Hell-Bent (6 page)

“Hallucinations and fainting and seizures and coma.” When you faint, your body is essentially commanding you to lie down fast. The new orientation makes it easier to get blood to the brain.

I think of classes where I have been ruthlessly and suddenly dropped to one knee.

When I tell her about the yoga, she is skeptical. “Most of my work is telling people to avoid exercising in exactly that type of situation. … When I study heat stroke, I put people into a room that is about one hundred four degrees to purposely stress their bodies.

“That type of situation can be devastating if core temperature rises to a dangerous level. … Rapid deterioration of organs, coma, death.” There is a loss of control as the brain shuts down: internal feedback mechanisms fail, toxic substances flood from the gut, cells starve, a bad situation becomes much worse. Even if a heat stroke victim survives the initial event, there is often long-term damage to the brain, kidneys, and liver.

Listening to her talk, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement. I wonder how anyone ever manages to make it through class alive, much less return and claim it’s healthy. Not only is it hot, but many studios artificially raise humidity, making it even more miserable and destroying whatever cooling effect comes from sweat. Not only are the exercises intense, but many are designed specifically to cut off and stress blood flow. It’s crazy
making. But what’s especially crazy making is that it feels great. I emerge from class feeling reborn.

And so somewhat reluctantly, I find myself explaining the benefits to Dr. Yeargin, hoping that I don’t sound like a New Age crank. I tell her about my weight loss. My gains in strength. The feeling that my concentration, clarity, memory, and reaction time have all improved. The extreme energy. The elation that carries throughout my day, lasting beyond any postexercise runner’s high. My voice swells, and I tell her I think it makes me a better person.

She considers. She is kind. “To be honest, it’s an unstudied area. I’m almost positive there is nothing in the scientific literature on that. … There are 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, dehydration
is 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 performed
emergency 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 participate in the design process directly. His reputation is not just behind the scenes. There are Bikram practitioners who know exactly which studios Chad has built and will detour out of their way to take classes at them. He has designed yoga studios in celebrities’ homes and worked for years at Bikram’s International Headquarters in Los Angeles.

Chad is not
Yoga Journal.
He looks and drinks like a hero from a Richard Russo novel. His body has the approximate proportions of a boiler. Face with slight scruff, receding crew cut hairline, and the blue-collar smile of a goofball who also knows he’s tougher than you are: he hails from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a family dominated by a family-run construction business. In his teens, when he used to bounce for clubs in New York City, people would ask for his autograph because they assumed he played football for the Jets. Nowadays, Chad’s got the type of thick fingers that look well adapted to casually twirling off lug nuts that most of us wouldn’t even consider loosened. When he wears button-up shirts, he tucks them in too tight, revealing a nice overhanging gut. His pants have smudges indicating exactly where he wiped his fingers when working. All of which is to say, in appearance, Chad is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who can disassemble and rebuild a furnace from memory, but not at all what you’d expect from a guy who has devoted his adult life to hot yoga.

“I got into this full-time because I couldn’t afford the phone bills,” Chad is telling me, hunched over a beer. “Studio owners would call at all hours of the night with these emergencies. If you are selling hot yoga and your heater breaks, it’s bad for business. I wanted to offer advice, but I literally couldn’t afford my own phone bills.

“Of course, long before that, I got into this because the yoga works. I had the type of back pain that shuts your life down.” Chad graduated from school with degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering, and he parlayed his general intelligence into a job as an investment banker on Wall
Street. But his passion has always been working with things—ripping out insulation, throwing up drywall, rebuilding machines of all sorts and complexities. A lifetime spent crouched while his fingers were tinkering left him with an angry lower back. When he was knocked around in an otherwise minor car accident, the pain grew unbearable. He tried to rehab it. When that didn’t work, he walked into a Bikram studio. “And within my first few months, I had my life back. … No one believes in the yoga more than I do.”

