24
awakenedbody
30-Day
The
Bikram
Challenge The yoga gauntlet has been thrown! Can Anne Brison survive 30 days of hot, sweaty Bikram yoga?
I’
m really going to do it. I am really going to commit the next 30 days to the daily practice of yoga in sauna-like conditions. ‘Why on earth?’ you might justifiably ask. Because I’ve heard that the intense heat that makes Bikram yoga different from the other varieties of yoga is amazing for getting rid of toxins, increasing flexibility faster and getting toned up and slimmed down in double quick time. Bikram yoga is basically a sequence of 26 traditional Hatha yoga postures that takes 90 minutes but the crucial difference to other types of yoga is that it’s done in a room heated to 41 degrees celsius. Apparently, the sequence of postures and the heated room will warm and stretch your muscles, ligaments and tendons in the order in which they should be stretched and the heat takes the trauma out of stretching, heals and helps prevent injuries. It also promotes sweating which helps flush toxins from the body. Which is all very well and good but can I do it every day for 30 days? Will it kill me or make me stronger? I guess we’ll find out... my first class is tonight after work, and yes, I’m a little scared. I’ve done Bikram only one
other time in my life, that was 12 years ago and I swore you’d never catch me stepping foot in one of these sauna torture chambers again. Never say never.
Day one: One down, 29 to go.
I won’t lie, it wasn’t pretty. I certainly wasn’t pretty by the end of it - unless you fancy women covered in sweat with mascara and eyeliner running down faces the colour of beetroot. ’Intense’ is one word for the experience, ‘hardcore’ is another and ‘painful and miserable’ could be thrown about as well. There were a couple of times when I thought I might throw up (especially in the camel pose) or pass out from the heat. I wasn’t the only one though. There were about 35 of us in the class, packed in like sardines mat to mat and other Bikram beginners were falling about around me like pins at the end of a bowling alley. Those who thought they were about to faint had to just stop and sit for a while... but anyone who sat too long was soon given a bit of a telling off by the teacher who would make an excellent boot camp instructor or drill sergeant. He’s of the ‘get up, don’t be so lazy, this is good for you and you will do it’ school of thought.
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I made it to the end but the last half hour was brutal. The words going through my head were, ‘please God, make it stop, please God, make it stop...’. At the end, I could literally wring the sweat out of every stitch of clothing I had on. Why am I doing it again? Oh yes, because apparently it’ll clear out a load of toxins, get me flexible in super quick time and help lose weight... cling to that thought.
Day three: Tired. Oh so tired.
I’ve got my third Bikram class in about two hours from now. The not so good news is that right now I’m feeling exhausted, nodding off in the office over my keyboard. And it’s only day three! But the good news is that I got through the whole second class yesterday without having to sit out any of the postures. So maybe you do acclimatise to the heat. It’s still hard going though. And the teacher doesn’t suffer any shenanigans. He told one guy that he was like “a fidgety three year old” and the woman next to me was berated for bringing her mobile phone into class, “we do not bring mobile phones into class! You can live without it for 90 minutes. I lived most of my life quite happily before the invention of mobile phones...” Then, DECEMBER 2012