why 🔥HOT🔥 yoga?
Reasons for the Heat:
- Enhances vasodilatation so that more blood is delivered to the muscles. This means that the capillaries that weave around the muscles respond to the heat by dilation. This brings more oxygen to the muscles and helps in the removal of waste products such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid.
- Allows oxygen in the blood to detach from the hemoglobin more easily. When blood passes through warm muscles, oxygen releases more easily from the hemoglobin. Blood passing through cold muscles releases less oxygen. Compressing and then releasing during postures allows blood to flow to all areas of your body including places more difficult to reach – think knees, ankles, feet, and lower back.
- Makes muscles more elastic, less susceptible to injury. Warmer temperatures produce a more fluid stretch, allowing for a greater range of motion. Cold muscles don’t absorb shock and impact as well and do not stretch as easily, so cold muscles get injured more easily.
- Improves concentration and coordination. Higher temperatures improve the function of the nervous system, meaning that messages are carried more rapidly to and from the brain or spinal cord.
- Reduces heart irregularities associated with sudden exercise. Regular practice can lower mean blood pressure and average rest heart rates.
- Speeds up the breakdown of glucose and fatty acids. Heat burns fat more easily. Warmed muscles burn fat more easily than cold ones. Fat is released during stress. The stress of intense exercise causes a deluge of fatty acids in the blood stream. If you exercise with cold muscles, they cannot use the fatty acids, and they end up in places where they aren’t wanted, such as in the lining of your arteries.
- When you sweat, your skin is the organ facilitating detoxification. This means your other organs that are more regularly used for detoxification, specifically the kidneys and liver, get a break during class and are also cleaned out in the process.