I want to share my experience about practicing Bikram Hot Yoga.

I did start practicing Bikram in the first months of 2015. I go to Bikram Hot Yoga Rosales twice a week and since then I think that I have taken more than 360 sessions – 90 minutes/each.

I was encouraged to practice Bikram yoga by Jose Antonio Rodriguez owner of Bikram Hot Yoga Rosales (Madrid – Spain) in January 2015.

I have practiced sports my whole life and I’ve never been interested in yoga. Perhaps it was ignorance, because I thought it was an spiritual exercise and today I know that it is a physical and spiritual exercise.

I recommend sport lovers to practice Bikram Yoga for a while, to discover the most complete activity that you can imagine to strengthen body and mind; I am not saying you stop practicing other activities but if you are sports person you will be fascinated. Bikram Yoga is a powerful practice and it requires  some sessions to accept it, it does not matter the sport you practice, Bikram Yoga is more powerful and a weekly practice will improve your usual sport results.

The room where I practice Bikram has 40ºC and 40/50% humidity, the air is clean, I can breathe intense and nicely. I did practice in another center where the environment was unpleasant with bad odor and it was difficult to breath.

To tonify the body and balance the spirit, the cold shower at 10ºC is essential after the exercise, Bikram Hot Yoga Rosales provides cold water at  10ºC in the showers all year round and when I take a shower at this temperature I feel in a state of joy. It also has hot water but I don`t use it.

The benefits that I experience are:

My muscles are stronger; and besides the 26 postures are intense and give an excellent posture to the body.

I do work the equilibrium. When I started I found out that I had little balance, and now the mental focus and muscular strength that I have acquired allow me to control my body.

I do work on focus. The concentration is one of the main pillars that I have develop, while using it daily at a professional level helps me to resolve problems in a more agile way with better solutions.

I have better flexibility, with the years the body loses flexibility reducing joint mobility, now my body has the same flexibility as a teenager.

I have improved endurance, I continue practicing other sports and I am seeing that my results are improving, I am doing more sport with better results in comparison with other sportsman that I know it from years.

I have improved my respiratory capacity, the improvement in the respiratory system are fascinating, I do control better my breath and cardiac rhythm.

I do release toxins through passive perspiration. During the 90-minute class I lose more than 1 liter of liquid, it allows me to eliminate toxins from food, stress, exercise. During the classes I drink water and afterwards once at home a fruit shake to recover liquid and minerals.

I control my ego, Yoga is not a competition with others, it is a competition with ourselves, and to discover my limits, it forces me to think that I am not better that others and that each day I have to work to be a better person. This practice forces the ego to disappear during classes and in my case also during the rest of time.

The aggressive energies around me do not upset me anymore, the concentration capacity forces me to disconnect from the rest of the world and focus in my surviving. I put this in practice the rest of the day, and I live better; I see the aggressivity of other people but it does not annoy me. To summarize it I feel calm.

The last point I want to point out is my relationship with teachers, all of them are good but different between them.

The practice has 26 postures which are repeated twice and the teacher keeps a dialogue during 90 minutes that seems to be the same but it is not; the voice, rhythm and personality that they instill is different, even every day the same teacher is different in relation to the previous class.

 All those different aspects that each teacher has are a challenge to shape body and mind, there is not a different class routine and it does not exist a comfort zone. One of the Bikram Yoga values is to defy yourself in each class and to accept changes that in normal conditions would not be accepted. Following Bikram’s philosophy you will accept changes as part of your progress.

I want to underline something that surprises me; 80% of the people that attend Bikram are women, and the only reason I find to explain the men`s absence is that either they don`t know about Bikram Yoga benefits, or that perhaps the toughness of the exercises beat them and make them quit.