I've done hot yoga, years and years ago, and I liked it a lot because the heat and hot floor in particular made stretching my back more comfortable. I don't recall it feeling like a workout in the way you describe, though, so I'm no help.
...a room heated to near 105 degrees F, with a humidity level of around 40 percent.
I can think of few things more unpleasant than exercising under these conditions. I'd turn into a pile of sweat-drenched misery in minutes.
There's a hot yoga place between the two bars I go to most often. It's right above an ice cream place. It took over the space from Curves, which is when I realized my neighborhood was getting fancy.
a) Virtue is its own reward-- the benefit of regular exercise is private and emotional. Anyone who exercises to be seen is part of the problem, the reason why bike shops are 60% clothes and do not stock much by way of midprice parts.
b) The guy who came up with hot yoga is a greedy whackjob. Yoga the way it gets done now in the US has only a tenuous connection to ascetic practices which themselves are not that old, I think connected with a pilgrimage-curious sect from the 1700s. Older references to yoga are basically magical-- lucky number sets of flying yoginis and the like. This invented new yoga seems like great exercise, makes lots of people happy and healthy. Hot yoga seems like a screwy gimmick.
I take a pill for virtue in the morning and a chill pill at night.
Virtue is its own reward-- the benefit of regular exercise is private and emotional. Anyone who exercises to be seen is part of the problem, the reason why bike shops are 60% clothes and do not stock much by way of midprice parts.
Neither of these describes my dad very well. He's just obsessed with staying healthy. He doesn't necessarily care if he's seen, and he wears shitty clothes to exercise (not his nice Klieban Cat t-shirts).
I feel like I should try regular yoga to help my flexibility in general and my running tendons in specific.
I'm planning on trying yoga for flexibility and to strengthen my core once I'm down a few more pounds. I really need to work on flexibility.
OK-- I'm mostly grumpy about how long it took to order a replacement crank, and bemused by how much of all "bike" shops that sell new equipment are taken up with clothes.
A friend who is a hot yoga devotee also runs about 30 miles a week. She's said that bikram's aerobic content is comparable to easy walking (she's in good shape aerobically already). She does the hot yoga for ease in stretching a la Thorn above.
I'm mostly grumpy about how long it took to order a replacement crank
I didn't even know they could make new ones.
A friend who is a hot yoga devotee also runs about 30 miles a week. She's said that bikram's aerobic content is comparable to easy walking (she's in good shape aerobically already)
This is helpful. I've rudely wondered if they aren't just totally out of shape, even though I know they're periodic-exercisers.
There's been an explosion of yoga places near me: in one square-mile area, I count seven different yoga establishments, most of them opened within the past two years. It's weird to me that yoga joints outnumber coffee shops in our little downtown area, but so it is.
I didn't even know they could make new ones.
organ donors.
Is the idea of hot yoga to mimic the conditions in India where yoga was discovered?
I suppose opening a yoga study takes much less capital than opening a coffee shop if you don't count years spent getting really stretchy as "capital".
yoga joints
The hardest to smoke.
Is this the thread wherein I boast about having gone from Crow pose into a headstand* in yoga class the other day? Because I would really like to do so, even at the risk of repeating myself from elsewhere.
More ascetic than thou, hippies!
* Without falling over and having a concerned older woman whisper "Are you all right?" Because that may have happened on previous attempts.
You just go to yoga so you can look at butts.
I remove my glasses in order to dispel just such calumnies, Moby.
I've done ashtanga yoga (which is not quite the same as Bikrsm) and in a fast-paced class it's pretty tiring, but I *am* out of shape.
You do this weird thing called ujjayi breathing in your throat where you sound like Darth Vader. This is probably woo of me, but I think that it helps your lung capacity, and that may be quasi-aerobic.
I should clarify that I am impressed by the muscle and flexibility and balance required to do all that stuff.
A hot yoga, or Bikram yoga, session moves through 26 poses in a room heated to near 105 degrees F, with a humidity level of around 40 percent.
Awesome. Where I'm going I'll be able to do this outdoors in the springtime. Oh wait, I thought it said humidity around 80percent. Never mind.
Some ashtanga yogini strapped a heart rate monitor to herself and concluded that it wasn't aerobic. Her heart rate went up into the aerobic range, but only for a few minutes at a time. It's the first hit if you google "ashtanga aerobic".
