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Turn Up the Heat!
Reshape Your Body with Hot Yoga By Jenn Director Knudsen
Bikram Choudhury, originally from Calcutta, India and now living in Los Angeles, Calif., created the eponymous yoga that today is taught at his 650 studios nationwide. Bikram yoga requires certified instructors strictly adhere to Bikram's 90-minute teaching dialogue and his sequence of 26 postures. Each posture performed twice and designed to build on the previous one helps move oxygenated blood to 100 percent of the body.
It's out of loyalty to Choudhury that instructors who deviate even slightly from his regime call what they teach "hot" instead of Bikram yoga, Elizabeth explains. Also, if an instructor did not receive formal training in Bikram yoga, he cannot pin Choudhury's name to it.
But whether at a Bikram or a "hot" yoga studio, students get a very similar workout, says Elizabeth, a certified Bikram instructor whose studio charges $14 for a single, drop-in class. It costs up to $20 a class at L.A. studios and some other locations.
At Mary Jarvis' San Francisco, Calif.-based Global Yoga Studio, where Nisse took her classes, the certified Bikram yoga instructor cranks her rooms to between 102 degrees Fahrenheit and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the external heat, students' core temperatures usually only rise a degree or two, says Jarvis, who has instructed Bikram yoga for 17 years.
Jarvis, Elizabeth and others in their profession insist hot yoga is not done in a stifling, sauna-like atmosphere. "Fortunately, our room isn't remotely similar to a sauna," Elizabeth says. Rather, the heat is merely a catalyst to quickly warm up muscles and help prevent against injuries to muscles, ligaments and tendons, such as pulls or tears. And the subsequent sweating and lots of it hastens the removal of toxins from the body.
Jarvis says some students break out with a smattering of pimples following a workout but then experience "skin smooth as velvet" once their bodies acclimate to practicing yoga in the heat. Furthermore, the heat promotes more efficient breathing, blood circulation and increased stamina.