The Hot Yoga Doctor – Free Bikram and Hot Yoga Resources › Hot Yoga Doctor Forum › General Hot Yoga Discussion › The Heat › Redlining
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I wanted to share an experience I recently had at the studio I’ve just started visiting. I’ve been practicing for 2 months, and I have been going 4 times a week now for the past 3 weeks.
Last week I moved house and am now practicing at a new studio. The first 2 sessions were fantastic, the first in particular was probably the best session I’ve ever had. I found the heat in the room to be perfect and very similar to my old studio, which I know was always around 105F. I noticed that during the class both the instructors would continually do laps of the room, opening and closing both the doors and the windows to let in some fresh air and let some humidity out, and shortly in to the floor series, they would leave 2 of the windows slightly open. The room would still remain very hot, however some fresh air would come through.
My 3rd visit was a disaster. I was very psyched to go and in a great mood. Upon arrival I noticed the instructor was an one I had at my old studio. I remember her last class was fairly good, although I found it to be rather easy, in that she didn’t seem to push us as hard as some of the other instructors. The room was packed, and I had taken position in the back row near the windows, which is far away from the other 2 doors in the room. Very early in to the class, during the Half Moon Poses, I felt the room was extremely hot, much hotter than usual. I looked down at my matt, and found considerably more sweat than usual. My feet started to tingle a bit, and I started getting pain in my toes which was very unusual. I also noticed a few people sitting out in the back row, which although wasn’t that unusual, the amount of people sitting out and the fact it was so early in to the class was a little alarming. At Eagle Pose, a person left the room, shortly after someone else left the room. The instructor made a comment, asking people to please try to stay in the room but by the end of the class I had counted at least 5 people who had left the room. Until then I had never see anyone leave the room in a class before. By the time we reached the floor pose, I could barely breathe let alone stand, I had also noticed that almost the entire back row was laying down well before the standing series was over, and several people from the middle and front rows were taking constant breaks, which again was very unusual.
I took the time in Savasana to try and compose myself, although I found myself getting very angry. Not only has the instructor failed to realise how overheated the room was, but she was also telling people off for leaving the room, or taking too many water breaks. On top of this, she would only open the doors for 2-3 seconds, and barely came over to the windows, when she did she would open only 1 window, about an inch, for maybe 5-10 seconds. It did nothing…
I sucked it up towards the end of Savasana, and put all my energy into the sit-up, ready to try and continue the class. At the top of the sit-up I felt as if I was about to pass out, and decided to just lay down and try to calm down. I did’t rejoin the class, or attempt to at any point. I had devoted all my energy to my breathing, and trying to remain calm, whilst inside I was panicking like a frightened child, suffering anxiety, hyperventilating and feeling somewhat claustrophobic, due to the fact I knew I couldn’t/shouldn’t just walk out and knowing I had to endure for another hour.
After the class I heard a lot of whispering about the heat. In the change rooms I spoke with a man who had been practicing for 4 years, who said quite admittedly that it was far and away the hottest class he had ever experienced. After composing myself, I approached the instructor and commented about the extreme heat. The response I received was “I can’t control the heat, that’s how hot it was when I walked in… Sometimes you hit that barrier with the heat, and you just have to power through it…”. I’m not a violent man, and I feel bad uttering anything even resembling a curse word in a Yoga studio, however there was a split second there where if I didn’t manage to restrain myself, any sailor within ear-shot would have been blushing… Instead, I gave her a blank stare and just walked out.
I’m really not looking forward to going back after this experience, especially if I walk in and see this instructor again. I’m tempted to contact the owner and see if she has received complaints from anyone else, although I’m not sure if this is going overboard, however I really don’t know what I would do if I was ever in that situation again.
Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
Wow. Based on your very clear and balanced account of your (and others’) experience, I would say it’s absolutely essential that you contact the owner. By the sounds of it there seems to be a very good reason why it’s standard practice for the other instructors to ventilate the room so frequently. Whilst some fresh air at the end of class is bliss, what you describe is highly irregular.
I hope the problem is resolved swiftly so that you can go back to focusing on and enjoying your practice.
Thanks for the input Cyberry, yeah my post was pretty long and detailed 😛
I’m going to contact the studio today to try and chat with the owner. I was probably always going to do this, I just felt it would be helpful to write out my experience to share with others, and seek input on what I should do if this happens again during class…
Also it would be nice to hear from an instructor regarding this. I know that students are very easily distracted, hence the uniformity of the class in regards to poses and water breaks, and the no leaving policy. Is it possible that my discomfort and negativity in the class was compounded by the distraction of people leaving around me? Could it have been a domino effect, where as soon as 1/2 people left, the rest of the class gave in to the heat and fell out? I’m not retracting my previous comments about the heat, it really was ridiculously hot in there, I’m just trying to explore every angle.
Keep in mind that a packed room will make a already hot room feel much hotter. The more students the hotter and humid it will feel.
I once attended a class during christmas. There were 70+ students. It was extremely hot.
Yes a packed room won’t only make it “feel” hotter and more humid it IS. That is why it is so important the instructor is paying attention to everything not only the thermostat but class size and paying attention to class behavior.
