A Bikram yoga studio is heated to around 105˚f but allows for some humidity and encourages a sweat.
Why the heat?
The Bikram heated room is designed to help the process of detoxification, as well as allowing the heat to penetrate your muscles. Being bendy while warm is so much easier than trying to stretch cold.
The heated room is also to prevent injury – the asanas take the body into full stretches where the body either compresses or extends certain areas – this cuts off blood circulation temporarily before it re-enters supplying fresh oxygen straight to the deprived area.
The techniques of compress and extend are common yogic principles, but the difference in a heated room is the extra mile you can go when you are fully stretching your lungs.
Bikram lungs
Bikram Choudhury, the founder, maintains that we only use around 50% of our lung capacity. His intention is to get us all breathing more fully, deeper and more focused as this increases the oxygen source direct to the brain, but also eliminates toxins and bacteria. Not bad for 90 minutes of sweaty stretching.
Bikram body
Devotees of the technique look fantastic, even people who are not naturally lithe, slim or double jointed can find a happy place in this regime, as it is an aerobic workout and your cardiovascular system gets a thorough MOT. But it comes at a price – hard work.
Bikram bodies do not emerge after a few classes one month, they are the product of a serious, almost daily workout. And because the workout is performed in tropical heat, you need not worry about fancy clothing (although many parade in designer lycra) you can just wear shorts and a vest or t-shirt.
Bikram challenges
Working hard in a hot room for an hour and a half is bound to have some effect. It’s not uncommon for practitioners to feel nauseous or dizzy, especially when new to the regime. All instructors advise when that happens, to sit or lie down until feeling better, not to push or go further than necessary. Health care is at the top of the agenda.
As yoga disciplines go Bikram is contemporary and controversial, as Choudhury Bikram favours a competitive edge eschewed in other yogas as it directly opposes the ‘union’ that is ‘yoga’.
Bikram boot camp
Having tried Bikram there’s no doubt in my mind that regular practice is beneficial to overall physical health, but my mental health suffered greatly by the boot camp style of show Bikram yoga instructors feel it necessary to put on.
I’m used to getting a few moments silence to breath deeply and visualise. A Bikram classes involves a teacher on a stage or platform, Madonna style microphone clipped on. Once their mouths open they do not shut up – 90 minutes of instructions, improvements, encouraging sound bites and the odd funny – anything but silence.
Of course great meditators (Buddha) have always pointed out that a calm mind, an equanimous mind, does not suffer external noise, it is the internal chatter that creates disharmony – and I agree. But yoga is a place of refuge – hard work too – but a place to find quiet, away from the carousel and hullabaloo of better bodied egos let loose on a microphone.
I love yoga and have tried many forms, but give me quirky Kundalini with its bandhas and chanted mantras or gentle Hatha with its flowing, caring asanas any day over Bikram banter.