Love it or hate it, sweating is a good thing when it comes to hot yoga.
North Shore Yoga owner Susannah Herring leads a hot yoga class.“As soon as you walk in the room, you are kind of sweating immediately,” says Kari Pollard, a hot yoga instructor at North Shore Yoga. “You feel like you are so overwhelmed with the heat, but after the final pose it is overwhelmingly relaxing. You know you are so much healthier than when you came in.”
Hot yoga, practiced in a heated room between 85-105 degrees depending on the class, is a sure-fire way to get the heart rate up and burn calories. The workout, though not for the faint of heart, can be done by anyone at any level and incorporates strength, balance and flexibility to “restore and shape the body.”
“Everything about hot yoga is goodness,” says Susannah Herring, owner of Hot Yoga Nashville and the new owner of Chattanooga’s North Shore Yoga. “It’s life-changing. How can you not do it?”
Different postures, or asanas, work to compress and then release certain internal organs in order to remove toxins from the body, says Pollard, who is one of two yoga instructors in Chattanooga certified to teach the Barkan Method of hot yoga, a fusion of hot yoga and vinyasa flow yoga. “The way that we twist and curve is getting into our internal bodies, so we can dig deeper inside and flesh out the toxins internally,” she says.