Let's Chat About GaiamTV

I received a free month-long membership to try out GaiamTV and write a review. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have heard me talk about it once or twice. GaiamTV is an online database of original transformational videos with a membership fee of $9.95 per month. The videos on the site fall into three categories: 

• Live Healthy
• Spiritual Growth
• Seeking Truth

You obviously know which I gravitated towards first, right? Yep, Live Healthy! But I did try out all 3, and I’ll talk about each of them.

Live Healthy:

For this section, I tried out so many videos, but my favorite by far were the Rodney Yee yoga videos. I own a few of his yoga DVDs, but this was a much bigger collection for the price of 1 DVD a month. To me, that’s great. It means my workouts are more fun because I can switch around various videos and various instructors and not get bored. We all know what it is to get bored with our workouts.

I know Gaiam as a company has been very focused on yoga products, but the Live Healthy section goes far beyond that. There are also other fitness videos from trainers like Jillian Michaels that I tried, and I was impressed with the variety. I asked a couple of questions from other bloggers I know have used the service, and they told me new videos are added all the time. Even better!

As a person that travels a lot and is away from home more than half the time, what is great for me with this service is that I can take my iPad wherever I am, connect to the internet, and boom, it works. Since I’m all about the big screen and I like to hear soothing music blasting through my sound system, I can also hook up my iPad to my TV and it’s clear as day.

This is how the video appeared on the iPad.

And this is how it appeared on the big screen.

Spiritual Growth:

This section contains many videos on exploring your spirituality (like videos from the Dalai Lama, exploring Isis, and other deeply spiritual topics), but if you aren’t completely spiritual, it isn’t limited to that. It also contains videos on personal development and self-help topics (like “Get Up and Find Success” with Mike Dooley). To be honest, I viewed more of the spiritual videos that the personal development ones. Although there is a vast collection here, I tend to like to read about spirituality and personal growth than watch the videos. So this section was not really for me.

Seeking Truth:

This section contains many videos on ancient wisdom, metaphysics, astrology, science, and history. If you are interested in knowing facts about the world and our bodies and how scientific theories have come to be what they are, definitely check this section out. It is very enlightening as there are interviews with scientists and historians. 

One of my favorite videos here was “The Pyramid Code” that delves into the history of how Egyptians built pyramids and what any of the technology at that time meant.

Those are the three sections and I tried each of them. My focus? Living Healthy. I loved this section because it was trainers I already work out to, and I get to use their videos for one monthly fee.

So… will GaiamTV work for you? I definitely think you should give it a try. For me, I was more focused on the fitness and yoga videos because that’s what I used more often. Is it worth the $9.95? That’s the kicker. It’s fairly cheap compared to buying DVDs, but I do think that the site should offer an annual membership that cuts costs for the users or cut the monthly costs just a little bit as there are also a lot of videos available on free sites. However, the price does make more sense if you use all 3 sections.

If you are interested in trying out the service, in September, we are partnering with GaiamTV to give away a free month-long membership and a fitness accessory! Enter to win and you can try it out for yourself :) For more details, check out this post.

Cheers Eights & Weights!