Hi Mark,
No I don't currently have a gym practice. I've dabbled a bit in the past, and have had instruction in all the machines and weights, but am not actively practicing now. Mostly, in the past, I have been an endurance athlete, especially running, though as I get older I get the sense more and more that running might not be the healthiest way for me to get my exercise, at least not by itself. Lately I've discovered yoga and am learning to enjoy it immensely. I've been surprised to discover that yoga can be as aerobically challenging as anything I've ever done, and it can be deeply relaxing, and both. It can also include a good amount of resistance training. Yoga really can be a good all around workout, especially when you combine different styles. Some styles emphasize gross body, while others emphasis subtle body more, though all the ones I have come in contact with do seem to incorporate elements of both. I actually learned the subtle breath practice shown by Terry Patten in the Auxiliary Practices section of the DVD in a Sivananda yoga class only a couple weeks before I received my ILP kit in the mail. There is also a recognition of the causal body in yoga, through meditation, but of course this again this varies a lot with the style of yoga as well as the teacher.
Regarding FIT, in all the yoga classes I've taken there is always the period at the end of class devoted to complete relaxation. They also often begin with a period of grounding and a period for meditation and for touching in to one's "deepest motivation for practice." In Sivananda yoga they also add a period of relaxation between poses, which is considered important to get the fullest benefit of each pose. This is probably the closest to FIT that I have seen in yoga, but in my experience it doesn't come near the level of intensity that can be achieved in a single set of a weight training program.
The 3-Body workout obviously draws heavily from yoga, but it draws from other disciplines as well, especially martial arts. Yoga I think is mainly an inward focused practice, and in that sense is a yin practice. Martial arts on the other hand is mostly an outward focused practice, and in that sense a yang practice. There are yin and yang aspects in both, it is just that in yoga the energy is mostly focused inwardly and in martial arts the focus is mostly outward. What is nice about the 3 body workout is that it includes both inward and outward, both yin and yang, in a single refreshing exercise that isn't stressful. It kind of wakes up the whole body (or all three bodies), both inside and outside. That is its strength. I guess its weakness, then, is that it doesn't go very deeply into any one thing, but touches only lightly on all. So its strength is also its weakness.
This has been a bit of a diversion from the original post. But I think I have come back around to the thrust of the question in my original post. The kata lightly touches into a FIT based resistance training as it digs into the gross body portion of the workout. But what do people do who want to deepen their resistance training? If you are spending 2 or 3 days a week at the gym pushing you're muscles to exhaustion, will you want to do any type of resistance work in the daily kata? This is a question that comes to my mind as I've been thinking about starting up a resistance practice again. I've started and stopped weight training a lot of times, and I think it mostly boils down to not having a real goal or direction for it, and no clear idea about why I would want to put myself through it, consistently. FIT might give me that answer, but I want to be sure I have a good map of where, what, how and why when and if I do start a resistance training program.
Don.