practice to Christ, God or Buddha. I think that's cool.” A quick Google search turns up Christian yoga, Judaic yoga, Buddhist yoga and a dozen flavors more.

Despite its current vogue, there is one sizable demographic group which has been slow to sign up - guys. Forman's classes in Santa Maria are 20 percent male, but in Lompoc the ratio is half that.

“It's a stereotype,” Forman says. “Yoga doesn't bring up a macho image. It brings up this image of women in tights.”

And as competitive as men can be, some yoga postures are hard for them, she admits. “Women are more flexible. Muscle is much harder to stretch than fat. It's intimidating for a man to be next to a woman who can take a knee and put it on her nose (go ahead and try, guys, but no bending your knee).”

Forman's TV show is seen on TAP-TV on Mondays at 6:30 p.m. Her husband Ken operates the cameras. Does he participate in her classes?

“No,” Forman confesses wistfully. “It's that male ego thing.”

Correspondent John McReynolds can be reached at 736-6352 or johnny544@verizon.net.