Does Hot Yoga Need to Be So Hot?

Do students of hot yoga, who practice at 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), reap more health benefits than room-temperature practitioners? Learn what the research says in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, they're
brain stuff, Lauren Bogo bam here. Some like their yoga
hot a hundred and five degrees fahrenheit or forty degrees
celsius to be exact, but according to a study published
in the journal Experimental Physiology, heat might have nothing to
do with the style's health benefits. Yoga is an ancient

(00:22):
Indian practice. It dates back thousands of years. As William J.
Brad describes in the Science of Yoga The Risks of Rewards.
Its roots lay in quote an obscure cult steeped in
magic and eroticism, but the practice has evolved over time,
reaching the West in the mid nineteenth century and exploding
in America during the nineteen sixties. Today, you'll find everything
from spiritual yoga practices that invoke can do traditions to

(00:45):
secularized models that target everyone from pro wrestling fans to
death metal heads. And then there's hot yoga, most notably
Bickram Yoga, founded by Calcutta born Bickram Chowdery in the
nineteen seventies. Bickroom Yoga centers around twenty six poses or
asanas performed in a precisely heated forty six community studio
for around ninety minutes of sweaty action. The official Bickram

(01:08):
Yoga website claims that the heat helps you practice your
postures optimally. But while critics have previously raised concerns over
elevated body temperatures, no study has actually isolated the effects
of heat in the practice. That's according to the authors
of the aforementioned study, carried out at Texas State University
and the University of Texas at Austin. They brought in

(01:28):
eighty study participants, ages forty to sixty, all of whom
had lived sedentary lifestyles for at least six months following
health screenings. They randomized the participants into three groups, a
thermonutral group, a heated group, and a control group. For
twelve weeks, the heated group attended three Bikram Yoga classes
a week in a traditional hot room, while the thermoneutral

(01:49):
group attended the same number of classes only under you
guessed at room temperature conditions that's seventy three degrees fahrenheit
or about twenty three degrees celsius. The control group did nothing.
In the end, fifty of the eighty two subjects completed
the interventions. And return for follow up testing nineteen hot,
fourteen thermo neutral, and nineteen control. The researchers compared their

(02:10):
findings and determined the Bickroom yoga can reduce changes in
blood vessel lining linked to heart disease, and that it
can possibly delay the build up of arterial plaque, which
can lead to heart attack or stroke. But here's the kicker.
The benefits were present in both the heat and room
temperature groups, indicating that heated rooms that Bickroom calls torture
chambers don't actually make a difference. That being said, many

(02:32):
yoga practitioners do like it hot and sweaty, even amid
legal scandals surrounding its founder. Bickram Yoga boasts studios around
the world, and that's in addition to various other non
affiliated hot yoga styles. If these latest findings hold true, however,
that hot room might be no more essential to the
practice than an iPod shuffle full of the traditional Kurton
music or Campble corpse. Take a pick Today's So It

(03:00):
was written by Robert Lamb and produced by Tristan McNeil.
For more on this and lots of other hot topics,
visit our home planet tostof works dot com,