Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr Read Free Book Online Page B

acclimatization effects, however. That’s why you can handle it day in and day out. Maybe there is something there.”
    Dr. Yeargin explains that in response to the stress of exercise in a hot environment, the body adapts. It becomes radically more efficient. After seven to fourteen days of exercise in the heat, people undergo a series of physiological changes known collectively as acclimatization. Some of those changes, like a lower temperature at the onset of sweating, feel obvious and banal. Others, such as increased oxygen consumption and increased exercise efficiency, hint at something more surprising. Muscles in acclimatized athletes show reduced glycogen utilization and diminished postexercise lactate concentration, meaning they use less food to accomplish the same effort and give off less waste during the process. Livers in these athletes begin producing additional proteins to increase blood plasma volume, causing in turn, a decrease in the strain on their hearts. Blood cortisol levels—a measure of stress—fall in these athletes during intense exercise, meaning they are less stressed by events that strain nonacclimatized athletes. Nobody knows how these benefits carry over to life outside of the heat—it’s unstudied—but what is clear is that sustained exercise in heat activates some primal mechanism that causes the body to increase its efficiency.
    “Acclimatization is great,” Dr. Yeargin emphasizes. “But it doesn’t eliminate the risks. No matter what, staying hydrated is crucial. Water, water, water. It doesn’t matter how adapted your body has become, dehydrationis terrible. It puts a huge strain on your heart and wreaks havoc with your organs.”
    They are such sweet, sensible parting words that when I get an email from Esak later, it almost feels necessary. The cognitive dissonance must be restored. “Hi Family,” he writes to all us prospective Backbenders. “When we practice together it will be with no water. If you have never done a class with no water before, you may want to eliminate it now. It may seem like a hard thing to do, but it’s really not that big a deal. We’ll talk more about why when you get here.”
    Chad
    Heat is not new to yoga . In Indian mythology, the world itself is created by the god Prajapati “heating himself to an extreme degree.” Spiritual work is repeatedly compared to work in the forge. Scholar Georg Feurstein notes that “the earliest term for yogalike endeavors in India is tapas. This ancient Sanskrit word means literally ‘heat’ derived from the verbal root tap, meaning ‘to burn’ or ‘to glow.’” Practicing tapas gave the gods their immortality . Likewise, it is through heat the ascetic becomes clairvoyant , the sacrificer becomes pure, and the sage becomes realized. To generate meditative powers, worshippers turn to Agni, the god of fire, hoping to internalize his flame.
    Nor is this obsession with heat abstract. Methods for internalizing and generating heat are endlessly discussed and recommended in the holy literature: fasting, withholding respiration, intense concentration, and —in a direct wormhole to Bikram and his space heaters—vigils in front of fire. Again and again, the ancients describe “cooking the body in the fire of yoga” to make the body pure.
    Of course, provisos to cook the body or take vigil before a bonfire were written centuries before the invention of the modern furnace, and so I decide I need to know a little more about heat as it is applied to yoga studios. To do this, I go straight to the master.
    Chad Clark is a heat artisan. He has designed, built, rebuilt, or performedemergency resuscitation on more than five hundred hot yoga studios from Alaska to Australia. For years, he would drive cross-country from studio to studio in a truck jammed full of everything needed to keep a hot yoga studio hot. Now his business has grown to the point where he primarily consults over the phone for breakdowns, or flies out to