The part I thought was funny was that they said "It's suppose to replicate doing yoga in India," and hey, we're here in Texas - let's just do it outside.
4.b Doesn't it go back at least as far as Patanjali (c. 400 CE). I thought modern yoga practices are at least partially grounded in the kriya yoga tradition which forms part of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Didn't Vishnu practice yoga even before the universe came out of his navel?
The explanation about heart rates going up due to blood loss from sweating causing low blood pressure is clearly demented. But 'being really hot makes you uncomfortable in ways resembling aerobic exercise' is almost certainly true.
From what I know of the history "yoga" is a tricky thing to trace back because the word itself is really, really general and applies to all sorts of various mystical stuff. Yoga as she is practiced in the US at least is basically just a version of calisthenics (of which India has a long tradition) with a bunch of the vaguely buddhist/hindu spirituality popular in the 1960s smeared on it. (It also dates back to about the 1960s, unsurprisingly enough.)
I've wondered about the OP question too. That is, I've ridiculed someone for believing that only elevating heart rate is sufficient for aerobic exercise (so watch scary movies!) but I'm not 100% certain of my response.
"What do you do for exercise?"
"Well, I think about my general career prospects and what would happen if I missed a rent payment and got kicked out onto the street."
I feel like my doctor would object to that plan.
Try asking about the coffee/meth diet plan.
32: "I think about medical billing."
27. Those describe ascetic practice and spiritual ideals, I thought not anything like exercise. Images labeled as depicting yoga are either old sculptures (which I thought depicted beings with magic powers) or paintings of ascetics on pilgrimages.
Maybe there are other sources, I'm far from expert-- but the yoga sutras read to my nonexpert self like lots of other other hindu philosophy, though most of what I've read is older.
The concept of yoga has been around a while.
Even today, serious yoga students will say that hatha yoga is only one piece of yoga. Modern hatha yoga is pretty new.
From this article is looks like yoga as a general exercise thing as opposed to religious ascetic practice is based as much on things like pilates as it is anything Indian.
The comment feed, which I use on my phone, has been coming in and out too.
Where did the sidebar go?!
It comes and goes for me.
Comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, chameleon,
You come and go, you come and go.
Speaking of hot yoga, a tweet of mine was just favorited by "Sappho's yoga mat." It doesn't get any hotter than that.
You just go to yoga so you can look at butts.
I did hot yoga for about 6 months. I loved it. After about 10 mins, I would forget about all of the scantily clad people bc I was drenched in sweat and only thinking about surviving the heat. (You quickly realize the benefit of minimal clothing bc your clothes get drenched in sweat.)
I stopped bc
1.Bikram takes so darn long. 1.5 hours for just the class. Since you need to get there 15 mins early, it ends up being a really long time commitment for a workout.
2. for a really long time commitment, I wasn't impressed with the fitness gains. It is a nice supplement workout for flexibility and mind clearing.
3. The guy who started Bikram is an ass and prob has taken advantage of people.
4. It is fairly expensive compared to other forms of working out.
The 'Recent Comments' portion of the sidebar has been disappearing every so often for me as well, the last day or two.
Since you need to get there 15 mins early
To stretch first?
"Sappho's yoga mat."
Not that useful to have only part of a yoga mat.
45:
To get a place.It is crowded. And you can't go into the class late.
4
a) Virtue is its own reward-- the benefit of regular exercise is private and emotional. Anyone who exercises to be seen is part of the problem, the reason why bike shops are 60% clothes and do not stock much by way of midprice parts.
This sounds nice but doesn't seem to make sense, the more I think about it. One problem is how to seperate the influences. How much of the emotional benefit is a matter of endorphins or earning greater self-esteem through achievement or whatever... and how much is just feeling better about myself because I look hot? In other words, to be seen?
6
Neither of these describes my dad very well. He's just obsessed with staying healthy
Then why is he afraid of someone developing an exercise pill?
It's been a long time since I looked into exercise in the heat but memory of the studies I saw is that exercising at high temperatures is an ok to good way to get your body to adapt to exercising at high temperatures (ok to good depending on which studies you believe), but is otherwise not much different than other exercise except that it feels a lot harder while you're doing it.
