Hot Yoga Not

Yoga for the love of it

Parivritta Janu Sirsasana

I love practicing yoga, but I don't do hot yoga, and here are my reasons why:

1.  It is not necessary to do yoga in a hot room.  Any good yoga practice starts with a warm-up, which uses the body's own muscular contractions to build up heat.

2.  If doing yoga in a hot room, the body still generates heat with muscular contractions.  As a result, that heat has to be dissipated, which is much more difficult to do in a hot room.

3.  As a yoga practice continues, it should increase in intensity after the warm-up period.  More intense poses means even more difficulty in dissipating  heat.

4.  In an attempt to prevent overheating, the body will increase it's sweat production in order to facilitate cooling through evaporating.  This mechanism of cooling doesn't work very well while exercising in a hot room.   In other words, the sweat will not cool you off because the room is hot.

5.  In a further effort to cool off, the body dilates, or opens up, the blood vessels under the skin.  All this blood in the periphery can increase the risk of fainting. 

6.  There seems to be a belief that more sweat means more weight loss.  This simply isn't true.  More sweat just means more fluid loss.  This fluid is easily replaced by drinking water.

7.  Sweaty hands are slippery hands, making it hard to safely do simple common poses like downward facing dog. 

8   If you really want to burn more calories doing yoga, you should do it in a cold room, not a hot room. 

9.  Physical exertion in a hot environment raises a real risk of hyperthermia(elevated body temperature) and heat stroke. Yoga practice isn't fatal, but heat stroke can be.

10.  Practice yoga for the love of it, and I promise, you will get hot.