Ms. Sneed has set up a yoga room in her basement, using a space heater to get her body and mind into the meditative state. “The heating bill is through the roof,” she said.
Diana West of Draper, Utah, is another heat-seeker whose initial exposure to the discipline nearly 20 years ago was in a hot yoga studio. “Right up there with having a baby without medication, the first hot class was up there as one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Ms. West said. “But instantly I was hooked and addicted.”
To recreate hot studio conditions, Ms. West lets the shower run to steam up her bathroom, fills her bathtub in order to bring a little humidity to the situation, plugs in a space heater (“Carefully!” she said. “That could end very badly.”) and rolls a towel under the door to keep the heat in. Then she takes an online class.
Her ability to create a new microclimate in the Utah desert has surprised her loved ones. “The first time I did it, my husband walked in and said, ‘It feels like Costa Rica in here,’” she said.
Ms. West only lets herself indulge in at-home hot yoga on occasion (three times since last March) because she worries about the waste of resources. “It is a lot of water,” she said, though she has conserved in other ways. “I haven’t showered in the last year nearly as much as I used to, so hopefully it balances out.”
In cities where some apartment bathrooms may not be big enough to fit a mat, yogis are still finding ways to break a sweat. Studio owners in New York, for instance, are getting creative with the city’s outdoor spaces to offer masked yoga sessions that allow for airflow and social distancing.
This content was originally published here.