I’ve only been practicing since May but I go often enough to have had a few very hot times. I know what that panic feels like, I have never left but I sure have wanted too!
I think it is definitely the right thing to talk to the owner as I think he/she would want to know. Let us know how it goes.
Hello Emad, Jeffrey, Cyberry and Pamela
Thanks so much Emad for the detail. You are correct, you really have to do something about this. What you describe is out of the ordinary for sure!
I like to think that people are doing the best they can and that they really DO want to stay in the room for the whole 90 minutes.
The fact that a person leaves and then others follow, to me says that these people could actually have got to a point where they have validated their own feelings simply by acknowledging that someone else is feeling as bad as they are. For some reason they don’t validate their own feelings until they see that someone else has had the courage to get up and walk out. They probably realize that what they’re feeling is not in their imagination and they can finally do what they’re body is telling them to do. They are finally practising yoga and not surrendering to someone else’s will.
OR on the flipside of that you have a whole lot of people who just are wimps. Do you really think that?
Let’s stop for a second and presume one of 2 things. The experience you had was normal for everyone in the room. Either there is a difficulty for the teachers to keep people in the room because of an issue with the way they teach (it could be an issue in being forceful or dogmatic) in trying to KEEP people in the room and not allowing them to leave having the opposite effect.
And believe it or not, the more dogmatic studios are about keeping people from leaving during class the more likely students are going to entertain the idea.
The other thing is that it was literally WAY TOO HOT. I think that studios’ temperatures should really be automatically controlled by thermostats. Once the heat goes on there should be only rare occurrences when the system needs intervention. I think that the teachers should be concerned with the needs of the students and not have the ADDED PRESSURE of being heat monitors. It’s really bad for business and frankly the perception of heat is so subjective that it’s really not fair to expect that the teachers could accurately work out ‘the fix’ to the heat issue.
It starts at studio owner level.
I do believe however as a teacher, if you see one or 2 people lie down or or someone leaves the room and it’s out of the ordinary, it COULD still be warranted to put that down to coincidence and just keep your radar on high alert.
But if a lot of people are sitting down into the second and third poses and people are leaving the room regularly, then there is something wrong. And especially if many people are taking constant breaks. It is definitely not in the nature of people practising hot yoga to willingly and frequently take breaks.
A teacher in that circumstance really has to ask themselves, hey, even check in with the students and find out what they are thinking and feeling about the heat.
I absolutely and thoroughly reject the notion about that comment about the heat and how you should power through it. My goodness, that kind of attitude will one day get someone in a hell of a lot of trouble. To me that doesn’t seem like compassion. And it is putting people’s safety at risk.
I really believe you ought to talk with the studio owner. On the one hand, as I said it is too much pressure to put on the teachers to try and monitor the heat to such a detailed level. The heating system should be accurately measuring the average temperature in the room (not just in one spot) and there should be a humidity gauge in there somewhere.
And teachers should know to what levels these readings should be below to guarantee a consistent environment (of course there will be changing effects due to numbers of people but then when it gets hot the heaters should be cutting out automatically and not controlled by flapping doors open momentarily). And then their attention has to be on the class. So when it does seem that too many people are ‘dropping like flies’ they can do something. What? They could turn off the heaters, turn on some fans, do one set of poses, encourage people to take breaks, get everyone to lie on the floor and take savasana, open the windows… there are things to do, I can’t say what exactly because it’s a hypothetical situation but you can always do something that is safety, respect and compassion driven.
You’re not supposed to be going to yoga emerging with a sense of accomplishment proclaiming, “guess what? I didn’t collapse today, so therefore I powered through it and am so much stronger as a result”. Or come out berating yourself: “I lay down today in class and therefore I am just not strong enough. I really have to work on powering through it so that I can be stronger”. Those ideas within both those utterances do not go together and unfortunately the hot yoga culture often puts them together. In doing so there are judgments made about the ‘kind of person you are’ because you did or didn’t lie down, leave the room, drink water or whatever.
Emad, I am concerned that you had tingling toes and pain. I wonder about your electrolyte levels. And if you ever experience this again (or not) I would encourage you to get a blood work up and just confirm for yourself if everything’s AOK.
The anxiety and other issues could be significant or not. I can’t say if it was a one-off (because that is possible) or whether it had to do with the extreme heat. Has this situation happened since that terrible class?
I don’t think it’s necessary to invalidate your experience to anyone. The heat experience might be subjective but your assessment is based on past experience. Go with that. Deal with it and move forward. But above all, never let your own health and safety be put at risk. I would love to know what the studio owner’s response was when you get a chance.
Geez, that was LONG!
Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂Thanks for all the replies and suggestions, they are very helpful.
Gabrielle, thanks so much for taking the time to give me a detailed response, I really appreciate it.
In regards to the tingling in my toes, I can best describe it as “pins and needles”, that feeling you get just before your foot falls asleep. I’ve never experienced it in a Yoga class before, and I haven’t since. So I’m hoping it was just a once off phenomena.
I’ve been told the owner will be in later today, so I’m heading down there to have a chat with them. I will keep you updated with their response.
Hi Emad
How did your meeting go with the studio? And have your ‘pins and needles’ persisted?
Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂 -
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