Bikram yoga – Karen's New York Love Affair

Rigor bikramitis has set in

OMFG! I am not sure if I survived the Bikram yoga class after all! Yesterday morning when I wrote about the class, I had a small patch of sore muscle between my shoulder blades. As the day went on, the ache spread out from there into my entire back and legs. This morning it is difficult to lift my legs enough to put on my socks!

So the Bikram yoga class was definitely an overall body workout that reached into almost every muscle. I’m surprised my chin isn’t sore. My arms aren’t too bad, so unlike Ashtanga yoga with the sun salutation vinyasa flow, the Bikram class isn’t too hard on the arms.

Anyway, last night I was definitely ready for some restorative yoga, and I did Melina Meza’s Fall Yin Restorative Practice again. I thought it would be easy-peasy, and help ease out some of the stiffness in my body. It was not and did not. I could barely get into a simple supine side twist (shown above from the My Yoga Online video); I had to use two fat cushions under my bent knee to even get close to the pose! After that I did about 10 minutes of my regular yoga routine, and found that the muscles used in the poses I do regularly didn’t hurt. This is very interesting information, because it means the world of hurt is coming from muscles I am not using regularly. Who knew there were so many muscles!

Thanks to my friends and family who have pledged 50 cents or a dollar or even two dollars a day for the 30-day Reach Out Challenge. The total pledges is now at $285 dollars! Almost at my goal of $300. If you haven’t done so and would like to sponsor me to raise money for Yoga Outreach, you can use the online donation link. Or phone me at 604.251.6337 or send an email to kyrempel@gmail.com. Thanks!

Bikram is hot even in a normal room!

I printed out the 26 poses for Bikram yoga yesterday, and spent about 40 minutes practicing the poses, with 6 ujjayi breaths per pose per side. I used David Swenson’s Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual for insight into some of the poses, but he doesn’t use all of the Bikram poses in his primary and intermediate series. I used pictures from another website to get additional info about some of the poses.

By about the third pose I was starting to get hot, so I can just imagine how it will be in a studio that’s heated to 104 degrees! I like the series, and it was interesting to discover some new poses I’ve never tried before. Toe stand pose, the culmination of the standing part of the series, was particularly challenging, both because of the balancing and because of the pressure squeezing my knees. I was a little worried afterwards that I might have overdone it, but the knees seem okay this morning.

Tonight is the Bikram class with my workmates. The class is 90 minutes, so we’ll probably be in each pose longer than 6 breaths. Plus there might be variations within the poses. I’m interested to see how the transitions flow. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks to my friends and family who have pledged 50 cents or a dollar a day for the 30-day Reach Out Challenge. If you haven’t done so and would like to sponsor me to raise money for Yoga Outreach, you can use the online donation link. Or phone me at 604.251.6337 or send an email to kyrempel@gmail.com. Thanks!

Anusara wind-down

Last night I tried my first ever Anusara-style yoga class. I love the possibilities for yoga exploration that have opened up through My Yoga Online and the Reach Out Challenge. This particular class, taught by Christine Price Clark, was a thirty-minute after work wind-down called Coming Home: Anusara Yoga.

I was confronted with my lack of flexibility, and found it difficult to stay with the breath during this class. Every pose was held for only one or two breaths, which wasn’t enough time to really relax into it. The exception was pigeon, which we went into one and a half times! I must have missed something, because after repeating the first side, it seemed the teacher had moved on to a different sequence. I had to stop the video and do the second side again when I realized it wasn’t just an extended flow, I had actually missed the boat!

It also seemed that the teacher recorded the postures and the commentary separately, which caused a slight feeling of not being in real time with the visual aspect of the teacher doing the poses. So as you can see, this was not my best class. But it is always good practice, and useful to learn more about what I like and don’t like. I did really enjoy the 8 minutes of sivasana at the end! That was always my friend Dorrie’s favourite yoga pose.

Next Monday night I am going to my first ever Bikram yoga class with some mates from work, so that will be a terrific opportunity to look like an idiot! 🙂 I’ll have to practice the 26 postures of the Bikram flow this weekend, so I can be prepared. All for a good cause, of course.

Thanks to my friends and family who have pledged 50 cents or a dollar a day for the 30-day Reach Out Challenge. If you haven’t done so and would like to sponsor me to raise money for Yoga Outreach, you can use the online donation link. Or phone me at 604.251.6337 or send an email to kyrempel@gmail.com. Thanks!