Raise Your Hand if You Love Bikram?!

Today was my first experience doing Bikram yoga. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, let me explain why:

While waiting for class to start, everyone is talking about how hard it was going to be... like they really expected the instructor to hold the highest level yoga class to students who don't habitually practice yoga. There's levels to yoga, even though we think we're ready for level 2 we are still somewhere between level zero and half way to one. Everyone else becoming nervous made me nervous.

Yoga is something that no one is "just good at". In high school I got a varsity letter for everything my first try: lacrosse, cheerleading, show choir, being active wasn't a chore for me. Yoga is the first thing in my life that is physically challenging for me. I think this is why I'm so drawn to it. I go to the gym every day, but like our instructor said today, "Doing something every day no longer confuses your body, and at some point you aren't really benefiting from the exercise anymore".

Bikram offers more than a physical practice, so the instructors say. We will call our instructor Jim. Jim sat in a chair in the front of the classroom and played a yogi version of Simon Says: I say a pose and you are going to do it. Then as you are holding this pose in whatever way you are, I am gonna list all the health benefits that I am claiming that pose has, I'm gonna tell you to switch sides, and then we're going to do it again. While the flexibility in a few poses did actually open up your chest for better breathing, I was more focused on keeping balance and not falling flat on my face then I was about my breathing; which, by the way, was supposed to be "normal". What does that mean?

Anyway, the class wasn't hard... he "modified" it for us and left a few poses out. It was challenging, yes, but I think if I went to another Bikram class I would get a completely different experience. Unlike the yoga classes I have been attending, the instructor doesn't seem to care about the placement of your body. The only way I could tell if I was doing something right is if a muscle started to cramp and I released the pose. Which meant I never really knew if I was doing something right. It's frustrating listening to someone yell instruction to you and you not physically knowing what to do to correct it.

I feel as though Bikram is very physical. The stretching and rotation of certain muscles and holding a pose in a certain form releases muscle tension while toning the body. This aspect, in addition to the extreme heat, has health benefits to them; perhaps even healing benefits like instructors claim.

Who am I to judge though? This is just day 3.