I am fidgeting with my tank top
and short-shorts which are entirely too tight and reveal more than I
would like, but what else would I wear? I'm in a 105ºF room, with
40% humidity. The room stinks of stale sweat, and the heat is
oppressive. I can deal with it. My body starts sweating before class
begins. I can handle it. I'm in a Bikram Yoga class, and the only
thing that really irritates me is the claims and directions of
the Bikram standardized script, a script which is repeated almost
verbatim in all Bikram Yoga studios. In this yoga room my back bends
should hurt, a comment that I have never heard in any of my other
yoga classes in nine years practice. In fact, all my other yoga
instructors advised students to back off when they felt pain.
Woman doing forward fold at Bikram Yoga conference
In this
room, it's like a
different yoga world. In here pyramid pose (called standing separate
leg head to knee pose in Bikram) improves
the functioning of my thyroid. In here, I should not keep a
micro-bend in my knee to protect my ligaments and joints from tears.
No. In here I lock my knee. I hear this command from the front of the
room, and in my mind I can see my yoga instructors, their eyes wide
and mouths agape. I am hyperflexible, and without trying I can
hyper-extend my knee, increasing my risk of injury and damage to my
knee joint.
In this room, wind-removing
pose not only stretches
my hip flexor,
but also massages my transverse, descending, and ascending colon. Do
I want my colon massaged?
In this hot, sweaty room, wind-removing
pose seems, at
best, like
a bad idea, and, at worst, a private joke played on the masses by
Bikram Choudhury,
the founder of Bikram Yoga.
And why is it so hot in here?
The script via the teacher says it's to remove toxins from my body.
At these words, I find myself mentally
rolling my eyes. “Toxins” is used
as such a vague buzzword
that it hardly has meaning. Is
the instructor talking about
exogenous or endogenous toxins?
Heavy metals? Pesticides?
Bacteria? Viruses? What kinds
of toxins could she possibly mean, and
does she even know? Is
a system which is
designed for keeping my body cool really a productive way of removing
them?
At least a dozen times, I have
gone through this or similar mental chatter while in a Bikram Yoga
class, the same questions rattling around in my head.
I asked questions
of my instructors after
classes,
once the mask and words of Bikram Choudhury
have fallen away. Outside of class, they are more like the yoga
instructors I'm used to; accommodating;
understanding.
Outside of class they seem to recognize that people have different
bodies and different levels of skill. They are no longer barking
half-instructions
at me over a microphone. I
immediately like them more after
class. The
answers are informative, but incomplete. The words I'm looking for
don't appear in their speech --words
like 'research',
'studies',
and 'safe'.
I know their answers would be only a jumping-off
point even if they were more research-based,
after all their livelihood is intertwined with Bikram Yoga's
success. Thus I send
myself deep into the bowels
of Google Scholar, searching for studies on Bikram Yoga.
The research is few and far between, although I am happy to see that
the Bikram Yoga
studio I attend works with The
University of Texas to
change that. I found
a study that suggests Bikram Yoga
improves pulmonary function and potentially blood pressure, but does
not give adequate stimulus to change resting heart rate, or aerobic
fitness [1].
Big deal? Other research has found that
yoga that includes
pranayama breathing exercises,
like Bikram, improve lung function [1,2]
and yoga in general helps control blood pressure [3].
Research on the effects
of yoga on the thyroid show similar results. Rawal, for example,
showed that participants released more thyroid hormones after they
practiced yoga [4].
Anu S and Senthil Nathan showed that inversions in yoga increase
blood flow to the
thyroid [5].
However, there is no research saying how great an affect
this has on the thyroid. And again, this is common
to any hatha yoga
practice, not just Bikram. I did find one intervention study that
used women diagnosed with hypothyroidism as participants. The study
found that doing yoga
everyday for one month
improved their quality of life [6],
but not that
it improved their thyroid.
Why
then
is all the sweating and heat necessary? According to a
Bikram
website, the heat “allows
for deeper stretching, purifies the body, increases circulation and
strengthens heart rate for a better cardiovascular workout” [7].
I've
already stated that there hasn't been sufficient evidence to claim
that Bikram Yoga
is an aerobic workout.
