Welcome to brain stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, they're brain stuff, Lauren Bogo bam here. Some like their yoga hot a hundred and five degrees fahrenheit or forty degrees celsius to be exact, but according to a study published in the journal Experimental Physiology, heat might have nothing to do with the style's health benefits. Yoga is an ancient Indian practice. It dates back thousands of years. As William J. Brad describes in the Science of Yoga The Risks of Rewards.
Its roots lay in quote an obscure cult steeped in magic and eroticism, but the practice has evolved over time, reaching the West in the mid nineteenth century and exploding in America during the nineteen sixties. Today, you'll find everything from spiritual yoga practices that invoke can do traditions to secularized models that target everyone from pro wrestling fans to death metal heads. And then there's hot yoga, most notably Bickram Yoga, founded by Calcutta born Bickram Chowdery in the
nineteen seventies. Bickroom Yoga centers around twenty six poses or asanas performed in a precisely heated forty six community studio for around ninety minutes of sweaty action. The official Bickram Yoga website claims that the heat helps you practice your postures optimally. But while critics have previously raised concerns over elevated body temperatures, no study has actually isolated the effects
of heat in the practice. That's according to the authors of the aforementioned study, carried out at Texas State University and the University of Texas at Austin. They brought in eighty study participants, ages forty to sixty, all of whom had lived sedentary lifestyles for at least six months following health screenings. They randomized the participants into three groups, a
thermonutral group, a heated group, and a control group. For twelve weeks, the heated group attended three Bikram Yoga classes a week in a traditional hot room, while the thermoneutral group attended the same number of classes only under you guessed at room temperature conditions that's seventy three degrees fahrenheit or about twenty three degrees celsius. The control group did nothing. In the end, fifty of the eighty two subjects completed
the interventions. And return for follow up testing nineteen hot, fourteen thermo neutral, and nineteen control. The researchers compared their findings and determined the Bickroom yoga can reduce changes in blood vessel lining linked to heart disease, and that it can possibly delay the build up of arterial plaque, which can lead to heart attack or stroke. But here's the kicker.
The benefits were present in both the heat and room temperature groups, indicating that heated rooms that Bickroom calls torture chambers don't actually make a difference. That being said, many yoga practitioners do like it hot and sweaty, even amid legal scandals surrounding its founder. Bickram Yoga boasts studios around the world, and that's in addition to various other non
affiliated hot yoga styles. If these latest findings hold true, however, that hot room might be no more essential to the practice than an iPod shuffle full of the traditional Kurton music or Campble corpse. Take a pick Today's So It was written by Robert Lamb and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other hot topics, visit our home planet tostof works dot com,