Hot Yoga - Where It's Going Wrong. What Can Be Done

Locust, any of the warrior poses and chaturanga. What do they all have in common?

They are all strengthening poses.

Now you get the same amount of strength in these poses, whether you do them in a heated room or not. Think about chaturanga.

You aren't supporting any more weight with your bent arms because the room is hot. Therefore, you won't be getting any stronger by doing the pose in a heated environment.

Ok, let's switch to lengthening (stretching) poses. Heated vs non-heated room. More or less lengthening?

Now, everybody who has done hot yoga is saying; more lengthening in a heated room.

To summarize the discussion so far:

There is no additional benefit in performing strengthening poses in a heated room. 

But there is additional benefit in performing lengthening poses in a heated room.

Therefore, to get the most bang for your yogic buck, given that you have a limited time in the heated room, it would be best to stack this session with lengthening poses, at the expense of strengthening poses.

So, if you are fortunate enough to attend a studio that has both hot and warm classes, the best combination is to focus on strength during the warm classes and to focus on lengthening during the hot classes.

Yet more and more, we see vinyasa being performed in highly heated rooms.

Wrong way around studios. Wrong way around.

All that juicy heat, that could be used for huge hamstring stretches like upavistha konasana (side splits) and hanumanasana (front splits), or for breathtaking back-bends like wheel (urdhva dhanurasana) ...

...ARE GOING TO WASTE.

It is so disappointing to attend a hot yoga class, get all heated, only to never be given the opportunity to use that heat to explore deep asana. This is squandering energy.

Which actually goes against the yama called brahmacharya. I know! Bad hot yoga teachers.

Brahmacharya is one of those grey areas where people get confused.

But if you think about yoga and control, you know, ahimsa is violence control, satya is lying control, asteya is stealing control. Well, brahmacharya is energy control.  

This includes misdirected energy, like doing vinyasa in a hot room, when you could be busting out a thoroughly deep back bend.  Anyway, back to hot yoga.

What is most frustrating is that with a little bit of foresight, those studios could be really benefiting their students. 

They would do this, by focussing on strength during the warm classes, and then using the heat to the max, by hitting the deep stretches during the hot classes.

Such a waste.

See you in hot yoga class, J (err....on the other hand, maybe you won't)

Yoga Myths Busted: The Expectation Of Perfect Alignment

Let's have a look at the great alignment myth. This is where, unless you are perfectly aligned in a pose, you are somehow doing the pose incorrectly.

The alignment nazis descend on you with their straighten this, tuck that mantra. The sky falls on your head, and your incorrect pose is responsible for the next world war.

The one that always gets me, is the feet facing out in wheel pose.

Now, being able to instantly hit this pose perfectly, if you are a twenty something, female, yoga instructor is no biggie.

But for us <cough, cough> year old, inflexible guys. Well, this is a near impossibility, without about 30 mins of dedicated warm up. And even then.

Our feet may face outwards slightly.

Now, some people will say, that unless you can do the pose with perfect alignment, then you have no business doing the pose.

This is absolutely incorrect. And I'll prove why...

Who, when they started yoga, could hit even a single pose with perfect alignment? A big fat nobody.

So, according to the alignment nazis, nobody should ever start yoga. Because you shouldn't be doing poses incorrectly.

Now, obviously, this isn't true.

When people start yoga, their alignment is out in every pose. Over time, the poses gain alignment.

So too with hard poses like urdhva (wheel). Guys feet face outwards slightly, and over time the feet start to straighten.

Poses are a journey from imperfection to perfection. Which means, we must practice poses imperfectly.

We only perfect asana as we practice it imperfectly, J.

Can You Be A Yogi And Still Do Other Sports?

Arrrrgh!

You know the real answer is no. But hey, it's 2016, and we are in the Western world. So.
The PC answer is <said in a serious voice> "Yes, of course, you can be a yogi and do other sports". Trouble is.

Modern western yoga is flat out being one eighth of one quarter (mathematically one thirty-secondth) of of old school yoga.

Asana is only one of 8 'limbs' of Raja yoga. Raja yoga is one quarter of all yoga. 8 x 4 = 32.

So, if you had to spend 32 more times practicing yoga, could you do it?

Say you do 2 hours per week, of modern class yoga.

If you had to spend 64 hours per week doing yoga (2 classes per week multiplied by 32), would you have time for other sports?

This is like, six 10 hour days and one four hour day. When on earth would you get time for other sports and to sleep?

So, old school yogis did it full time. They didn't do anything else.

So the answer to the question is:

Sure, you can be a (modern) yogi and do other sports. However.

You can't be an old school yogi and do other things in life, because yoga was your life.

Peace out, J.

P.S. I know the math in this is dodgy. Point is that it was a way of life back in the day.

Look modern yoga can - and should be - practiced all the time. So the question in the heading is wrong. It should be "Are You Still Practicing Your Yoga When You Do Other Sports?"

Now we've got a topic.

Should Yoga Be A Workout?

Have you ever seen Dharma Mittra's 908 yoga poses poster? If you haven't...what am I doing? This is the internet...hang on, I'll get one...



So, there's Dharma Mittra doing a LOT of yoga.

Now if you started to categorize the poses in the poster, into easy effort to maintain, and hard effort to maintain, you'll get a lot more hards than easys.

What's this mean? Just that on the whole, yoga is physically hard.

So, the whole of yoga is best described as physically hard, because there are far more hard poses, than easy ones.

Now there are subsets, that have easy poses in them, like Restorative, Bikram, Vinyasa (when was the last time you did a Kapinjalasana in a viny class? Freakin' never! So, yeah, vinyasa is only a subset of yoga).

So, YES, on the whole, yoga is physically demanding.

Now, a workout is hard, and yoga is hard. Therefore, yoga IS a workout.

Whether, yoga is anything more than a workout is beyond the scope of this post. Why...because the whole point of the post, is to argue that yoga is a workout.

Job done, J.