All About Yoga and Hot Yoga

Yoga has been a popular form of exercise for a long time now, and recently, hot yoga has also been joining the ranks and increased in popularity; they both offer physical and mental health benefits for people of all ages, including when a person is recovering from surgery or living with a chronic condition. Yoga can become an integral part of treatment and quicken the healing process in some cases, so with multiple benefits for both, there is a lot to gain from yoga and hot yoga, which is why you should read on for more information on how you could be adding this into your own routine and why.

Benefits of yoga:

• Improves strength, balance, and flexibility
• Helps with back pain relief
• Benefits the heart overall
• Relaxing and can improve sleep
• Gain more energy and better moods
• Manage stress better
• Connect with a supportive community
• Promotion of self-care

Hot yoga takes place in a room where the temperature is usually between 30 and 39 degrees. The classes range from following a sequence of poses, to more fluid flow classes and soft classes. Chloe Chivers at Yogamatters said, “Hot yoga is a great way to feel fully refreshed and reset. I teach an 8am hot yoga class on Saturday mornings and it’s a great way to start the weekend. My top tip for those thinking about trying hot yoga would be to give yourself permission to rest when you need to. It is all too easy to get carried away with the sequence, but taking your practice into your own hands and pausing when you need to will allow you to notice if you are moving in a way which serves you on that particular day. Moving with intention throughout the whole class will ensure you leave feeling good in the mind and body and not just plain exhausted at the end of a class.”

Hot yoga does the same thing but there are some key differences, which are:

• Cardiovascular health: exercising in the heat increases your heart rate and makes the body work harder, so a hot yoga class will be more strenuous for the body than a similar class done in a lower temperature.
• Flexibility: the heat in the room means you will have to create less heat yourself to feel your muscles loosen up. You will be able to move deeper into stretches and will not have to warm up as much to build the heat. 
• Detoxing: a lot of people will claim that because you sweat in a yoga class, you are detoxing. However, your body does not detox through your skin, but rather through the kidney and liver, so a hot yoga class will not directly have you releasing toxins. The cardiovascular exercise and the fact that you drink lots of water can help boost your metabolism, and essentially help you flush toxins.
• Breathing: although the heat might mean that you feel like you are working hard to catch your breath in a yoga class, the breathing exercises that are often done in class can over time help increase your lung capacity and help you breathe better and deeper.

Try out the yoga class below:

Try out these hot yoga classes below: