IT MAY HAVE BEEN around for thousands of years, but yoga is still the hottest exercise on the block. And with the launch in Hong Kong of the new Pure Yoga centre, which is devoted to a discipline called bikram, it looks as though it's going to get hotter still. Literally.
One of the characteristics that sets bikram yoga apart from the rest is that it takes place in a room heated to 41 degrees Celsius. This might take a while to get your head round - particularly if you're one of the no-sweat brigade when it comes to yoga - but its advantages are multifarious. As well as the usual benefits of practising yoga - improved flexibility, toned, strong muscles - the heat helps you to release bodily toxins (because you sweat so much) and raises your heart rate so you get a cracking cardio workout to boot. It works every muscle, tendon, ligament, gland and internal organ in your body.
'Within minutes of walking into the heated studio you'll have warmed up and this reduces the risk of straining muscles and other injuries,' says Colin Grant, founder of Pure Yoga along with Bruce Rockowitz and responsible for bringing bikram yoga to the SAR. 'You'll be able to stretch better from the start of the class and you'll therefore get a much deeper workout. It's great for people with stiff joints and such problems as back pain. Bikram also increases your lung capacity, reduces cholesterol levels and strengthens your immune system.'
Bikram yoga was devised more than 30 years ago by Bikram Choudhury who began studying yoga at four and won India's National Yoga Championship at 12. He subsequently made the unlikely leap from yoga champ to gold medal-winning Olympic weightlifter which, after an accident, left him with a crushed knee, unable to walk. While recovering at the Tokyo University Hospital he got back into yoga and studied more than 900 postures from different yoga disciplines, trying to find the best ones to cure his injury and get him fit again. He modified the best of these moves into a 26-posture programme, which he ran past scientists, doctors, physiotherapists and other such experts, and then worked them into a specific sequence to warm and stretch muscles, ligaments and tendons in the order in which they should be exercised.
Choudhury eventually moved to Hawaii and set up his own studio. Word spread and he was summoned to see the then American president Richard Nixon, who was ill, stressed and not sleeping. A month and several bikram sessions later, Nixon was reputedly a much happier man.
Choudhury's next break came when a wealthy Los Angeles woman offered to sell him her sports club for a dollar on the condition that he teach his discipline to others. He took her up on it but found that he wasn't getting the same benefits as he had done in Hawaii and as a child in India - until he shut the windows and turned off the air-conditioning.