This is a highly incomplete list, but a quick search finds these:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/csa/vol72/morrison.htm
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/csa/vol165/green.htm
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/csa/vol132/watkins.htm
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/csa/vol36/vanrensb.htm
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/csa/vol36/gunning.htm
So is the sensation of exertion just an evolutionary mechanism to get you to quit doing it?
I always feel like if I jog in the Texas heat all summer, then when it cools off, I can go much faster on the colder days. In other words, disputing 49 and claiming that the heat had some training benefit - 3 hot miles at 30 minutes gets me in shape for 3 cooler miles at 27 minutes, or whatever.
42: that's a neat article!
Best Use of Suspense: Manakamana
Will those two women finish their rapidly melting ice cream bars before the gondola ride ends?
This instantly made me want to watch this movie, of which I had previously never heard.
How much of the emotional benefit is a matter of endorphins or earning greater self-esteem through achievement or whatever... and how much is just feeling better about myself because I look hot?
Zero to both. You're a self-contained being, indifferent to both the opinion of others and indeed to your own opinion. The benefit comes from having a livelier metabolism, mediated by your limbic system. Or your chakras, pick the story you prefer.
Less facetiously, to me the main benefit of frequent exercise is less frequent and less intense episodes of unhappiness, and more energy. Possibly from overall better health, fewer colds and the like-- but my last two injuries have actually come from exercising, so maybe not.
I think 50 has a lot more to do with overheating than anything else. You can exercise a lot harder when your body can more effectively regulate its temperature.
My heart rate increases more in high temps for the same amount of moderate exercise. That's just the result of a need for cooling. But I don't see any good info about increased HR doing anything good for health all by itself. We need to get a bunch of y'all implanted with adjustable pacemakers.
51 It's a great movie. I don't know if it's still playing in theaters but it's worth seeing it in one. There's something about sitting there in the theater looking at people who are facing you the whole time that's part of the viewing experience. But catch it anyway you can.
I haven't done Bikram because 1. just do ashtanga, you brats, and 2. that's just too hot for me. That said, doing fast-paced, sequence-based yoga in a heated room is nice. I prefer an 85-90 degree range. If you do an entire ashtanga series, with opening poses, one of the series, and finishing poses, it will also take around 1.5 hours. You can break it up a lot more, though.
" . . . and how much is just feeling better about myself because I look hot? In other words, to be seen?
IMX none of it. I'm at the invisible man stage of life, I do all my exercising in front of the TV, and I don't interact with anyone who cares how I look. I still feel much better when I do it regularly.
If "Ashtanga" is Hindi for "Wii Fit", I do Ashtanga yoga.
Is the site mildly broken right now? The latest comments doodad on the left comes up empty for me.
I know. This is a catastrophe. People may be going presidential on old threads right now and spilling all kinds of wild stuff and we may never know.
50: Oh, yes. Heat also reduces performance, so you'll do better when it cools down. But I don't think there's evidence that you'll do better than you would have done had you exercised in cooler conditions.
This is way outside of my field, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
62 If you exercise in a very hot and humid room you should probably take more than a grain of salt.
You'll lose many grains of salt if you exercise in the heat.
64-66 I'll have you know I felt very Moby H when I typed 63.
Grains of salt in your t-shirt are what make your nipples bleed if you jog a long way.
If they make a pill that mimics exercise, they'll probably find out ten or twenty years later that it causes cancer.
Use a sugar pill, label it "Take only as directed" with directions saying to "Take with water after a three mile run."
70: Make it sodium, potassium and calcium in a pill with a bit of glucose and low calorie sugar alcohol.
Heat also reduces performance, so you'll do better when it cools down.
Not sure this applies when part of the performance is stretching / flexibility.
Regular exercise already significantly increases your risk of contracting terminal cancer.
I don't know whether only run/jump motions count, but I've done yoga in a heated studio (not bikram) and it doesn't feel like the same cardio workout as running or HIIT. Intense, but I probably get a better cardio workout from weightlifting.
I'm just too pressed for time these days to manage exercise classes or anything; 1.5 hours of yoga + commute/changing would eat all of my free time.
||
I am blindingly enraged by something incredibly stupid that's just happened in a bunch of cases that have been kicking around since 2011 -- counsel for petitioners has made a completely maddeningly insane motion in a number of similar cases. The insaneness is technical (in a NYS-procedure only kind of way) and explaining it would take a long time and be completely uninteresting. And it probably won't even be that much work to respond to.
