Hot Yoga

Last night I had the pleasure of experiencing a completely unique form of exercise. Oren and I decided to finally go try out a yoga class we had been talking about doing for months. We walked into Bikram Yoga thinking it would be somewhat similar to other yoga classes we'd taken in the past. Boy were we wrong!

This was "hot yoga," where they basically heat up a room to 100 degrees more or less and then have you do the more physically intense forms of yoga poses (26 to be exact) for 90 minutes straight. I have never sweat so much in my life -- not even when I ran a half-marathon! I know now not to ever wear yoga pants in that class...the fewer the clothes, the better.

It was all very overwhelming and some of the positions seemed downright impossible. But others came to me easily as I have done them in the past. Of course it takes practice to build up to those difficult poses, but some of them I just didn't even get how they were doing it! Our instructor was great, very encouraging to the new guests and reinforcing the fact that if you got too tired it was OK to give yourself a break.

The last 15 minutes were the most grueling. I even got a bit of a headache as well as some nausea. But I kept going because the instructor was slowing down a little. When I walked out of the hot room at the end of the lesson, my body felt amazing. I had worked it out literally from head to toe and it felt so relaxed and free-flowing. Not to mention the overall euphoric state I was in. I knew right then I was a little hooked.

I made the commitment to sign up for a month, consisting of 10 classes. It will be quite a challenge but I am so curious to see the kind of results I am thinking I might see since just one class made this much of an impact on me.

Today, I'm pretty sore. But it's a good kind of sore and I am going back this afternoon since that is usually the best cure for soreness. Stay tuned on this new element in my life...