Knotty Yoga

This might sound hypocritical to say, given that I have used group purchasing to promote myself, but I believe that group purchasing has been highly detrimental to the fitness industry. It’s been even worse for the massage industry. You could probably make the case for any industry.

I have a friend who works as a yoga instructor and was making around $55 a class at a nicer yoga studio more than eight years ago. At the same studio now, she is making $35 a class. Yoga has gained in popularity in that time. She is now a better, more trained, and experienced instructor. She is also highly popular with students. Still she is making 36% less than she was almost a decade ago.

The problem is that yoga is now a commodity. Yes people will have preferences for studios, teachers, and styles, but there is a generic hot / power / flow yoga that permeates many studios. If people can bounce between studios using group purchasing to get continual $40 a month unlimited yoga instead of being loyal to a studio for $130 a month, there is a set of price conscious people who will do that.

Oddly enough, most of the people I know that do this are people who could easily afford the regular price. They like the price hunt and feeling like they are getting a deal. I honestly hate this mentality of deals, coupons, special offers, and so forth. There is a level of dishonesty to it. Ideally, we would just state a price that reflects the quality of our services and people would pay it. Yet, people want to feel like they are getting a deal.

Most people don’t realize it, but when you get a massage, take a fitness class, or work with a coach / trainer, the professional you are working with is getting paid 25-40% of what you are paying for the service (keep that in mind when you are figuring out how much to tip on that $40 massage for which the therapist is making minimum wage). The business takes the rest. This might sound unfair but when you factor in the cost of commercial leasing, operating costs, employee expenses, taxes, and marketing to build a clientele, most of these businesses are barely profitable.

The lure of group purchasing is their large mailing list. By listing yourself on group purchasing, you open yourself to an introduction to many more potential clients. The price of entry is discounting your service by 50% and then splitting that remaining half with the group purchasing company. That leaves the business with 25% of their normal price. So instead of getting $130 a month per unlimited attendance person per month, they get $20 for a $40 group purchasing unlimited offer.

The idea is to attract new clients that might not know about your studio. The hope is that they stick around after the group purchasing deal ends and become regular clients. However, there are a number of people doing yoga already who jump on it to save money. By doing this, the studio ends up getting less than a sixth of what they were getting before. The situation is even worse if people bounce around between studios each month and only return once every six months.

The net result is more people doing yoga, which is good, while at the same time, having studios shut down, teachers making less, and less investment in the industry. The quality of yoga instruction is dropping radically. It’s even worse on the massage front.

For me, I elected to participate in the group purchasing juggernaut but tried to do so on my terms. It helps that the aerial, strength based yoga I teach isn’t generic. I also elected to offer a one-time introductory workshop for $19 instead of something potentially devastating like a $40 monthly unlimited option that would cannibalize existing business and make me shut down. Even then, my deals have sold well and I’ve conducted a number of these workshops. I have found some new students this way, but the conversion rate is remarkably low even though my satisfaction reviews run in the 90th percentile.

My worry is that by meeting me at one artificially low price point, even if they like my services, they might be more tempted to keep deal bouncing between the new offerings flooding their inboxes. It’s like the bachelor that never settles down because he’d rather keep playing the field. The same people probably will always wonder why they stay fat and never get in shape. Inconsistency is the enemy of fitness.

I think that we are moving towards being like the automobile industry where you have a list price that “nobody” pays. This inflated price is used when you need to discount yourself 50% to list on group purchasing. This way the hit isn’t quite as bad and then when people finish group purchasing, you can make them your own “special” offer since they are such a “special” person who deserves a “special” deal.

The crux of the issue is that businesses are clearly participating hoping to find new, regular, loyal customers. However, the existence of group purchasing is spoiling people to expect to pay little to nothing for services and to dabble in a lot instead of doing a few things well. This ultimately drives prices down and devalues everything. Ask yourself if you would like to work for 25% or less of what you are making now.

For me, I’m trying to make it very clear to people that I’m an honest person offering a great product that I’m proud of. People who work out at my studio on a regular basis get in amazing shape. I’m using group purchasing as a means of meeting new potential, regular customers. If you try my product at this low price to start with, the assumption is that, if you like it, you will return as a regular fitness client at the normal, more than market competitive price. I’m not doing this to get flaky, cheap people who want to have a one-time experience and snap a new Facebook profile picture holding onto a fabric so that their friends think that they are more interesting than they really are. If that’s you, then please scroll down to mani/pedi deal below me…

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. People think they understand this concept until it is applied to their understanding of fitness. When people are frustrated by their fitness progress and I ask them what they do, they usually tell me that they are doing their standard routine. All things being equal, if you stick with the same fitness routine, the best you can hope to achieve is maintaining the status quo.

Even maintaining the status quo is not likely with the same routine. Over time, you will age, hormone levels will drop, and your metabolism will slow. You will have to work harder just to maintain the status quo. When presented with the same task over and over again, our bodies are very efficient and we will develop the means of being able to accomplish the same task with less effort. This will also cause a loss of progress.

The factors determining fitness success are consistency and intensity. You need both. You have to continually increase your intensity if you want to make progress. You also need to maintain, or increase, the consistency.

For an activity like weight lifting, it’s easy to tell if you are increasing the intensity since that translates into being able to lift more weight. I would call this a simplistic increase in intensity. It’s mainly a function of time, protein consumption, and repetition which results in a muscle increasing in volume.

A more interesting increase in intensity is being able to do something new that you couldn’t do before. I find this a lot more exciting than a five pound increase in a weight that I can lift. Frequently, this would also involve taking something that you could barely do before, or execute poorly, and then be able to do it better. Take, for instance, the ability to do a handstand. You don’t just go from not being able to do a handstand at all to being able to do a handstand at will for as long as you want. There are a set of training steps to get there and supporting strengthening and stretching exercises to condition the body to accomplish the given task.

Being able to serve in tennis is the same way. You start just doing anything to get the ball in the court with regularity. Then you begin to experiment with power, spins, and consistency. It takes years and thousands of acts of repetition and experimentation to improve and be able to develop a competent tennis serve.

In Knotty Yoga, there are a lot of “goal moves” that will take people months or years even to be able to do for more than just a half second (or at all without someone else spotting you heavily). Even though only a couple of students have mastery of many of these moves, for each move, there is a long set of progressions on the way to the actual move itself. Each of these progressions is an exciting goal to achieve in and of itself. However, the real excitement is knowing that each one will take you to the next step on a long and exciting path. When you can finally do something that you have been working on for years, it’s an extremely rewarding experience.

The other factor in progress is consistency. This is where many people struggle. I’ll see people post to Facebook and brag about an EPIC workout. Then they will be so proud of themselves that they will slack off for a month after. Or people who need to lose 100lbs and stop after losing five pounds to celebrate with a binging meal. Consistency is working out three to five days a week at a high intensity level with an ever increasing intensity.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that making that kind of commitment to your fitness and health is unrealistic and a challenge. This is where I think Knotty Yoga excels. Knotty Yoga is an intense and efficient workout. A person could do three, one-hour Knotty Yoga workouts a week and make excellent progress over as little time as three months. After a year, they will be doing things that they had never thought possible. For busy people without much time to spare, that is only three hours a week. Most people waste more than that much time watching television in a day. It will also save time in sick leave, back pain, headaches, doctor’s visits, and chiropractic adjustments down the road. Not to mention the improvement in your appearance.

On the flip side, I have seen many people over the years that go to the gym regularly like clockwork. They have the consistency thing down. But they never get in any better shape because they do the exact same thing every workout.

If your workout has consistency and intensity, you will get in shape and then continue to get in better shape over time. The key is to have both. I created Knotty Yoga with a basic goal: anyone from a moderately fit person to an elite athlete will be challenged with increasing intensity in a format that achieves results if people consistently attend at least three, 60-minute classes a week. Whatever your fitness vehicle is, make sure the intensity is there and that you consistently make time for it if you want to make progress.

One of the biggest surprises my new students have is how much harder one side is than the other with asymmetrical exercises. Whether it is differences in strength, coordination, or flexibility, it surprises people how out of balance they are from side to side. One of the biggest flaws in most training regiments is an over reliance on symmetrical training that doesn’t simulate real world activity.

One of the biggest examples of asymmetry was a number of years ago when I took a workshop from a contortionist. When doing the big flexibility moves on one side, she was amazing. To her less developed side, she was just like any random flexible girl in pretty much any yoga class. I worry for her as she ages.

Activity tends to be one sided. We have a dominant hand so we use that side more. It gets stronger and stronger and muscles and range of motion become different on one side versus the other. This applies to more than just the upper body. People usually post on one leg and step with the other when they encounter an obstacle. This causes one side to get tighter and have more balance while the other leg becomes more flexible.

People are fairly aware of an imbalance in something like a racquet sport where they are only using one arm, the biggest surprise is how asymmetrical people function in supposedly symmetric exercises.

When people do pushups or pull ups, they don’t use their arms evenly. They tend to do a disproportionate amount of work with the dominant side arm. This is a huge flaw with barbell based weight training regiments. Having the arms tethered to each other allows the dominant side to take over and do more work without the person realizing it.

