Morning, Noon or Night: when's the best time for hot yoga?
Could doing hot yoga at a new time of day boost your benefits?
Do you feel sluggish afew hours after lunch?
Do you have trouble sleeping at night?
Do you need a coffee the size of your head before you can function in the morning?
It could be that your circadian rhythms are confused. In this 24/7, globally awake, in your Facebook, tweet-tweet-news-flash, no interest in Pinterest, attention medicated world, we're all a bit confused.
Blogging all night can leave you feeling blah. Even when you finally fall asleep over email, sleeping in a lit room when your body expects darkness can wreak havoc. Jet lag, for those who think a vacation will fix you, is another common culprit.
Everyone knows yoga can help your body, mind and spirit; but try yoga at a time of day that syncs with your own natural rhythms and you might you might just open up a whole new world of benefits. And you never have to be without hot yoga when you have the RIVERFLOW ONLINE YOGA COMMUNITY. Here's how to get your boost from yoga morning, noon and night...
Are you just out of rhythm?
Every living thing has a rhythm: Circadian Rhythms, your body’s internal clock, send signals that direct your cells to do their physiological duties. They orchestrate of your your body’s systems, controlling protein messengers to your heart, brain, liver and other vital organs. Coordinating all the miracles that take place in your body is what keeps you healthy.
In yoga, Circadian Cycles are seen as chakras: spinning vortexes of swirling energy associated with certain organs and emotions. Balancing the chakras is an overall goal of all hatha yoga. (Ha-tha means Sun-Moon...light-dark...balance.)
Healthy Circadian Rhythms work with natural light and darkness. So when you do hot yoga to coincide with natural light-and-darkness, you could be onto something...
How A Broken Internal Clock risks your health
Balanced Circadian Rhythms means you have energy during daylight and you sleep soundly at night. Sigh....to quote Eliza Dolittle, wouldn't that be lover-ly!
And more than just nice: balanced Circadian rhythms are necessary.
Research shows all the potentially serious health consequences of disrupted circadian rhythms: increased risk of diabetes, obesity, hypertension, headaches, indigestion, mood disorders, learning problems, and even certain types of cancer.
Lack of sleep and altered circadian cycles can exacerbate serious diseases such as:
- Parkinson and Alzheimer diseases
- Multiple sclerosis
- Gastrointestinal tract disorders
- Kidney disease
- Behavioral problems in children
And more bad news: aging tends to worsen with an out-of-whack internal clock.
So what's the good news? Hot yoga.
Hot yoga is built to balance your inner cycles, and certain hot yoga poses are particularly spectacular at it: Arda Kurmasana, for example (one of my favorite poses!) focuses on the pineal gland which is the brain center of your biorhythms.
Hot Yoga works, like Clockwork
Hot yoga Midday: Afternoon Delight
Too bad we stopped napping in the afternoon after kindergarten. A psychiatry professor at the University of California Los Angeles Brain Research Institute explains that we could all benefit from a midday boost.
Consider that midday hot yoga might be that even more powerful nap replacement.
First, you are also generally more alert and your muscles more warmed up by afternoon. Stretching is easier.
Secondly, if you tend to hit that wall of blah around 1:00 or 2:00pm, the energy burst of midday hot yoga will surely carry you through.
And now, a study in the Journal of Physiology also found that while all exercise can help regulate your Circadian rhythms anytime, the most profound results come from midday movement.
And what's more profound than hot yoga?
Try sneaking in hot yoga on your lunch hour - Riverflow Yoga offers Noon classes on Mondays and Fridays, and weekends at 1PM. Take a longer lunch and slip into our Noon class, get back to work at 2, and make it up on the other weekdays. Sleep late on Saturday and Sunday and do Hot Yoga when you wake up - at 1PM. You might even convince a couple of co-workers and late-sleeping family members to join you (when they ask about your glow, take them to hot yoga. And tell them no shower necessary; why wash off the glow?).
