Hot Yoga Doctor Start Here

Hi there! It’s great to see you. Whether you’re here to:

  • get all knowledged up on awesome hot yoga techniques to make your practice rock
  • learn the Bikram or Hot Yoga basics
  • or if you’re here to re-discover your yoga mojo …

… you ARE in the right place.

Welcome to the most visited Hot Yoga Information site on the planet and the home of the famous Hot Yoga Doctor Forum answering just about any Bikram or Hot Yoga question you could ever ask. Just about the only thing you won’t find here is where your closest studio is. But that could change at any moment! 😉

There’s a ton of useful, practical and life-changing stuff on this website. To get you heading down the right track, take a look at the 4 tabs and see which one fits you the best. I just want to make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

There really is so much here to see and experience and make your practice what you want it to be.

Hot Yoga Beginner or Hard Core Hot Yogi? See the tabs below for the best place to start!

So, you’re new to Hot Yoga. Or maybe (just maybe) you are brand new to yoga. Whichever way you look at it, you’re probably wondering what to look for on this website, where to start, and what to use. Well wonder no longer.

The information you will find about the ‘HOT’ in hot yoga is very important. In fact, I kid you not, it’s vital for your survival. Exercising in the heat is no joke. There are some crucial things you need to know to keep yourself safe so you can enjoy your hot yoga from now and right into the future! Make it your business to read up about it. You’ll find that info in the Heat Survival section. OK, now that I have that waiver out of the way, let’s get started.

This website is jam-packed with everything you need to have the best, most satisfying hot yoga experience. The gateway to the best information and to keep you drip-fed with useful weekly practical tips that will improve your practice, is to start with the 4 life-changing tips that I teach every hot yoga student. Click Learn More on the Home Page.

So, if you haven’t already done so, I recommend you take a squiz at those 4 techniques. These are simple, yet important techniques that will help you in class and help you understand how to use your body in and out of the yoga room. Most importantly, these important techniques will give you the leg up that you need to get through your class with much less risk of injury, far less exhaustion and, believe it or not, they’ll give you a vital ingredient (to keep you present and always improving your yoga experience), and that is … curiosity.

You’ve probably heard about the importance of being present (also known as not-being-off-with-the-pixies!). Well, curiosity helps you stay in touch, stay connected with the here-and-now. Let me be your guide. Partly it’s about knowing what to focus on. As I always say: “The more you learn, the more there is to focus on, the more you get out of it”. And if there’s one thing I know about this yoga, it’s this: Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll love how you feel after class, and you will simply want to know how to do it better. Starting the right way will save you oodles of time.

Here’s your Newbie Hot Yoga Doctor Road Map complete with links! Take it step-by-step and don’t do it all at once. There’s a lot to cover.

  • Download your 4 Life-Changing tips! (Click Learn More on the home page.)
  • Go to Heat Survival for essential information (especially important for new students).
  • And there’s great info to put your mind at ease about the heat in the blog called: Hot Yoga: Help! It’s so hot I can’t breathe
  • Take a look at the photos and the benefits of each of the poses.
  • If you have ANY problems or ANY QUESTIONS then come to the Forum. It has been and continues to be the most popular and most visited hot yoga forum since I started it almost a decade ago. You’ll find hundreds of posts on what to expect when you start. You’ll come back time and time again and find the answers you need to extend you, challenge you and heal you.
  • Look out for my Newsletters! About once a week, you’ll receive very highly specific newsletters about how to improve your practice. I make this commitment to you that I always, always, always aim to give you something of real value in every newsletter. The fastest way to get the newsletters is to go to the Home Page and sign up!
  • Buy my products! Haha. OK that was a joke! So much free information here! There may come a time however, where you want your own reference guide to all the poses, right there at your fingertips. Or, maybe you’ll need a CD to practise to, when you’re away for work or on holidays, or a DVD for seeing the poses in action. I won’t cover everything right here, because that’s not my style. Just take your time and when you’re ready, take a look at the Apps and Shop tabs above. And if you want an in-depth look at my flagship product … the Hot Yoga MasterClass manual, then please go here!
Ah yes! You’ve already been bitten by the Bikram or Hot Yoga bug for a while now. You’re here because you want to know more. Just like I did when I started out all those years ago. It’s almost a compulsion. You just HAVE to know how to do the poses, how to grow your breath, your focus, your stamina, and how to avoid as well as fix mistakes.

