By Emily P. Walker
There I stood in the 105-degree heat, sweat rivulets ricocheting down my body, trying to stand perfectly still on one foot so as to win the approval of the incredibly taut, nearly naked gray-haired man standing on a platform in the front of the room. At the end of the 90-minute sweat session that was my first experience with Bikram yoga, I felt mentally, physically, and liquid-ly drained.
I’m home in Michigan for a week staying with my parents, and didn’t want to deviate too much from my workout routine. My cousin recommended a Bikram yoga class, telling me that it could burn up to 1,000 calories during a 90-minute session. I figured that could help counteract the eggnog, brie cheese, and peanut brittle I’ve been eating, so I went to check it out.
Bikram yoga, which was created by Bikram Choudhury in the 1970s in a series of 26 postures performed for 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees. The idea behind the heat is that it increases flexibility, and the added bonus of sweating profusely is that it supposedly flushes toxins out of the body.
When I first walked into the super-heated studio, referred to by Bikram devotees as the "torture chamber," I was overcome by the heat and the musky smell of all the sweaty bodies that have come before me. The poses were nothing particularly new, but what was new was sloshing around in a pool of my sweat and exercising while willing myself not to faint.
One incredibly long, slippery, and mentally challenging (as in willing myself to not simply push open the door 10 feet away and drink in the cool parking lot air) workout later, I left feeling pretty good.
Later, I wondered: Was that actually a good workout? Or would sitting in a sauna for two hours accomplish the same thing?
I looked at some online message boards on how many calories are actually burned during Bikram, and one commenter pointed out that the hardest workout she could think of — 90 minutes of a military-style drill complete with sit-ups and jumping jacks, squats, and lunges — would only burn about 750 calories, so there is no way that holding your body in mildly uncomfortable positions in a hot room for an hour-and-a-half could compare, calorie-wise.
But burning calories isn’t the whole point to working out and I don’t
necessarily do yoga for calorie-burning or even muscle-building
purposes.
During my online searching, I also learned that Bikram has also been in the news as of late for a bit of controversy: Bikram Choudhury is currently suing the creator of a Bikram offshoot called "Yoga to the People" for stealing the supposedly copyrighted Bikram poses and the order in which they’re performed. Yoga to the People is very similar to traditional Bikram, but instead of
costing close to $20 a class, it’s either donation-based or under $10,
and is usually billed as just "hot yoga."
While the creator of Yoga to the People did shell out the $7,000 required to train under Choudhury to become a cerified Bikram instructor, he never agreed with Choudhury’s idea that Bikram-style yoga should only be performed in sanctioned spaces and that it had to be expensive.
At issue is whether yoga poses and the order in which they’re performed are something that can be protected by copyright. Choudhury says yes, and those who support Yoga to the People say, no, yoga poses have been around for centuries, and should be free to whomever wants to practice yoga.
Bloomberg recently reported that a regulator in the U.S. Copyright Office said that yoga poses are exercises and not choreography and shouldn’t be copyrighted. However, the U.S. Copyright Office has apparently awarded copyrights to yoga poses and their sequences in the past, according to the article.
I’ll give Bikram another chance before I head back to D.C. I like a new
fitness challenge and will keep an open mind while I decide whether the
thousands of people who swear by it are on to something, or whether it’s
just a money-making venture built on hype and whole lot of hot air.