Morning hot yoga: Your WOW wake up call
Doing hot yoga first thing in the morning is fantastic in so many ways.
First, it gets the task done early in the day, before daily pressures interfere with your intentions.
I love the 8AM music hot yoga classes on the weekends, when it's easy to organize my schedule around getting up early and sneaking off to hot yoga before anyone else gets up. It's an added bit of "alone time;" there,s something delicious about driving through town so early on a weekend morning when the world is still sleeping. Even the morning light is more peaceful. When hot yoga is over, my weekend day is still stretching out ahead of me. And I'm ready for it.
Secondly, a 2010 study in the Journal of Physiology showed that exercising in a fasting state improves insulin sensitivity, which has great implications for weight loss/fat loss and prevention of type 2 diabetes.
Doing hot yoga before breakfast qualifies as exercise on an empty stomach. I usually tell students to eat lightly before evening or hot yoga but for your next morning hot yoga class, try just water, water, water. Breakfast of scrambled eggs and Tuscan mushroom soup at Cafe Galleria in Lambertville after hot yoga is something you can look forward to all through class.
Hot yoga for the Night Owl
If you can remember Allison Steele, the Night Bird DJ on WNEW-FM from Midnight til 3AM, you are a night bird.
Evening got yoga not only fits a busy workday schedule, it tends to decrease your appetite (the worst time of day to eat is evening, after which you become sedentary and burn off no calories).
So evening hot yoga can put a limit on evening eating. And that has great implications for weight loss.
Some studies show that late-day exercise. like running, can keep you awake at night, even disrupt your Circadian Rhythms. From my experience, hot yoga is different; in the evening, it sends me into a peaceful and uninterrupted sleep. And I wake up the next morning with a burst of energy.
Find your Hot Yoga groove at every time of day
There may be discrepancies in the scientific literature about the best time of day to exercise but one thing is certain: hot yoga does a body good regardless of when you do it.
So just do it.
Experimenting can be fun; if you're a morning hot yogi, see how evening classes impact your appetite and your sleep patterns. Sneak in some midday hot yoga and see how you feel at 5PM - raring to go perhaps?
Get A Hot Yoga Habit
Chances are you'll stick with hot yoga if you make it a habit. So to start, pick one time of day and your favorite days of the week - three of them optimally - and stick with that for three to six months. After one month, the habit is set. After 6 months, your body is transformed.
Then break out! Alternate another time of day in yor hot yoga schedule for a month. Compare the differences in how you feel at that different time of day, and, just when you thought you knew all there was to know about those hot yoga poses, you'll open up a whole new world of benefits.
How often to do hot yoga? Three times a week builds a strong foundation for a hot yoga practice that suppports your rhythm, even on the off days.
And when you can't get to hot yoga, you can still check in on yoga at our ONLINE YOGA COMMUNITY. It's the next best thing to being in a hot yoga class; articles, audios, videos and yoga guides as well as the yoga FORUM discussions, will keep you in practice and give you some new tips for maximizing your next hot yoga class.
Now that's hot yoga round the clock.
Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT
Reader Comments (3)
I am addicted to morning hot yoga. At Riverflow there was a 6:45AM class that I had do drag myself out of bed for - but doing hot yoga with the sunrise got me totally in sync and for the rest of the day, my energy levels were consistently high, And that was a Music Hot Yoga class! I would bring back the 6:45AM Monday MUSIC HOT YOGA class for the summer, if just 6 other morning yogis would join me; comment here and let me know.
I'm definitely a morning hot yoga person. I don't eat in the morning...never have...usually I'll just have wheatgrass or warm lemon water. I love doing yoga on an empty stomach. So if I plan on doing a class later in the day I make sure I eat light at lunch. Not a bad thing come to think of it! If its an evening class I never eat dinner before...always after.
I do hot yoga on am empty stomach too...and the new research says that's the best way to exercise. So much for the old-fashioned big breakfast. My favorite morning food is green drink: lemon water with a little romaine lettuce in the blender. Refreshing before or after morning hot yoga