Karen Dubs, a Power Yoga instructor, leads an early-morning class at Timonium's Maryland Athletic Club. Classes begin Feb. 11.

Phoenix resident Karen Dubs has the perfect antidote for fans who will be forced to cope with the emotional crash of football withdrawal. NFL highlight videos, aerobic exercise -- and yoga. Starting Feb. 11, Dubs will lead a four-week yoga class at the Maryland Athletic Club in Timonium geared especially for those stricken with post-New Year's, post-NFL season blahs and the task of making good on New Year's resolutions to get in better shape. Dubs' class -- one of several she teaches at club -- will also include indoor cycling as well as NFL highlight videos.

"I'm excited about it. I think that will be fun," said Dubs, a certified group exercise instructor who worked for six years as the club's marketing director before returning to teaching yoga, indoor cycling and pilates classes full time.

"I've been going to the Ravens' home games every Sunday, too," said Dubs, 38, a 1991 Towson University graduate who also teaches a yoga class for employees at the Baltimore Ravens training complex in Owings Mills. "I'm a fan, and I've actually had a few of the Ravens players in my classes, and I know you do get the winter blahs," she said.

"The concept for the class was just born from that," said Dubs, who recently released an instructional DVD called "Flexible Warrior: Athletic Yoga for Triathletes." "The class will be fun but it will also be challenging." Dubs believes in yoga as far more than just an antidote to coping with life after the Super Bowl. And that comes from personal experience.

She has been teaching group fitness since she was a teenager in Hanover, Pa., her hometown. But she didn't discover the healing powers of yoga until she got sick about eight years ago. That was when she was hit with a double whammy of Lyme disease and auto-immune hyperthyroidism. She grew so weak and listless, she had to take a year off from teaching fitness.

"It just knocked the life out of me," she recalled. "I was so exhausted. I'd never been that sick before. I remember hardly being able to walk up stairs. I'd wash my hair at the end of the day, and I didn't even want to hold my head up. It was bizarre." Seeking to regain her strength and stamina, she took a yoga class with Suzy Pennington, owner of Susquehanna Yoga and Wellness Center, in Timonium. Pennington also teaches yoga classes at the club. "Suzy really introduced me to it," said Dubs, who later completed 200 hours of training and became a certified instructor through a program called Yogafit, which bridges the gap between yoga and more conventional forms of fitness training.

"I just needed something that was not so athletic or high impact. The type of Yoga I studied is a traditional yoga that's about very precise alignment (of the body). I took a six-week session with Suzy and found it was really restorative, and I was steadily rebuilding my strength. It just really felt so right to me that I realized it was what was missing in my life."

As Dubs began teaching yoga classes at the club, she noticed that yoga provided something that was often missing from the workouts of many of the students in her other pilates and indoor cycling classes -- namely stretching and flexibility training to balance out aerobic and resistance training such as weightlifting. "Getting athletes to slow down and stretch was a challenge," she said.

Dubs also had to convince some club members that yoga doesn't have to mean burning incense or chanting in Sanskrit. She said those are some of the many misconceptions that kept people away from yoga.

"Too easy, slow, weird or boring... " Dubs said, reciting some of the objections she's heard. "Athletes, sometimes when they hear about yoga, don't want to be doing anything that feels uncomfortable to them or that they don't know or understand. "And most Athletes are Type A, go-getter types who don't want to slow down and stretch or do something like yoga that appears to be low-impact," she said. But "more and more professional and recreational athletes are discovering it improves their conditioning and performance." Many of Dubs' classes -- such as yoga for athletes and mind-body fusion -- incorporate yoga in specialized training regimens for various types of athletes. "You often have to get them to appreciate that the way you become a stronger athlete is by balancing the challenging training with gentler recovery and restorative stuff like yoga," she said.

Though Dubs' debut instructional training DVD is tailored for triathletes, long-distance runners and other high-endurance, high-impact athletes, her classes are also for everyday folks who just want to stay agile and physically active. Hunter McCullough, 49, a Freeland resident who works in the insurance industry, is one of Dubs' students. He's not a triathlete or a marathon runner, just a diligent exercise buff. McCullough first attended one of Dubs' Maryland Athletic Club classes about a year ago after he won a free certificate for a six-week yoga courses. Today, he's still at it. "It really has made a world of difference," said McCullough, who has incorporated yoga into his five-day-a-week workout regimen, which also includes weightlifting, basketball and cycling. "When I started, I had a lot of lower back and neck pain, probably from tension, and that went away," he said. "I've always known stretching was something you were supposed to do but I never did it. "But now I try to do a little bit of yoga every day and it has really forced me to make a habit of improving my flexibility."

E-mail Bob Allen at ballen@patuxent.com