You know you’re making ‘em, but usually it’s not because you know what they are, it’s because you know that, for some reason, you can’t go as deeply as you like, or you’re hurting somewhere on your body or it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe you have an injury or illness you want to work around (without making anything worse) while still going to yoga.

Look, you’ll find there is a ton of information here. Mostly free and, it’s fair to tell you that some things (like my highly rated best-in-the-world-or-so-they-tell-me Step-by-Step Hot Yoga MasterClass highly detailed 304 page full color manual, CDs, DVDs, and Pose Tutorials) are products that one would pay for, too.

First port of call – and absolutely free – could very well be the forum! If you scout around enough on the forum and in the blogs you’ll find a huge proportion of what is in my paid products. So feel free to access the information. *** So check out the forum for anything …

  • and everything Bikram and Hot Yoga related
  • from the heat
  • to particular poses
  • to what to do with certain conditions and injuries
  • to ‘I can’t quite seem to get this pose’ questions
  • to even how your teacher or studio treats students
  • and yoga philosophy.

We can get into some really cool and even contentious discussions. But we’re always nice to each other and respectful. You’ll find literally thousands of amazing tips, practical techniques, ideas and ways to improve your practice.

You may like to:

Read this if you are tempted to do one of those 30 Day Challenges!

Before you zip outta here to look at the rest of the website, I really recommend that you consider these questions:

Are you planning to do a 30 day challenge just to see if you can make 30 days in a row?

See what I have to say about that in the forum about creating a sustainable, meaningful and pain-free challenge.

I love, love, love helping teachers teach more effectively. I run training courses that rely on adult teaching technologies. This means – amongst many other things – that we don’t waste anyone’s precious time just memorizing words of a script. What we actually do is learn effective ways of teaching the practical things about yoga and the poses so that what you know is always on the tip of your tongue. We use methods that mean that once you learn it, the instructions come naturally to you!

The yoga class as a snapshot

If you know anything about the way I teach (and teach teachers) then you’ll know that I don’t like to confine myself to the Bikram script. It is my experience that a repeated script is limiting. Here’s why:  The script is simply a snapshot (just as a photograph is) of a situation, captured in time. A picture of a beach doesn’t encapsulate all that a beach has to offer, any more than a single recording of a yoga class can give you everything about that class. A snapshot can only work in limited applications. It doesn’t help your beginners and it doesn’t cater to anybody who has something wrong (like a chronic condition, someone healing after an operation, someone rehabilitating, who has their own specific challenges, or even someone with something as simple as very limited flexibility).

In fact, just for a moment, imagine as a teacher if, your entire class was full of beginners – first time Bikram goers – and nobody else, nobody with any yoga experience and certainly nobody in the front rows to ease your challenge and demonstrate poses as you go along. The script just could not and would not work. (If you already have teaching experience, then you’ll know that even teaching half regulars and half new students is not an enviable task.)

Use of a repeated script has you relying on other people in the room knowing how to do the yoga to demonstrate it to the people ‘in the back rows’. If you don’t believe me, then I challenge you to do what I have had to do once: Teach a class to 47 people that are Bikram or Hot Yoga beginners who have never done a class before. You need more than the script. You need to know how to teach to the people who are there, right in front of you.

I don’t believe that it is reasonable to expect regulars to set the pace. For one, they can’t always be there. I also believe that we have to credit beginners and newish students with the intelligence to be able to work things out for themselves WITHOUT having to watch others for what to do. In other words, you need to, express your knowledge in a way (with your words and actions and not necessarily with demonstrations) that teaches without relying on any other person except you, to show the way. It’s your class. Take control with your expertise, not somebody else’s repeated words. [In case you’re wondering, there will always be turns of phrases that you use in every class and that’s OK. Stuff like “inhale your arms up” or “step out to the right x distance” and so on. But that’s not a script. That’s not the descriptive instruction I am referring to. I am talking meaningful instruction that is unambiguous and has depth of meaning without needing analysis or debate.]

On this website you’ll find some great resources

While most are completely free, you’ll also find that the Hot Yoga MasterClass products (including the reference manual called, Hot Yoga MasterClass, as well as the Hot Yoga Doctor App, and all the different Pose Tutorial DVD titles) will help you deepen your understanding of the human body, massively improve your understanding of the poses, what works, what doesn’t work, how to recognise and then correct the mistakes.

