Bikram Yoga turns up the Heat
Tracey Turner
“Free your hips and your mind will follow.” Great advice for those involved in academic pursuits. That being said, if one frees one’s hips, and sets one’s mind free, anything is possible. But just what are we holding in our hips, anyway? At Bikram Yoga Winnipeg, owner and instructor Cathy Huntrods believes that “every cell, and every muscle, stores what’s happened to you . . . as we do our yoga, as the body opens, you find yourself more flexible. When we release physical pain, out comes emotional energy with it.” Yoga views the human body as a system that can record and store tension and trauma, creating blockages that may impede our mental and physical health. Many postures may assist in releasing these blockages to create a harmonious flow of energy, bringing both the body and mind into balance.
26 Postures for health
On invitation from the American Medical Association, Bikram Yoga founder Bikram Choudhury brought his yoga to the United States in 1971. His yoga series includes 26 body postures, which work collectively and cumulatively on the entire body in 90 minutes. Bikram yoga is known for its tourniquet effect; stretching, squeezing, and massaging the internal organs, while flushing the endocrine and nervous systems. Huntrods recalls, “I hated my first class, but after that, I loved the changes I felt. I physically felt amazing.” No stranger to athletics, Huntrods, a former runner and Manitoba certified fitness instructor, shared, “After my Bikram class, I woke up pain-free for the first time. Imagine someone saying to you, here is your body 25 years ago.”
Who’s getting hot
Anyone can practice yoga. Bikram says it’s “never too late” and you’re “never too old, never too bad and never too sick to do this yoga.” The postures of Bikram Yoga are “dynamic and exhilarating” and offer relief from stress and anxiety. Reflecting on her practitioners, Huntrods contends, “The busiest people are the people that are in my studio every day,” and it’s their yoga practice that “helps them deal with their day.” Many people are drawn to yoga as a way to keep their bodies physically fit, while others are there for more specific health concerns. Whatever the reason, yoga can be seen as an instrument for change.
Stay in the heat
It’s the heat that makes Bikram so unique. The studio is kept at a toasty 40 — 43 C. The heat in the Bikram studio makes you sweat. “But it’s a different kind of sweat,” says Huntrods. “You feel clean when you’re done,” and, “We don’t sweat out our toxins enough,” she says. And this can lead to illness, disease, and imbalance. In the heat, muscles stretch more easily, helping practitioners relax, and travel more deeply into the postures.
While the heat might sound great, Huntrods warns, “The first class can be hell.” Apparently feeling dizzy, lightheaded, or nauseated is a normal experience for the first time. Huntrods encourages her students by saying, “If all you can do is stay in the heat, lying on your mat, then that’s good for today.” Of course, it’s the heat that makes Bikram Yoga so controversial within the medical world. A study on environmental thermal stress, completed in 2002 at the Arizona Health Sciences Center by Samuel M. Keim et al, advised that sports or athletic pursuits, moderate or intense should be refrained from in temperatures over 32 C when symptoms of heat stress occur. These symptoms could include “a body temperature above [38 C], fatigue, nausea, dizziness, lightheadedness, faintness, irritability, malaise, or a cessation of sweating.”
Huntrods maintains that after five or six Bikram classes, you’ll keep going back and that “the heat works for you not against you.” In the Arizona study on heat stress, researchers suggest that “acclimatization to a hot environment will occur after training in a temperate environment, leading to an improved ability to handle thermal stress.” This supports the idea that after a week’s worth of classes, one’s body becomes more acclimatized to the Bikram experience. Since there’s not a significant body of scientific, peer-reviewed research on this issue, trust in your own awareness and be gentle when beginning any new discipline.
Perhaps it’s easy to see why Bikram Choudhury personally refers to his class as a “torture chamber.” Despite mainstream medical controversy, there’s a mountain of personal stories of healing that Bikram Yoga helped manifest in practitioners lives. According to Huntrods, “for health benefits, you can’t get a better series than Bikram.”
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