Bikram why the heat

Cosmos » Society » Hot yoga waste of time and heat Share Tweet. Andrew Masterson Andrew Masterson is a former editor of Cosmos. More from:.

Andrew Masterson. Read science facts, not fiction Make a donation. Other popular hot yoga options include the Canadian import Moksha yoga known as Modo yoga in the United States and CorePower yoga , a rapidly expanding chain. Many locally-owned and independent yoga studios offer their own style of heated classes as well.

Hot yoga will need preparation and gear that can handle the heat:. Bikram Choudhury is a hot yoga innovator and founder of the Bikram yoga system. His method is the original style to be set in a hot room. It is a unique, set series of 26 postures, including two pranayama exercises , each of which is performed twice in a single minute class. Some hot yoga classes may follow a Bikram format, but others may not. Classes that specifically indicate that they are Bikram classes will generally follow the proprietary pose format.

But a non-Bikram hot yoga class can be any series of yoga poses in a heated room. Choudhury was born in Calcutta, India, in He was a yoga champion in his youth, as was his wife Rajashree. It soon became one of the most popular styles of yoga asana practiced in the West. As Bikram's yoga classes began to draw members of the Hollywood elite, he embarked on an increasingly ostentatious lifestyle. He became known for his fleet of sports cars and for wearing expensive jewelry.

The successful yoga guru would, however, become embroiled in lawsuits and sexual assault allegations. In , Choudhury copyrighted his series of 26 poses done in a hot room. He has since been involved in a number of legal disputes, both over the unauthorized use of his name and the use of his method under a different name. Choudhury successfully sued a Los Angeles yoga studio in for copyright and trademark infringement.

He became the defendant in when he was sued by a San Francisco-based collective of hot yoga teachers. This group had received cease-and-desist letters over their unlicensed use of the Bikram method.

The plaintiffs argued that yoga cannot be copyrighted. The parties reached a settlement in in which Choudhury agreed not to sue them and they agreed not to use the Bikram name. And, due respect for his non-native English, that did not appear to factor into his explanation that he has sex with his students only as a public service when they threaten to commit suicide if he does not. It has helped people with high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders—".

But then I started yoga, and they went away. These health anecdotes are far from isolated. Choudhury has positioned himself as more of a spiritual leader than as a fitness expert " I implant my mind into your brain " , but many people turn to hot yoga with an eye to improving health by some unknown mechanism.

The practice undeniably tends to make people feel good—even researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital are evaluating hot yoga as an adjunct therapy for depression—but almost no research has been done into whether hot yoga actually is good, or even prudent, as a bodily undertaking.

So I was interested in concerns raised this week by the American Council on Exercise ACE , which released a strongly worded warning about elevations in body temperatures during Bikram classes.

Bikram yoga, by definition and decree of the guru, consists of 90 minutes at degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent humidity. The series follows a specific set of poses in a rigid order every time. Even though the practice has been around since the s—breaking into mainstream American consciousness when his friend Shirley MacLaine got Choudhury a spot on Johnny Carson —it has largely gone uninvestigated. But as its popularity continues to grow, along with growing popularity of hot workouts of other types—there are now hot spinning classes, hot kettle-bell classes, hot boot camps—the cumulative hotness drew the attention of ACE.

We had met a couple months earlier when he was in D. Bryant is a serious and methodical person whose mission at ACE is to ensure that fitness trainers, in yoga and elsewhere, are certified by a centralized body of some kind ACE or another, but, you know, ideally ACE before advertising expertise and plying their trade.

His takeaway in this case is that Bikram teachers and practitioners need to be attentive to heat intolerance and encourage hydration, not deprivation. What makes you feel good? There's something anxiolytic about saunas, and about exercising in a hot environment.

There is also something at least slightly misleading about the amount of sweat a person produces, which is not indicative of an intense workout, but can be similarly gratifying. You do not have to practice Bikram yoga in a hot room for it to be beneficial for your arteries, according to new research now published in the journal Experimental Physiology. Researchers at Texas State University in San Marcos and the University of Texas at Austin found evidence of improvement in vascular health in middle-aged people who went to hot Bikram yoga classes three times per week for 12 weeks.

However, they found the same improvement in a middle-aged group that completed the same Bikram yoga program in a normal-temperature environment. Bikram yoga is a system of yoga that takes its name from Bikram Choudhury, who started teaching it at his school in India more than 50 years ago. It is now taught by a worldwide network of affiliated teachers. The system is based on 26 postures, or asanas, and two breathing exercises drawn from traditional hatha yoga.

The findings follow previous research in which the team found evidence that Bikram yoga can benefit vascular health in middle-aged adults. Stacy D.

The researchers assessed changes in vascular health using a noninvasive method called brachial artery flow-mediated dilation FMD. Changes in brachial artery FMD reflect changes in the linings of arteries that are linked to the development of heart disease.