Please take the time to hunt around the forum for many thousands of answers which are absolutely free. However, the best practical and affordable all-in-one-place-at-your-fingertips portable resource is my Hot Yoga MasterClass manual with literally 744 detailed photos of step-by-step instructions also including photos of mistakes and how to fix them. Gorgeous in either the prestige Full-Color version or in classy Black and White. Available in paperback from our own Shop and on Amazon too!

Be a yoga authority

Not sure if you know this but the Hot Yoga Doctor Forum is actually the most popular and most visited Bikram or Hot Yoga forum on Planet Earth! 🙂

I would love to see you on the forum. You are most welcome to chime in and offer your opinions and your advice. I encourage you to participate in all areas of this website.

Working with you or your studio, trainings and programs

I am available for Skype consultations for anyone, for private lessons in my home town, and equally I can come to your studio or country anywhere in the world for workshops, seminars, pose tutorials (clinics) and teacher training help or entire programs. Please contact me at help@hotyogadoctor.com. I will be happy to help out. Friend me on Facebook, and look for me on Skype. See you around! 🙂

Using this website for your own professional development

Check out any area of interest and feel free to ask me any question via the forum. I would love to hear from you. You have only to sign up for your password … Simple!

When you do, you’ll also receive my approx. weekly newsletter with excellent tried-and-true techniques and tips some of which I promise you’ll want to keep. These will, without a doubt, help you with your teaching.

Here is a list of other things (both free and paid) that will help you along the way:

Did you know?

Did you know that the Hot Yoga MasterClass manual is THE book of choice for Hot Yoga Teacher Trainings around the world. Course leaders use and recommend it to their trainees because the manual lays out step-by-step instructions of all the poses complete with detailed images. These help teachers create their own deep understandings and craft their own classes. It is also used by Bikram teachers (and even behind the scenes at that training by trainees) to round out their knowledge. Feel more confident by learning to recognise all the mistakes your students make and more importantly, how to teach so that you prevent those errors even happening in the first place! That’s the magic of having thorough technical knowledge from the get-go.

Love your Bikram or hot yoga but need to practise with a little more autonomy? Hey, you might be looking for a recording (a video or mp3 or CD) to take on holidays with you, or just want to brush up on your selected technique(s) at home in between your studio visits.

Are you someone who lives too far from a public heated studio? Maybe you just prefer to fly solo without the same old repeated script, time and time again.

I want to come clean with you and tell you 2 things:

  1. There is plenty of free information … blogs, pose gallery with benefits and so much more including the world-famous Forum where you can ask me anything … and all of it you can get your hands on right now. Gratis. Costs nothing. Go ahead and ask me and the community any question you can think of.
  2. The Home Practice Kit is a paid product and my second most popular product after the Hot Yoga MasterClass^^ photographic pose reference manual. It’s the only product of its kind for Bikram and Hot Yogis (like you! 🙂 ). It’s perfect for learning how to set up your studio at home, how to take care of your hydration, electrolyte and nutritional needs, how to place your mat to avoid your carpet stinking up your home and how you place your mirrors and how big they need to be (HINT: doesn’t have to be big!). You’ll even find a transcript of one of my 90 minute classes and pictures of someone regular doing the pose in an ideal and real-but-not-ridiculously-flexible fashion.
  3. Check out the Apps page at the top menu for a fun app with plenty of class choices in a take-anywhere format, which also includes games to test your knowledge of the Sanskrit and English pose names and their order in the sequence. You’ll find pose photos, bite-size tutorials of the poses and pose benefits too.
  4. For even more class choices for your Home (or holiday) Practice Library, you’ll find a handful of classes that will keep your practice fresh and interesting. Of course you can simply browse the Shop for the complete range of helpful products.

^^ The Home Practice Kit contains a digital downloadable manual that is 196 pages. Much of the contents is listed in the point number 2 above. Just so we’re clear, it’s not the same and does NOT substitute for the Hot Yoga MasterClass manual. That, my fine yogi friend, is the supreme, crème de la crème, highly detailed 304 page, paperback manual that you can buy from my websites (in Super Value Packages) or from Amazon.