Bikram yoga: Sweating and stretching

Published 3:11 pm Monday, September 13, 2010

When I first walked into the hot yoga studio, it felt great, like a warm embrace on a chilly Northwest day, like I’d slipped through a south Everett rabbit hole and somehow landed in Mexico.

It was a heavenly room, steamed to about 40 percent humidity and warmed to 105 degrees.

But as I waited for class to start, I felt the air get heavier.

The studio was wet like a steam room, hot like a sauna and surrounded on all sides by mirrors.

Sluggish and out of shape, I started to feel a bit panicked. This was where I’d be spending 90 straight minutes, trying to contort my body into poses such as eagle, triangle and tree.

I wondered how I would manage to keep breathing.

That, however, is the point of hot yoga, also known as Bikram yoga, a series of 26 traditional yoga poses and breathing exercises arranged by Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram’s Yoga College of India in Los Angeles.

Bikram’s prescribed formula of heat, controlled breathing and specially ordered postures is supposed to help your body reach its maximum stretching potential. It’s designed to move blood around in beneficial ways and encourage excessive sweating.

Indeed. I have never sweated so profusely as I did in the two hot yoga classes I took at Bikram Yoga Everett.

We hadn’t even finished the warm-up breathing exercises, when I noticed my shins had beaded up with large droplets. By the end of class, everything I was wearing was completely soaked.

I was not alone, not by a long shot. It was a full room and everyone was slick.

Yu Wang, the charming and energetic woman who opened the studio in March, already has a dedicated following of die-hard students and offers more than 30 classes a week.

Despite the extreme heat, students, even first-timers, are encouraged to stay in the room for the entire class. Standing still, sitting or even lying down in the room are preferred methods of rest.

Yes, I cheated and indulged in the cool air of the lobby. Twice. It only made it harder to go back in, though.

Many of Bikram’s poses demanded far more balance, strength, cardiovascular fitness and mental focus than I could muster.

It was grueling. I kept thinking, “Couldn’t this class be just an hour?”

And yet, when I was done, it was as if I’d had an expensive massage.

I felt incredibly relaxed and a bit delirious with the afterglow. And how could I not be purified by all that sweating? I wanted more.

Afterward, 26-year-old Natalia Tune of Everett, who had seen me stumbling and gasping with disbelief throughout the class, said, “If you keep coming back, it really does get a lot easier.”

Tune isn’t a fan of heat, but loves how she’s instantly warmed up and ready to engage her body in each class.

“I feel like it lubricates everything,” she said, a departure from the cold yoga classes she had tried. “It was just really amazing how much farther I could stretch my body.”

Sonja Bricker of Whidbey Island, 38, enjoys the repetition of the poses, which are the same in every class at Bikram-certified studios across the country. Each class provides another chance to improve or, perhaps, perfect poses.

“If you were to go to any other yoga class, there’s so many poses,” she said. “Here it’s always the same. You know your weak poses. There’s also a kind of comfort in knowing what you’re going to be doing.”

Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037, sjackson@heraldnet.com.