Sweatheart

Hi Jr. Member,

The interesting thing is that I also have a tightness in the left shoulder and some nagging pain in my right hip… And also I was practicing Bikram but stopped my practice because I stopped believing in the goodness of what I was doing. I discovered too many contradictions and I could not resolve them so far.

Yes, Bikram was giving me night sweats, by they stop if I limit my water intake to 2 glasses (throughout the class and after). If I drink more than two glasses, I will be waking up in the puddle.

As for my shoulder/hip disturbances, I do not think they are Birkam related, because I know that I used to have those during the time of stress, when I was not practicing Bikram.

This forum doesn’t look as an very active one, so I am not sure if you will get a lot of feedback…I wish you did because I would also want to know what other people think…

As for me, I discovered that Bikram can cause stress, because it takes 90 mintues and if you go every day, then you do not have for anything else and it is stressful. Also the heat stress throws my body off way too much and it takes a lot of time before I can regain my balance. I thought it will pass with the time, but it doesn’t. The only times when I was not suffering from heat were times when I was attending every day, then I would build the heat tolerance, I guess… But as soon as I stop going every day, I lose this tolerance in a flash.

What I found much better for me is to do it all at home. My AC is down and in the summer it gets really warm on the third floor. Not a 100F and not that humid but enough to warm the body and to sweat a lot. Plus the big benefit is the open window so I can enhale the real oxygen and not the heated CO2 from the earlier class. Makes a huge difference. Also I discovered that the absence of mirrors offers me to look differently into the postures and I was able to fix some of the things I was struggling with when I was performing while staring at myself in the mirror.

Yes. It is possible. It is a water weight. As soon as you drink it all back, your pounds will come back. The same happens with me before the run. Only I used to “lose” only 2 pounds through it. However they are always come back the next day. I have never weighted myself before/after Bikram but it definitely should be more than after running because in Bikram class I sweat much more.

Hi Shazastar!

I am new to this forum, but I discovered Bikram last summer and was going steadily without interruption until now. I have done two months without a break when I joined Bikram and then I was going steadily 4-6 times a week, and then, again, I completed my 30 days challenge… So I am somewhat familiar with B.

If you would ask me your question a month ago, you would hear from me big YES. Yes, it would help you. However now I am more cautious. The reason is the injury I received through B. Definitely one learns from those. Now I would tell you that Bikram Yoga alone is not enough to heal you. YOU are the most important part of this healing. You see, I was trusting BY blindly, sort of submitting myself to it, signing off the responsibility for myself, all I would do is to show up and do the best I can. And it was working until I hurt myself (pulled back of my leg).

Now you can say I am in the same place as you are: trying to heal from my injury. It is not easy and Bikram is not the answer. I have to think now “outside the box”. I discovered that gently running on the soft grass helps with the pulled leg and BY exacerbates the pain, especially from all this standing on one contracted leg. When I put all my body weight on the injured leg and hold it for a minute, it doesn’t feel good after class.

Building your core muscles is essential as a preventative care for injuries, this is very true. You say you have lower back issues. Often it can be elevated by developing good working stomach muscles. By contracting those we release the pressure from the lower back when we do forward bends for example. Will BY help you to build stomach muscles? Not without your active participation. I was doing BY for almost a year and did not build any stomach muscles until I started deliberately doing crunches every morning. In two weeks I progressed further at that than ever doing BY.

There is another thought. If you are already injured and you are attending hot yoga, then in the hot room your injured muscles would perform MUCH better than normally – because heat relaxes them and stretches become much deeper without giving you a feedback “stop, this is enough”. So I would say if you have injury, you have to stop before your muscles cry for help, otherwise you can re-injure them again.

As for the knee, it would definitely help to build muscle mass around the knee to protect it. Will BY help you with this? Sure it will. However I am not sure how effectively it will do it in case there is already injury. May be there are other specific exercises that help to build the muscle mass around your knee without straining the knee itself (in BY as you know all standing series put a lot of pressure on your knees, especially for beginners who do not have enough developed muscle/strength to concentrated all the contraction on the top of the leg).

Basically my main advice in your situation is to take responsibility and do not seek for the ultimate solution. I doubt if there is one. I would recommend building a plan of what do you need: build strong abdominal wall, build muscle around the knee, that type of a thing. And then research what type of exercise would more effectively solve those mini-goals without re-injuring.

This is just my experience. Pushing through pain…. I would not recommend that to anyone, but what do I know…