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What would you do for that feeling of “hhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaa”?
What is hot yoga?
We can say that hot yoga has organically grown from Bikram yoga, created in the 70’s by Bikram Choudhury, an Indian yoga teacher. Bikram yoga is a standard practice of 26 postures, practised always in the same order, in a heated room over 40c.
The rise in demand for hot yoga in the 70’s meant that studios started delivering different styles of yoga in a heated room, which can vary between 25 – 35c.
Over the years Vinyasa became the most popular, especially in the UK. Vinyasa is the Sanskrit word for flow and means that we flow from pose to pose with Ujjayii breath . The hot yoga classes at our studio are dynamic and very powerful, including sun salutations to warm up the body and get you into your breath, twists to give your insides a good rinse, balancing poses to challenge your balance and focus, hip openers to help you release tension but also give you more agility in your body, backbends to allow more flexibility in your spine and strengthen the back muscles and lastly working on the core muscle, our power house, the muscles that help us have a good posture, that helps us with balance, gives the strength to make the rest of our body light and allow us to be subtler.
There is no fixed sequence and the classes will depend on the level of students, on the energy from the students and on the weather as well.
Why hot yoga?
There are many physical benefits to practicing in a heated room, muscles and joints are warm, allowing us to go deeper into poses, the body relaxes completely, opening up much easier and moving more freely, being heated up also means we prevent injuries that can occur during the practice but also helps recover from other injuries that we might have had outside the yoga practice.
The psychological effects of being in a hot room are the feeling of relaxation, letting go, melting and surrendering. Very often in the UK, with long winters and summers sometimes not very hot, our body craves for these feelings.
Imagine you are walking home and it is freezing cold, you are wearing a jacket, woolly hat and gloves and still you are all tensed up making sure not a bit of cold goes inside your clothing.
When you arrive home, the heating has been on for a while and it is really cosy and toastie, as you undress the heavy winter clothes, you and your body naturally go “ hhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaa “.This is a great feeling, isn’t it?
The intensity of our yoga practice combined with the heat takes us to another level. We have no option but to keep our mind focused on what we are doing, it keeps us focused on our breathing, allowing us to disconnect from our over-thinking minds.
The sweating makes me feel reeeaaalllyyy good, lighter, relaxed and drinking so much water feels like I am flushing out.
If you have been wanting to come to hot yoga class but are feeling a bit scared, I hope this has given you some insight.
Let’s do it together, reach out and I will support you in your 1st step :).
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Namaste!
Benedita