Hawt.
Today, at the suggestion of my friends Christina and Debbie, I went to a Bikram yoga class at Bikram Yoga Evanston. Bikram yoga is 26 poses and 2 breathing exercises practiced in a 105 degree 40% humidity room for 90 minutes. I was fairly apprehensive about it because I had heard it was really hard, and the BYE website is pretty intense. So I get there, pay, introduce myself to the instructor, change into my relatively modest yoga outfit (a tank top and running shorts), and then head into the actual yoga room and immediately start sweating like crazy. I think I had a slight advantage being from St. Louis, where 105 degrees and 40% humidity is an average summer day, but still, it was really hot. The class itself was hard because of the heat, obviously, but the positions themselves weren’t particularly hard, and the time actually passed fairly quickly. The instructor was kind of a stereotypical yoga crazy yoga dude. The only difference is, instead of being like calm and meditative, he talked constantly, which he said (and I believe) was because as soon as he stopped talking and gave you a second to think, you wanted to relax and get a drink of water (which isn’t encouraged unless you really need it). He was also kind of a weird ADD mix of good cop and bad forth. He’d go back and forth between telling us anything but excellence was unacceptable and telling us how awesome and wonderful we were. Overall, I really liked it and felt really great afterwards (There could not possibly be any toxins I did not sweat out, and it burns over 1,000 calories). I sometimes like the solitary feeling of going to the gym and being in your own world with some Lady Gaga, but generally I’d rather be in a group and feeling accountable to someone other than myself. Sports is definitely like that, and a class is close. I would definitely recommend trying it at least once.
