Very Hot, Very Bothered
What works about hot yoga, and what doesn’t?
“How lucky you are to be in these bodies, experiencing this sensation!”
Context: the sensation is a near death, heart-pounding-in-your-eyes, heat exhaust kind of feeling that’s washing over me in bouts I’m trying to differentiate from nausea. I am perched over a damp mat like a sweaty flamingo, my left leg a shaky telephone pole and my right leg perpendicular to the ground. I’m trying to extend in a way that resembles a “standing split” but my leg feels much too heavy and stiff to move past a 90 degree angle. Speaking of degrees, the room is approximately 105. The air is only 60% real air, the other 40% being vaporized water pumped in from machines humming in the corners. “How lucky you are!” booms the toned and spandex-clad teacher as she weaves between 30 sticky mats. I change out the word “lucky” for “deranged” in my head.
From donation-based haunts to premiere, spa-like studios, there are literally hundreds of hot yoga studios across New York City. In their own ways, each of them can feel a little precarious. Even the most inexpensive, down to earth versions of a hot yoga studio are like sweat-drenched microcosms of wealth and gender dynamics, where femininity, athleticism and money are all acutely on display. 72% of people who practice yoga are female, and while this number is for all varieties of the practice and not just the heated kind, the trends that I’ve observed in hot yoga studios are quite the same. Most classes are full of female practitioners who can afford to invest their time and money into health trends. The de facto uniform for yoga isn’t exactly the most inclusive, either: spandex leggings and clingy sports bras are all but required for entry. The yoga industry has surely been co-opted by capitalism, with brands like Lulu Lemon, Athleta and Prahna targeting women with $160 stretchy pants and accessories. In New York, the birthplace of the capitalism co-opt, the hot yoga paradigm of “wealthy woman in brand-name lycra” feels markedly intense.
To truly understand how hot yoga came to be known as the pricey, female-dominant fitness fad it is now, it’s important to examine its history. This style of exercise became popular in the early 1970s, after a man named Bikram Choudhury became inspired by the cleansing properties of saunas. He coined a trademark 12 breathing exercises and 26 poses and started marketing them as “Bikram Yoga,” a holistic, health improving, life improving exercise sequence. Bikram hawked his classes and teacher trainings to people all over the country, recruiting thousands of devotees, the largest majority of them female. In the 2019 documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, however, it was revealed that Bikram chronically harassed and assaulted the women who participated in his classes. He was a slimy man often seen wearing a speedo who preyed on women’s desires to feel good and exercise, a seemingly underhand toss towards the cancel-culture players at bat. Despite this revelation, however, hot yoga remains semi-ubiquitous and maintains a devoted cult of followers.
I’ve been doing hot yoga for years, but after watching the Bikram documentary, I began to wonder what about it draws me in. I thought about how it seems that women are always the ones who end up being the primary connoisseurs of self-improvement trends, and also the most common targets for physical and emotional abuse. Is it possible, perhaps, that these two propensities are related, and that predators like Choudhury are knowingly capitalizing on their intersection? All of this led me to wonder if it’s possible as a woman in the 21st century to be a self-aware and ethical consumer of a wellness trend, specifically my preferred one.
When you zoom out, hot yoga is an objectively insane proposition from nearly every angle. It pushes your body past all of its inflection points and makes you sweat more than you would during a six-mile run on the equator. It has the tendency to get competitive, especially in studios lined with mirrors that beg you to stare at your posture, or your neighbors’. It’s hard to breathe; it hurts, it quite literally burns. It makes me feel a little dizzy nearly every time I do it. And yet, each time I lie on my back at the end of particularly grueling class and swear that I’ll never do another, I know I’m lying to myself. I think the reason for this is two-fold.
If women are taught to always be making the most of their bodies, their time and their youth, then a heated yoga class is arguably the perfect workout. The feeling of seeing the sweat wrung out of your pores onto the mat below is one of pure productivity, like all the wrongs I’ve ever done to my body are being condensed into droplets and squeezed out in liquid form. I am convinced that this response is conditioned: women are taught from a young age to believe that beauty is pain, and hot yoga is the most visceral form of painful beauty. You squeeze, bend and form pretty poses all while getting the immediate gratification of producing bucket-fulls of fat-wicking sweat.
This intentional calibration of the female body is also a callback to the tendency of yoga to be an activity for wealthy women, or those who can afford to pursue the Western beauty/success ideal. The people who are most proximate to this illusion are the ones who are pushed to achieve and sustain it, making hot yoga an extremely effective and standard-perpetuating form of bodily optimization. Of course, hot yoga is exercise, and exercise gives you endorphins, and endorphins make you happy. This is undoubtedly part of the draw. But I think the other part of the gravitation to hot yoga, or my gravitation at least, is the subconscious desire to better contort myself into the ideal female form: toned, bendy, glistening.
The second, less depressing reason is one that is not unique to the practice, but rather an element of most “extreme” workout regimens. At the end of each class, it’s simply a good feeling to know that I could do it. I could workout in a sauna for an hour and not die! I rarely feel physically strong when I leave a class, and I often look like a wet mop, my cheeks an ambulance shade of red and my limbs jello-like. Still, I know that I could sustain and push through the pain, the exhaustion, the borderline asphyxiation. It’s the same sense of accomplishment I get when I stay up late working on a deadline and finally get it done, or wake up without snoozing my alarm and get to work early. Accomplishing something hard is inherently rewarding, no matter what the payoff looks like.
When distilled to its most basic form, I think these two facets of hot yoga’s draw can be separated and redesigned to create something ungoverned by societal norms. The feeling of agency this wellness trend provides can be harnessed to oust the disillusioned and problematic weeds that suck the oxygen out of studios. The present state of hot yoga evolved from the intentions of its founder, who recklessly built his empire on the backs of women. If harmful body ideals and gender dynamics are a product of this rotten root, they have undoubtedly been aided and abetted by the capitalism machine. It’s a sad reality, but I don’t think it’s the only one possible.
If people like myself who enjoy hot yoga can examine their role in the insidious aspects of the practice, it can become something less mired by abuse, capitalism and vanity. Perhaps this means not purchasing clothes from overpriced, unsustainable brands, or making an effort to seek out more affordable and inclusionary studios. I don’t know if this is enough of an overhaul, but I do believe it’s a start. Being mindful of how we think about exercise and how we spend our money on it can go a long way, especially when a collective decision to do so is made. Because of this, I don’t think hot yoga needs to be outright cancelled. But I do think it needs a reexamination, and that begins everyone who enjoys it taking a hard look in the foggy studio mirror.
