Is Hot Yoga today's Peak Fitness?
The latest fitness secret that's piqued everyone's interest is Peak Fitness.
Peak Fitness is a form of exercise that works you as hard as possible for a short burst of time, and is followed up with slower, more relaxing movement. It's all the rage.
Which just proves that everything old is new again.
Hot yoga had this system down to a science over 50 years ago. Hot yoga is finally being proven by modern day science, but we hot yogis already have our proof, in our results...
Consider this description of hot yoga:
Each hot yoga asana is held for anywhere from 30 - 60 seconds; at that time you may feel your heart pounding and your muscles aching as the intensity of the pose builds in power. We call it the "tourniquet effect;" the blood flow dams up as you hold, and when you let go into total relaxation, the floodgates open and freshly oxygenated blood floods through you.
Powerful for the heart, the vascular system, the muscles...in other words, you.
Hot yoga is so much more than hatha yoga with the heat turned up. Here's how hot yoga gives you peak fitness....
The old exercise wisdom had us running on a treadmill for an hour, or biking to nowhere on a stationary bike for many "miles" til your legs turned to pudding - all to get your heart rate up and keep it there for a sustained period of time.
New findings by researchers such as Dr. Izumi Tabata, now show that shorter workouts work best for a healthy heart, as long as the intensity is high enough. In fact, it is the longer workouts without rest that are not thought detrimental (now you tell us).
Now, optimal workouts for "peak fitness" go something like this: thirty seconds of raising your heart rate followed by 30 seconds of recovery, over and over. Lather, rinse, repeat..
Sound familiar? It does if you've done hot yoga.
Dr. Tabata also recommends a more intense routine of 20 seconds of exertion and only 10 seconds of recovery; and some hot yoga poses such as Floor Bow, are indeed held for only 20 seconds. Others, like Tuladandasana, Balancing Stick, the hot yoga pose designed to make your heart REALLY pump, is only 10 seconds in duration....and boy do you feel it. Very aerobic. And then rest.
The wisdom of relaxation
While other forms of exercise advised us, "No pain, no gain," yoga continued to cajole us with the refrain of, "Just let go.: Total relaxation is something yoga has always championed.
And now the word is that doing nothing may just be the best thing for your health.
Put your Type A mind on the back burner when you're in hot yoga. Make it a point after each hot yoga pose, when your teacher finally says, "Release," to come out of the pose slowly (slower movement) and then stand completely still, taking at least one full, deep breath in Standing Savasana (rest).
No hair -fixing, clothes-pulling, mat-straightening, towel-wiping, daggers-glaring at your teacher. That's not relaxing. Focus into your eyes in the mirror and silently quote the first word Yoko Ono said to John Lennon:"Breathe."
Compare the core principles of Peak Fitness to the very core of hot yoga:
Peak Fitness:
- Warm up for three minutes
- Exercise as hard as you can for 30 seconds. You should be gasping for breath and feel like you couldn't possibly go on another few seconds. Use lower resistance and higher repetitions to increase your heart rate
- Recover for 90 seconds, moving at slower pace with decreased resistance
- Repeat the high-intensity exercise and recovery 7 more times. When you're first starting out, depending on your level of fitness, you may only be able to do two or three repetitions of the high-intensity intervals
- Cool down for a few minutes afterward by cutting down your intensity by 50-80 percent
And now, Hot 26 Yoga:
- Warm up in Pranayama to expand your lung capacity for a full five minutes; two sets
- Enter into the yoga poses with 100% effort, giving 100% attention the directions and 100 % intensity as you hold for the prescribed amount of time, building the instensity for 10/30/45/60 seconds depending on the post. Breathe in the pose; no gasping for breath. Come out of the pose slowly
- Recover for 10 to 20 seconds, standing still; breathing deeply
- Repeat for a second set, giving even more intensity of effort
- Repeat the standing stillness
- Move on to the next high-intensity asana
- Complete 26 poses, two sets of each, in this fashion
- End with a cleansing breath pose to rid the body of toxins and free radicals in the bloodstream
- Cool down in Final Savasana for at least 5 minutes. Relax body and mind.
Hot yoga takes "peak fitness" to a whole new peak, introducing breathwork, cleansing breath, and incorporating complete relaxation throughout the high intensite series.
Here is what Dr Tabata says about Peak Fitness:
Contrary to popular belief, extended extreme cardio actually sets in motion inflammatory mechanisms that damage your heart. So while your heart is indeed designed to work very hard, and will be strengthened from doing so, it’s only designed to do so intermittently, and for short periods...
Repeatedly and consistently overwhelming your heart by long distance marathon running, for example, can actually prematurely age your heart and make you more vulnerable to irregular heart rhythm. This is why you sometimes hear of seasoned endurance athletes dropping dead from cardiac arrest during a race.
Hot yoga has it all over conventional cardio and even Peak Fitness as highly efficient form of intensity exercise, because hot yoga also provides benefits such as a hormone balance, circadian rhythm balancing, circulatory system conditioning, detox through sweating....and more and more and more.
Perhaps this is also the reason why for over 5000 years, yoga also held the secrets to anti-aging. If you've been doing hot yoga as long as I have (40 years plus), you know what I mean.
If you just started hot yoga, no worries: you'll find that some things can be reversed (despite what you've been told about your ailments. Anectodal evidence galore on this.)
Will science one day prove that hot yoga is the Fountain of Youth? Will it prove that certain "irreversible" conditions and diseases can be fixed by the unlocking the healing power of mind and body?
That's another ancient yoga secret. And I have no doubts that any day now, modern science will catch up.
Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT
Reader Comments (3)
I know yogis aren't supposed to care about their looks but I don't care, I admit it: I LOVE it when people ask if my 26 year old daughter and I are sisters. What's my secret? Forty years of yoga. Who knew when I started as a teenager that it would pay back like this? All I knew was that if felt good which proves the value of this ancient wisdom some of you hippies will still remember: " If it feels good, do it. " A lot.
Haha---that first line you wrote in your comment---yogis aren't supposed to care about their looks. Alex and I laugh about how our behavior can be so "un-yogi" all the time. Getting mad at this, cursing at that, eating a ton of food, getting drinks, self-conciousness, looking good. Yet again, it seems quite un-yogi to box yourself into the "yogi-must-be-this-way"...and maybe a little less fun. ;)
If you're a yogi, then all of your behavior is yogi-like - by definition! There are no standards of behavior. There are yogis who diet and yogis who love Oreos; there are yogis who wear red lipstick and eyelash extensions (me!) and yogis who wear no makeup at all (..me!). There are yogis who drink (have you heard of the Hot yoga and Red Wine classes?) and yogis who are tea-toters (very few are Tea Partiers, though LOL). All yogis have one thing in common: they are yogis! What you think of yourself is all that ever really counts.