But wow I hate this guy a lot. He is such a bad lawyer, and he has been so incredibly successful in keeping his crooked clients open for years and years after we should have been able to shut them down. If your kid lives in the Bronx and has asthma (the crooked clients are specifically causing air pollution), you should be hating him along with me, and I'm sorry I haven't done a better job of protecting you.
|>
Also, does anyone have any experience with heart rate monitors, or can they recommend a good site for figuring out how to train with them? My problem is that my heart rate blows by the so-called "aerobic range" very easily -- I don't think I could possibly keep my heart rate under 150 (let alone 140) during an easy run. It's possible that I'm horribly out of shape cardiowise, but I've been running consistently for a year and I think ~165 is just my sweet spot. But the internet seems to think that will make my heart blow up, even though I can hold that for an hour?
37. I was going to ask that as well, but if the FPPs don't know, who does?
77: pro athletes (soccer) have a humongous range in their "max heart rate." I wouldn't believe almost single thing about the cw there.
Guh, hot yoga sounds terrible. I feel like they should increase people's sense of virtuous suffering by making them roll in fiberglass insulation first, and maybe play "Muskrat Love" over and over.
80: I have a medical condition, Smearcase!
Me too, Chronic Crankiness About Everything Syndrome. What, don't laugh. Andy Rooney died of it.
Anything to say about the sidebar/comment feed?
I bet you could get almost all of the benefits of aerobic exercise by taking erythropoietin.
Oh wow, even the little buttons on the upper left of the main page are broken. NOSFLOW!
83: pro athletes also have a wide range of opinions about the sidebar.
"I've learned to depend on the sidebar/comment feed."
One of my work colleagues whom I'm FB friends with took this up a few years ago and for about a year began routinely posting mostly-naked pictures of himself in various poses. Very impressive and he's in great shape and all that, but Jesus Fucking Christ.
88: You could flag the posts on FB. Use the code "Ball Sack".
I'm thinking of making my own sleeping bag to save money. How many geese is comfort to 20 degrees?
Surely any positive number of live geese are going to make for discomfort.
But the internet seems to think that will make my heart blow up, even though I can hold that for an hour?
What other's said - that formula for computing target/max heartrates is about as sound as 8 glasses of water per day. It's fine to blow through it completely, and your perceived exertion is the best indicator of...perceived exertion, I guess.
I don't know why the internet would think that 165 would make your heart blow-up. That's what mine gets to when I run and I think the internet told me it was fine when I last looked. It used to be 170-180, but now I'm old.
Now is the time to get the last word in on all sorts of threads without anyone seeing you.
I can't remember if I was arguing that fashion was the same as in the 90s or different. I remember I was team "home in on" because "hone in on" is stupid.
You've always been my favorite commenter.
My biggest fear is that somebody makes a pill that will make everybody your favorite commenter.
And all your virtue, hard work and discipline won't set you apart?
Moby, I need to know: "You've got another think coming" or the wrong version?
102: Was having the same thought, but the phrase was eluding me until midway through a meeting. I'm sure anyone looking at me would have wondered why I looked so pleased with myself for a minute or two.
Is "the other place" necessary to follow this?
106: No, it makes as much sense as it makes. Is cocaine? Maybe.
76: [t]he insaneness is technical (in a NYS-procedure only kind of way)
And very insane that must be. Dealing with NY procedure in several cases over the last year or two has been professionally helpful to me because it reminds me how clients and other normal people feel about the legal system in general (i.e., pervasive dread).
Sympathies on the annoying opposing counsel, though. Just tell yourself it'll feel all the sweeter when you finally get him. We had one adversary who kept garbage claims going against one of our clients for ten years in front of (at least) three agencies and in three different circuits. In the end we won on counterclaims, pierced their corporate veil, and got to the owner's personal assets. That was fun.
106: Suggesting that cocaine will make everybody LB's favorite commenter. Or maybe it will make everybody feel like LB's favorite if they take it. 101 was to 99.
I like 101 to 84, but it's not as funny as those combos usually are.
My daughter takes her yoga classes out into the desert. Probably still not as hot as Bikram. Hike an hour is, class for an hour, hike an hour out -- not something you'd want to do every day, but her classes for this always fill.
