Can You Overdose on Hot Yoga?

Hot yoga is a great way to tone the body, increase flexibility, and even cure some diseases, but can you overdose on hot yoga?

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
- W. Somerset Maugham

It seems it would be impossible to overdose on something good for you – but even eating too many carrots can cause your skin to look orange. It takes a lot to overdo yoga – but it is possible. Many injuries and egoic states of mind can be found in the practitioner that doesn’t know when to back off. Yoga, after all, is not a race to the finish line. It is not a way to beat the competition, even if the competition is yourself. It s very difficult for westerners to embrace the les sis more philosophy sometimes because we live in s society that has been taught from its beginnings to do more, and a lot more, as often as we can. It is our ‘manifest destiny’ ways that can sometimes lead to trouble, though.

Even B.K.S. Iyengar admits pushing himself too hard on his yogic path sometimes. Most yoga teachers (who are infinitely students of yoga, too) will admit to wanting to accomplish a posture before the body has been ready and pushing oneself to a place of injury instead of ‘realizing’ a deeper stretch or ‘allowing’ a new asana to find its most elegant form. With hot yoga, there are a few other concerns aside from just pushing too hard in a posture that one must be mindful of.

When the body is heated, it can feel much easier to stretch into asana. This is a wonderful thing. Almost anyone can relate to trying to stretch on a freezing cold morning – it is much more difficult as the body will tend to feel like concrete instead of a pliant, movable thing. The problem with doing yoga while heated, though, is that we will sometimes push the muscles and joints too hard too quickly to take an asana, which is still ‘new’ to us, and this can mean you’ve been working on a posture for many days or many years and it still keeps the label of new. It depends on each person’s own body and temporary limitations.

If you’ve had a frozen shoulder for fifteen years, you shouldn’t expect your Garudasana or Eagle Pose to happen with ease the first dozen or so times you try it. If you mistakenly press yourself too hard, then you can end up exacerbating an injury instead of helping it, which is the ultimate goal of your practice – to return the body to a state of wholeness. Even if you are healthy, and without injury, you should be careful to take yourself to the very edge of your stretch without feeling pain. In yoga there is no such as thing as the ‘no pain no gain’ motto. That is just a recipe for disaster.

Secondly, with hot yoga, you need to take extra care to stay hydrated. If you are practicing several hot yoga classes a week, you should be hydrating all week long, not just before you run into find your spot on your mat. As much as you sweat, you also need to replace electrolytes, without them even your brain cannot function as it should and you will certainly take much longer to recover from each session. Try to drink water that has electrolytes added or consume foods that have potassium in them like bananas and spinach.

The best rule of them is to push yourself, find your absolute limit, but then respect it. Don’t try to move faster than your body is ready to, or you will end up having to stop your practice altogether for a time due to a newly created injury or making an old one act up. Trust your gut, but remove your ego and you should experience great results from any hot yoga class you attend.