Hot Yoga: Everyone out of the Comfort Zone
Hot yoga is a routine, but there's nothing routine about it.
You do the same yoga poses in every hot yoga class, so the inexperienced might be tempted to think that this kind of routine might create a kind of comfortable, predictable laziness.
I've heard lots of adjectives for hot yoga but comfortable isn't one of them.
Yes, the yoga poses don't vary; Hot Yoga is structured to work your entire body from bones to skin, as they say. Complete each pose and you've just had a whole body workout.
But some people are still a bit mixed up about hot yoga and exercise...
Because some strength trainers say that varying your exercise sequence and routine is the way to stay in shape. This is the concept of "muscle confusion," which sounds like a bad thing, but, they say, is the way your muscles grow: by "surprising" them, shocking them with new twists and turns and causing them to do something different.
That would make sense if you're not already doing something that works your entire body - every muscle, joint, ligament, system, cell of your body - and this would be hot yoga.
So why confuse things? In fact, the last thing you want to do is shock your muscles.
As challenging as hot yoga is, you are actually being very gentle with your muscles and encouraging them to let go of tightness and resistance as the heat encourages and softens them. Just when you are maximum stretch, the pose is over; and then you must move slowly and correctly OUT of the pose and not jerk, shock, or surprise your muscles by moving too fast.
No pain, no gain? No sale. Here in hot yoga you are a different kind of warrior.
As you hold the hot yoga pose (we call it freezing in hot yoga), your muscles slowly begin to stretch and lengthen; you are training your body to stretch beyond its current edge. You are pushing beyond your old boundaries, but with the support of heat, a teacher's guidance and your own inner resolve to expand beyond old beliefs that don't serve you: limited beliefs about your age, injuries or other resistance.
In every hot yoga class, your goal is to get out of your comfort zone, properly.
And there is the one important thing that always stretches in the hot yoga room: your mind.
You are never the same person you were yesterday, last class, or even 5 minutes ago. hot yoga lets you feel the subtle shifts and changes in your body, and then, in your life. Hot yoga can teach you how wonderful change really is.. and how to experience and celebrate it.
No one wants a boring life; and let's face it, the comfort zone isn't really all that comfortable. In fact, it's pretty dull. When you push beyond your resistance in the hot yoga room, you are also gradually buidling muscles for letting go of whatever may be holding you back from getting the life you want outside the hot yoga room.
Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT
Reader Comments (3)
Well written and appropriate to this weekends scripting workshop. We were "reaching for the stars"...Thank you.
With workouts I always found myself getting bored, mastering them, and having to create my own stuff. And if I didn't "sweat" the workout didn't count.
With hot yoga, it's never boring, because I never know what to expect. Poses that aren't challenging become impossible, the road to pose masterization is neverending but personal victories are more abundant, and sweating is always a given.
The "muscle confusion" philosophy seems like an extension of the same belief system that equates "healthiness" with being "thin"--in the most conventional sense (as opposed to finding the body weight at which you are most comfortable). Often the upshot of such thinking is the compounding or exacerbation of existing injuries and the introduction of new ones.
Hot yoga, by contrast, does lead you out of your comfort zone--and into your healthy body as old injuries--ones you thought were simply the inevitable consequences of aging, etc.--heal and old limitations fall away.