Some jerk on her FB feed was asserting that yoga teachers are often strippers. NTTAWWT, but UNFRIEND.
(Last time we talked about it, Jen did not approve of Bikram. That was quite a while ago, though, and she may have mellowed on the subject somewhat.)
77
My max heart rate is probably 30 bpm higher than the stupid formula says it should be. There's a lot of variability and perceived effort is way more important than actual heartrate.
Yoga was worthless to me. No improvement in flexibility, no improvement in fitness, I just felt like ass after working hard in a hot room. Nice views, though.
I got way more improvement in body shape and self-esteem from Crossfit, but the soreness and potential rhabdo issues frighten me.
77- My heart rate is all over the place all the time, sometimes up to 160 during minimal exertion on my part (like, walking down the hallway, or standing up), and the doctors all say that the rate itself is not a medical problem as long as nothing else weird is happening (dizziness, arrhythmias, skipping beats, dropped blood pressure, etc.).
It doesn't seem like the type of heart rate monitors you can buy yourself monitor for any of the potential weird stuff anyway. I'd say, ask your doctor next time you're there, but my understanding is that 160 during exercise is nowhere near dangerous or even weird.
I guess maybe 77 was more interested in staying within a maximally effective range, exercise-wise, than actual danger. I don't know anything about that but I know people with fancy wristband doodads that talk to their phones about stuff. You should get one of those and live in the future.
That's could be right. At least, 150 bpm is near the top of AHA's "Target Zone" for people my age.
I doubt that's Cala's issue; I'm pretty sure she's just wondering why the internet is telling her that her heart is going to explode.
The internet says lots of thing. I was look at this. It seems reasonable in tone about the issue.
The sidebar looks the same as ever. Thanks to whomever honed in on the problem.
Max heart rate charts are mostly bullshit. Find your true max and do percentages of that. If even that is giving you wacky results, sell your monitor and do perceived exertion.
Thanks to whomever honed in on the problem.
Well, it was nice knowing you.
At non-hot yoga this morning the teacher kept apologizing, in that breezy shut-the-fuck-up-and-be-tranquil-goddamnit way, for the heat being turned up to eighty-something. I don't think I want to know how the room would smell at hot yoga.
Perceived exertion-wise I think I'm fine -- yesterday's run according to my heart rate monitor was around 175 for most of it but I could chat without too much puffing as long as we weren't running up hills. I think I probably just need to do an all out sprint or something and see where that pushes me.
I'm not worried, but mostly can't figure out how 140 beats per minute for "aerobic" conditioning could possibly count as a workout. I was literally running around a track on Friday at 165 talking to myself "can I have a conversation at this pace?", so I think I'm okay, just curious and possibly a bit weird for talking to myself.
I don't have any biological sense of what the mechanism might be, but I think it comes down to beats-per-minute not meaning the same thing in terms of exertion from one person to the next. You just sound like your heart naturally runs fast, and someone else (like me! It's been a while since I kept track of my heartrate while working out, but I think 175 would have been a dead sprint, no speech possible) might have their heart beating slower at the same perceived level of exertion.
It depends on body size certainly. I don't know what else but I'm sure there are other things.
Yeah, it's weird, because I have a lowish resting heart rate (55 or so.) Whatever, the data makes cool chart to go along with pace and distance. Running is so damned stupid.
My impression is that low resting heart rate and being able to get your heart rate high without feeling like you're going to die are both the same phenomenon as far as heart health goes.
People just have different max heart rates. You might google a reliable way to find out yours, but typically one sprint won't get you quite there; what I've seen recommended is a series of sprints. Sprint, short rest, sprint, short rest, sprint, and by that last one, you'll hit your true max. Also, don't die. If you do it right, you should be really, really wiped out on that last sprint.
If you die, just figure what your rate was when you died and subtract one.
I'm not worried, but mostly can't figure out how 140 beats per minute for "aerobic" conditioning could possibly count as a workout. I was literally running around a track on Friday at 165 talking to myself "can I have a conversation at this pace?", so I think I'm okay, just curious and possibly a bit weird for talking to myself.
This is me, almost exactly. (Although I usually recite the pledge of allegiance instead of just randomly talking to myself.)