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Turn Up the Heat!
Reshape Your Body with Hot Yoga By Jenn Director Knudsen
Maxine Nisse thrives in the heat. Good thing, because she took a friend's recommendation and gave "hot" yoga a try. And she liked it more than other yoga practices.
"It was so different to me, that I enjoyed it. I like anything that makes me sweat a lot," says Nisse, 29, from her San Francisco, Calif. home. "I wanted to try yoga out, to do something very different from the prenatal yoga class I'd taken earlier."
So Nisse sweats it out for nearly two hours in a yoga studio heated to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot yoga (also called Bikram yoga) has been around for years, but more recently has become popular among both old-time yoga adherents and newcomers to the practice. As Nisse knows, so-called "sweaty" yoga is not for everyone, yet instructors and practitioners alike say turning up the heat makes for a better workout.
"With this heat, we melt the body in order to reshape it," he says, likening the body to a piece of steel that must be heated before it can be molded into another form.
Deneen Elizabeth, an instructor at Bikram's Yoga College of India, operates a studio outside Portland, Ore. and says the intense heat and subsequent humidity warm up the body much faster than does a similar workout in less balmy climes. "Because of heat, once you get 45 minutes into the class, you can already do something you couldn't do at the beginning of the class," says Elizabeth, 34, referring to the poses (also called asanas) students strike during each roughly 90-minute course.