Can Hot Yoga Release Bodily Contaminants?

Hot yoga is hailed as a fantastic workout for not only enhancing one's flexibility and well-being, but as an exercise that can help your body "detox". With alternative choices that involve strict and often dangerous diets that have you subsisting on little more than juice or smoothies for months at a time, hot yoga definitely appears to be a gentler decision. However, many individuals have misconceptions about what causes detoxification within your body during hot yoga. It's correct that hot yoga is a superb choice to rid your body of detrimental chemicals, but it is not primarily as a result of hot yoga's most well-known component - sweat - that your body is losing the most toxins.

Certain people believe that sweating allows toxins to be secreted from the body's sweat glands. This is vaguely true, but to a small extent - 1%, in fact, according to an Auburn University Ph.D in Alabama. This makes toxin removal due to sweat a fact, but doesn't make hot yoga seem to be very effective if you're looking to cleanse your entire system. Sweating is only one part of hot yoga though, and not the most important by far. The numerous poses one performs during hot yoga are made to "massage" and stretch different parts of the body, one of which is the liver. Unlike sweating, the liver is specifically designed to remove bodily toxins.

Hot yoga works to literally stimulate your body's largest detoxification units, including your lungs, kidneys, intestines, and skin too. A hot yoga pose called the "Wind Removing" pose stimulates the transverse, ascending, and descending sections of the large intestine. Built up toxins can then more easily move through your body. Your liver is also compressed in the "Half Tortoise" pose. In doing this your liver is getting a massage, and since hot yoga stimulates blood flow, your internal organs will function more efficiently and cause your body to become more able to remove toxins naturally. Hot yoga's breathing exercises allow your organs to receive stimulation during the entire class, as they compress them as well.

So what about the detoxification of your largest organ, the skin? Once again due to the circulation of blood during hot yoga, your skin will be refreshed and feel renewed after a hot yoga session, but be sure you are drinking plenty of water before, during, and after your practice to avoid dehydration. If you want to take a step further, since your pores will be thoroughly opened after a class, take to the showers and use a facial mask product to easily help draw out additional impurities.

Hot yoga can provide numerous healing benefits aside from body detoxification, and can be taken up by individuals of any fitness level despite its apparent difficulty. Moving one step at a time is important, and you will find yourself growing more accustomed to the warm environment and stretches involved even if you can't finish a class initially. You may even end up becoming an instructor after getting past the learning curve, and helping others reach their fitness goals as well.

FFew careers offer the satisfaction and flexibility of being a yoga instructor. Yoga training offers the support and guidance needed to acquire your official yoga instructor certification.

Go Back

Comments for this post have been disabled.