Heat does allow for deeper stretching and increased
circulation, but if you're hyperflexible like me, is that a good
thing? Experts say 'no'. The director of orthopedic and sports
rehabilitation at the Beth Israel
Medical Center in Manhattan, Dr. Robert Golin says “[h]eat
increases one's metabolic rate, and by warming you up, it allows you
to stretch more...But once you stretch a muscle beyond 20 to 25
percent of its resting length, you begin to damage a muscle” [8].
The
New
York Times
article
in
which
Dr. Golin was consulted,
goes on to say that any pose requiring
extreme bending of the knee such as Bikram squats or fixed firm pose
“are the most likely to cause tears in knee cartilage” [8].
The
news just gets worse for Bikram lovers as far as the knee goes. The
truth is, you should never hyper-extend your knee, not even if your
quadriceps
are
engaged. Both the Yale Medical Group and the American Academy of
Orthopaedic Surgeons advise not to lock your knee during weight
lifting or
stretching [9,
10].
As
for those who are hyper-flexible and can easily hyper-extend the
prognosis is worse. “Hyper-extension
of the knee can overstretch ligaments, stresses the front of the knee
joint surface and weakens the quadriceps” [11].
Lee Staebler, a licensed physical therapist, says that “[l]igaments,
tough bands of fibrous tissue that connect bones or cartilage at a
joint, do not regain their shape once they are stretched out... A
loose joint can be a like a loose door hinge that prevents the door
from closing tightly” [8].
Bikram Choudhury doing toe stand
So
while
the
heat does not help with cardiac function, it does allow for increased
stretching, but that can damage muscle tissue.
Surely there must be something
redeeming
about the hellacious heat. To all my Bikram lovers, I can offer you a
few
bones.
Research done on sweat has shown that along with water, minerals,
urea, and lactate, the human body does release heavy metals such as
cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in sweat [12
]. Thus,
one can say that the
heat does help remove toxins from the body. From personal experience,
I can tell you that Bikram Yoga reduces my recovery time from
Crossfit in a way I've never experienced in any other
form
of yoga.
Bikram Choudhury standing on a student
I
think my truth is that Bikram Yoga
makes me nervous. I see in it a lot of my potential downfalls, such
as its focus on flexibility,
which I have too much of already,
and
the external world. In Bikram, students are not supposed to take
their eyes off of the mirror for the standing series. This forces me
to focus externally on how I look, as opposed to noticing my
internal state or
how I feel in a pose.
Recently, The
New York Times
posted an
article called “How Yoga Can Wreck your Body.” In it, there are
some spectacularly horrifying stories of how bad yoga can be. Don't
get me wrong, yoga has many many benefits, but these benefits come
only if we are mindful of our
bodies. As yoga teacher David Bauer said, “[w]hen you are in a hot
studio filled with Hard-core Type A personalities, and everyone's
adrenaline and endorphins are pumping, you're not feeling any pain...
and it may mask how far you can go” [8].
This
more than anything makes me nervous about Bikram; the thought
indicates
to me
that because I am competitive and I do push my physical limits, I
might hurt myself --badly.
Will
I go back to Bikram Yoga again? Of course I will, my muscles feel
better when I do. But I have nine years of yoga training to lean on
to prevent me from hurting myself.
Would
I recommend Bikram to someone who's never done yoga?
Not
a chance.
Works Cited
1. Abel,
A. N., Lloyd, L. K., Williams, J. S., & Miller, B. K. (2012).
Physiological characterisitcs of long-term bikram yoga
practitioners. Journal
of Exercise Physiology Online, 15(5),
32-39.
2. Hewett,
Z. L., Ransdell, L. B., Gao, Y., Petlichkoff, L. M., & Lucas, S.
(2011). An examination of the effectiveness of an 8-week bikram yoga
program on mindfulness, perceived stress, and physical
fitness. Journal
of Exercise Science and Fitness,9(2),
87-92.
3. Jayasinghe,
S. R. (2004). Yoga in cardiac health: A review. European
Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation, 11(5),
369-375.
6. Singh,
P., Singh, B., Dave, R., & Udainiya, R. (2011). The impact of
yoga upon female patients suffering from
hypothyroidism. Complementary
Therapies in Clinical Practice, 17,
132-134.
Other
Relevant Resources
Here
is some research done by an Austin Texas Bikram studio, along with
The University of Texas
This
is a video done by Leslie Kaminoff, author of Yoga Anatomy
