Bikram yoga is notorious for being taught in a 105°F humid room. The idea being that the heat will make your muscles more limber and reduce the chance of injury. I have tried all sorts of exercises in the past but this is the only one that I have done stuck with. I have gone twice a week for nine months.
I have taken other types of yoga in the past and I liked it enough to know that I would like the right kind of yoga. Bikram works great for me for a few reasons:
-Most people can’t stand it but I like the heat. Maybe it’s just because it feels so great when you leave the room.
-The series of postures is exactly the same every time. There are 26 poses that are performed in the same order for the same length of time. The more advanced postures are staged so that less advanced students can at least do the first couple of parts of them. Previous yoga classes that I have taken have been random and all over the place which is irritating and makes it difficult to track your progress.
-The instructors don’t babble half baked Hindu philosophy at you. Don’t get me wrong, real Hindu philosophy is deep and rich and thousands of years old and takes decades to master. Some twenty something who’s read too much Deepak Chopra has no business lecturing me on the subject particularly when I have paid for an exercise workout.
I’ve been thinking of taking it up. There’s a studio in Pasadena. I’m mulling over whether or not I’m going to go for bellydancing or bikram. Most of my past yoga experience is either with Iyengar or gym yoga.
Me! Me! I go several times a week and just love it. I know it’s not for everybody, but it’s worked well for me.
As a matter of fact, I’m considering taking the teacher training if I can swing it.
The Bikram teachers here are just awesome and I consider a few of them good friends as in outside the classroom.
I’ve been going for almost two years and it’s changed my life. I’ve lost weight, I’m in great shape. I’ve changed my eating habits and I’m working on other areas of my life, like reducing my anxiety, now.
I’ve tried it a couple times - and I was much more limber in there than in any other yoga class…but, it was hot. While I like heat, the first time I went to a bikram class, it was hotter than I expected, even having read about how hot it was going to be. I didn’t stick with it because it wasn’t convenient for me and my schedule.
That said, yoga is a very hit or miss thing - some of your complaints about other types of yoga are not necessarily true. The bikram yoga class that I attended wsa into the spiritual side of yoga, so we got the philosophy - conversely, some of the non-Bikram classes I’ve taken have been entirely spirituality-free. It depends on the instructor and the space and the class. The same can be said for “progress.” While some non-Bikram classes are random and haphazard, some aren’t. And while they haven’t been as regimented as Bikram, it’s still been easy to see where I’m doing better or what I need to work on.
That said, if you’ve found this and it works for you - good. Enjoy it!
anu-la1979, of the two, I prefer bellydancing. But it’s an entirely different kind of work.
I love Bikram. I’ve always been weird about regulating temperature, and I swear this has helped out immensely. And I’ve been doing yoga for so long, that most other yoga classes were yawn dull and not at all challenging. I’ve been doing bikram for about a year now and I still find it enough of a challenge.
But yes, do the belly dancing too. It has… other… benefits.
