Gabrielle Raiz is a Senior Yoga Educator and author who has been teaching the 26+2 hot yoga series since 2001, when she completed her Bikram Yoga Teacher Training. She is the author of The Hot Yoga MasterClass, the pose-by-pose anatomical reference for the 26+2 series, and has run teacher training retreats for practitioners and instructors in both Australia and Costa Rica.

Between 2008 and 2024 she answered nearly three thousand questions from hot yoga practitioners on the Hot Yoga Doctor forum: the body of work that became the foundation of this site.

Gabrielle was formerly trained as a dentist. Her clinical background in human biology, anatomy, and dental science shaped the way she teaches: she reads the body as a system of mechanical structures, and she explains poses as the specific joint actions, muscular engagements, and compressions that produce their benefit, not as shapes to be matched.

I came to hot yoga the way most people do: with a body that was asking for something I couldn’t name.

What I found in the studio was a practice that genuinely worked, and a way of teaching it that, quite often, didn’t. Students were being told to “go deeper” in poses their bodies were never going to reach. They were being told to “lock the knee” in ways that compressed joints rather than stabilised them. They were being told to ignore headaches, nausea, and dizziness as weakness, when those symptoms were their physiology doing exactly what it should: warning them.

I started writing about this in 2008, on a forum I built because the questions students were asking me in person were the same questions being asked by thousands of practitioners around the world — and no one was answering them honestly. Over the sixteen years that followed, I wrote nearly three thousand replies. Some of them were two sentences. A few of them were four thousand words. All of them were me trying to explain one thing: your body is talking to you, and the instruction you’re being given is often getting in the way of you hearing it.

That forum is the reason this website exists. The articles you’ll read here are the distilled, organised, updated version of what I’ve been saying for almost two decades. Different format, same position.

The Raiz Method is the framework I use when I teach, when I write, and when I work with students and other teachers. It’s four principles. They underpin every article on this site.

1. Your body is providing data, not obstruction

When you feel dizzy, nauseous, or in pain during class, that is not weakness, stubbornness, or a mental block. It is physiologically accurate information. A practice that requires you to override your body’s signals is not yoga, it is the opposite of yoga. The first principle of yoga is ahimsa, non-harming. That begins with how you treat yourself in the room.

Every Recovery Room article on this site starts from this position: what you’re feeling is real. Then we look at what it means.

2. Intent matters more than shape

Every pose in the 26+2 series has an anatomical intention: a specific joint movement, a muscular engagement, a compression that produces the benefit. The shape you see in a diagram is a proxy for that intention, not the goal itself. A student with bunions, a longer torso, a fused hip, or a repaired knee cannot and should not achieve the same shape as the model in the book. But they can, almost always, achieve the intention.

A teacher’s job — and an instruction’s job — is to help you find the intention in your body. Not to enforce a shape.

3. Alignment before depth, every single time

I correct this more often than anything else. Depth in a pose, without correct alignment, is not an achievement: it is an injury waiting for a trigger. Most students, and a surprising number of teachers, are trying to achieve the destination of a pose while skipping the mechanical journey that makes the destination meaningful in the first place.

The question is never “how far can I get into this?” It is always “am I doing this in a way my body can safely repeat for the next twenty years?“

4. Heat should be a tool, not a test

A safe, effective hot yoga room is body temperature plus one or two degrees, with humidity supporting the physiological effect. Beyond that, you are no longer doing yoga: you are doing heat endurance at the expense of yoga’s actual benefits. The number of people I have heard described as “dropping like flies” in studios running at 42°C is, honestly, the reason I still write about this several decades on.

If your studio’s heat is making you sick, the problem is not you.

The Hot Yoga MasterClass

A pose-by-pose anatomical reference for the 26+2 series, written for practitioners who want to understand what their body is actually doing, and for teachers who want more precise cueing than the standard dialog provides.

Available exclusively from this site as a special package with a long list of special bonuses!

Gabrielle Raiz is not a currently registered medical practitioner. Her dental qualification is not active, and she does not diagnose, prescribe, or treat medical conditions through this website.

Everything published here is educational content grounded in more than two decades of teaching hot yoga and a clinical background in human anatomy. It is not medical advice. If you are experiencing symptoms you are concerned about, or have a medical condition, pregnancy, or injury that affects your practice, please consult your healthcare provider before acting on anything you read here.