My company recently hired a charming gentleman named Raj Patra. Raj and I got to know each other and I found out that in his spare time he teaches Hot Yoga (or “Bikram Yoga” after founder Bikram Choudhury). I had never heard of this, but I was shocked to find out that some people actually practice yoga in rooms heated to 105 degrees and 40-50% humidity. This has several supposed health benefits beyond the obvious effect of making you sweat buckets of water in every direction. Then they kick it up a notch with “Power Yoga” which has more movement than the traditional pose-holding variety.
I have never done any kind of yoga before, let alone aerobic yoga in a sauna-like room, but as you all know I’m game for trying pretty much anything. So I brought my roommate Chris and we signed up for Raj’s “Hot Power Yoga” class at Hot Yoga of Kirkland.
The place was extremely crowded: apparently hot yoga is the Big New Thing to hit the exercise world. Most of the people there were female, which was great, except that I can’t imagine trying to hit on any of them while drenched in three gallons of my own sweat. As the class started I quickly realized too that I was by far the most out of shape person in the room. I was unable to hold even simple yoga poses and mostly just flailed my arms and legs around while trying not to die of heat stroke.
