Question:
Noodle, I have a question for you. Why is it that the heat in the room varies so much from one day to another? One day the windows are open and a cool breeze blows through making me feel like I didn’t get a real work out, and other days it’s so hot I think I’m going to puke. Is there a standard temperature?
Dick H.
Answer:
Dear Dick:
Man, I totally know what you’re talking about! You should see what it’s like when you have a fur coat on!
 I have to sleep in front of the fan when I'm all hairy! It's too hot! |
 When all my hair's been shaved off, I have to snuggle in the covers to stay warm! |
The standard rule of thumb for the temperature of a Bikram Yoga room is 105F and 40% humidity. If you’ve travelled around the country, however, you’d see that some studios keep it hotter than that, and some keep it closer to 105. Some studios are more humid (in climates like Florida, Hawaii and Texas) and some are a little drier, (in Colorado or Arizona). From studio to studio it has a lot to do with the climate, the heating technology that the studio has installed, preference of the owner and even slight fluctuations seasonally.
There are many variables that will determine how hot the yoga room feels to you. We can group them into 2 categories:
1. The environment (the room and everyone/everything in it)
- How hot and/or humid is it outside. (More humidity = feels hotter)
- How many people there are in the room. (more people = more humidity)
- Whether the room has windows. How leaky they are.
Some studios, in the interest of keeping the heat exactly even and “perfect,” choose a room with no windows that’s heavily insulated and sealed. We could try to hermetically seal our yoga room, but in our opinion, that feels like you’re doing yoga in an airplane cabin. We like our windows and the fresh air that comes in through them, along with the fresh air that gets pulled in through the heating system, itself (our system has a special feature with louvers on the roof that allows us to vary the amount of fresh air we pull in, which can temper the humidity).
-AND-
2. YOU!
- If your immune system is compromised.
- How much alcohol, sugar, (whatever else naughty you can think of) you’ve consumed lately.
- If you ate.
- If you didn’t eat.
- How hydrated you are.
- How much sleep you’ve had.
- If you’ve done other sweaty workouts.
- How much you’ve been practicing lately.
We’ve had exceptionally strong classes in scorching hot rooms (teacher training), and had to sit several times in a relatively cool room, it almost seems like there’s no rhyme or reason! There are so many variables, that trying to get the exact right combination and keep everything external to you perfectly under control is an exhausting enterprise all by itself.
I don’t have thumbs. I can’t run a thermostat or get ice out of the freezer. I have to surrender and relax and hang onto my happy equilibrium whether I can change my situation or not. Take it from me, the greatest favor you can do yourself, is to adjust your level of effort based on how strong and energetic you feel. If the heat doesn’t feel like much, hold your poses a little longer, lift your leg a little higher, sit a little deeper in your awkward pose. Concentrate and celebrate your strength. When you’re feeling tired, back off on your effort slightly and concentrate on surrender and relaxation. When you can adjust your effort to match your environment and how you feel, you’ll have a practice that is an authentic reflection of where you are and how you feel today.
Love, Noodle.