Bikram Yoga is a series of 26 poses, which take 90 minutes and is performed in a room heated to about 105 degrees.
It’s hot, and you sweat. A lot. You may think this sounds gross, 40 people crammed in a room, sweating buckets. Well…it is, but the benefits out-weight the unpleasantness.
In addition to burning about 700 calories, you get a diverse strength training workout. Poses focus on flexibility, breathing, and balance.
More importantly, it’s interesting. Previous workout routines, for me anyways, become boring after a few weeks. It’s hard to keep in shape when you don’t look forward to working out.
The strange thing about Bikram Yoga is the challenge of each session. Sometime you will have great class. You breeze through every move, left with enough energy to try the advanced versions of the poses. Other times the classes are brutal. This is due to a combination of not being hydrated, how hot the room is, or how long the particular instructor decided holds each pose. I’ve had classes where I thought my heart was going to explode on a backward bend or my legs were going to give out on balancing pose.
Don’t let you turn you off from trying Birkam, though. No one has ever died (that I am aware of), and you feel phenomenal afterwards. It’s an incredible workout.
Which is why for the month of July, I will be participating in the 30-day challenge at my Yoga Studio. 30 days of continuous yoga breaks down to 45 hours, or 2700 minutes, of consecutive sweating.
It’s going to be a long month. I’ll check in from time-to-time to let you know how it’s going.