A Chad Clark studio is different because of the control a studio owner has over the environment. “When I first started, it was ‘How can I get this thing hotter?’ Studio owners were just trying to take conventional furnaces and use them to heat commercial spaces.” It was very much a do-it-yourself community of isolated practitioners, all excited to experiment with a new innovation, but with little practical experience. Bikram had brought a fundamental new idea to both exercise and physical therapy. By providing a shortcut to raising heart rate, the heat allows relatively simple movements—which almost everyone can engage in—to have much more potent cardiac benefits.
⁵
Just as important, it allows muscles to relax in a deeper stretch, leading to more penetrating blood flow. From a rehabilitative standpoint, heat also induces a temporary analgesic effect. This allows people with chronic pain to exercise—often for the first time in years—the areas of their body that cause them pain. Which in turn, allows them to strengthen atrophied muscles whose atrophy is often directly related to their chronic pain in the first place. It stops a vicious convalescent cycle.

As an engineer, Chad can deliver heat any way an owner wants it: dry,
humid, filtered, oxygenated, static, or with flow. Depending on those variables, exercise in heat can feel extremely different while offering similar therapeutic benefits. For instance, the decision to recycle warm air or pump in fresh (oxygen-rich) air from the outside will have a large impact on the practitioners’ comfort but almost no difference on the degree to which their blood vessels expand. Chad’s insistence on building studios that pipe in fresh air is one reason I hear of practitioners detouring to his studios.

But when I ask him to explain how the heat is actually delivered in most studios, there is little complexity in his response. “Most of the yoga studios I work for, they just want the room as hot as possible—period. Half of them get to me in the first place because they’ve destroyed their system by pushing it past capacity or by trying to circumvent an automatic shutoff.

“Everyone will say they use the heat for therapy,” he says. “Which, of course, is true to an extent. But I know the engineering and I know the personalities. You don’t need it to be 110 degrees for blood vessels to expand or to get a cardiac benefit.” Vasodilation is a reflex reaction, not a progressive effect that continues the hotter it gets. Similarly the analgesic effect occurs with ambient temperatures well below the debilitating. “Heat makes things hard. Point-blank. Studio owners want to use the heat to push people.”

Referring to one of Bikram’s most senior teachers, he says, “Jim Kallet wants his regulars on their knees. That’s a direct quote. … It’s a special type of madness. But of course, once you get sucked into that world, it’s all madness.”

That world?

“The world near Bikram … Once he discovered me, Bikram wanted me to do everything. I was his ‘superintendent’ at his Los Angeles studios. I drove him around like a personal valet. I used to carry this crazy wallet for him that was stuffed with cash. I would come out and do personal repairs at his house.”

Chad flashes me his goofy grin and slams the rest of his beer. “Let me promise you one thing. You have never been in a place with more mirrors.
You absolutely have to see it to believe it. His house is a satire. Red leather sofas, white leather sofas, these huge dripping chandeliers in every fucking room. …”

I ask him what type of work he did there, but Chad stays put for a moment.

“I mean can you imagine the mind that lives there? Gold. Fake gold. Platinum. Giant stone tables. Insane thrones scattered around. And everywhere, everywhere mirrors.”

Lost in the Present Moment

I arrive for the first day of Backbending a little after midnight.

Driving up to David’s house, I say a silent prayer for my phone’s GPS. David lives in one of those vaguely jingoistic, embarrassingly American gated communities—literally just off Rifle Range Road, down the block from Boston Grill Road—complete with a series of identical dark green lagoons, endless cul-de-sacs, and motion sensor lights that tick on, house after house, if you are one of the few who walks rather than drives past them. It is a neighborhood for the newly but truly rich. You can actually smell the homeowner restrictions in the form of the bagged grass clippings tied up neatly on the front right corner of everyone’s identical white cement driveway.

It’s obvious when I roll up to David’s address. His eight-car garage is wide open and overflowing with cars, yellow light spilling on the street.

The rest of the house looks quiet, however. I decide it’s too late to ring the doorbell politely. I didn’t call, and at this hour, David may or may not be expecting me. Instead I knock meekly a few times. I curse my small bladder. I curse my many rest stops. I knock again; I jiggle the handle. I Google a hotel on my phone. I jiggle the handle again.

And with a classic horror-movie groan, it swings open.

Peering in, backpack on my shoulder, I find every light on, but nobody around. The floor is littered with Whole Foods bags and bedding materials.
In the background, I can hear gunfire from a TV. A lone head of broccoli lies on the floor, ready to roll through the scene like tumbleweed.

As I step inside and clear my throat, looking for someone to greet, a leggy woman chewing on a rib of celery bounds downstairs in her boxers.

“Hey!” she says smiling, before zooming past me.

“Hey,” I say to myself and slip off my shoes.