I was always surprised how much less weight I could lift when I used dumbbells with a weight in each hand versus a barbell for basically the same exercise. Bench pressing 200lbs on a barbell is MUCH easier than doing dumbbell chest press with individual 100lbs in each hand. In fact it isn’t even close. The bar tethers the hands and also makes balancing and stabilizing the weight much easier.

When I started doing aerial acrobatics, I was surprised how much stronger and more symmetrical my arms became. This was from all of the rope climbing. I really, really like that rope climbing is performed with one hand moving on top and pulling down and then the other. It is an alternating, asymmetric action that makes the arms work individually. It becomes pretty obvious if one side is stronger than the other and is a huge win over a pull up or bicep curl.

I was recently doing body work on a regular student and realized his chest was tight on one side and the triceps were loose whereas the chest was underdeveloped on the other side and the triceps were very tense. I was careful to observe his form on pushups and realized he shifted his arm out away from his body on his left side to recruit the arm more and make up for a lack of strength on that side. It’s amazing how easy it is to take a symmetric exercise and operate asymmetrically.

To combat this, I spend a lot of time doing exercises that are asymmetric where it is obvious if there is a difference from side to side. It’s also more realistic to how we function in life. For instance, the traditional barbell on the shoulders squat is a very flawed exercise to me because very little in life is done with that body position. It’s a very weak position to have the legs positioned in line because it is too easy to get toppled over. We normally stagger stance the legs to get better balance and leverage. We also don’t perform locomotion like that. We take steps. Spending a ton of time training a movement that we are never going to perform in life is a bad idea. This is on top of the likelihood that you will work unevenly through the legs or, worse, the torso. Leg press with the sled is even worse in this regard.

By working with dumbbells or one side at a time, you become aware of over development of one side and are able to counter it. In time, the imbalance will take a toll and cause injury. As a body worker, I frequently deal with people with back pain in which an imbalance somewhere in the body is causing tension that pulls unevenly on the muscles of the back. This causes further shifts throughout the body to counter balance the tension. For instance, I had a recent client with a tight left glute and right shoulder that were causing an asymmetric work load through her middle back. This resulted in a lot of back pain.

If you are doing a sport that is inherently asymmetrical like tennis or an aesthetic based activity like dance that emphasizes a “good side” to showcase in a performance, you should do a lot of training that emphasizes balancing out this asymmetry.

If you are doing a training regimen that is entirely based on symmetrical exercises (ie. Beware the all barbell weight routine), you should incorporate a decent amount of asymmetric training to balance things out. We achieve symmetry by working asymmetrically.

Out of shape people normally have out of shape friends. They also tend to date and partner with out of shape people. Not surprisingly, fit people tend to have fit friends and partner with in shape people. Fitness is rarely just an individual thing. It’s a lifestyle and a big part of any lifestyle is who you surround yourself with.

Peer pressure is real. People who smoke tend to be friends with people who smoke. Same with people who do drugs, commit crime, or are alcoholics. However, peer pressure shouldn’t be exclusively associated with failure. I love the term “a rising tide lifts all boats” because it is frequently true. Positive peer pressure and healthy competition can definitely motivate people and encourage success in all things.

Active people generally want other people to join them in their happenings. Obviously, tennis, racquetball, softball, ultimate Frisbee, football, soccer, and all the competitive sports mean that you need at least another person to participate in the activity. Even solo things like cycling, hiking, running, yoga, or strength training are more fun with others and the accountability of doing it with a friend can help with consistency. Mild competition can encourage you to push yourself harder than you might solo.

I’m always pestering friends to go hiking, do yoga, try acrobatics, play tennis, and generally come to do active things with me. I’m drawn to people who lead a similar lifestyle. Pretty much all my active friends are the same. I do have friends who aren’t active, but I see them less and we have less in common. If the only activity I can do with someone is share an expensive and fattening meal on an infrequent basis, their prominence in my life diminishes over time. Relationships are forged on shared experiences. Hopefully those shared experiences are built on more than gluttony or intoxication.

If you want to get in shape, you should start befriending fit people and doing things with them. Join a fitness community. I’m not saying you need to drop all your friends but if you are unhappy with your weight and fitness, evaluate what is keeping you from meeting your goals. It might very well be your current friends, a lack of friends, a relationship, family, or a combination of all of these. Start with adding healthy people to your life. Over time, reevaluate your relationships with negative people who are holding you back. Chances are that this will extend to more than just your fitness level.

One of the things I am most proud of with respect to Knotty Yoga is the community of people who participate. Many friendships are formed in this highly supportive, healthy, active community of amazing people. Knotty Yoga helps people get in shape and build a fitness foundation and then the people use that foundation to do a variety of other activities. Before and after classes, I love hearing about people going hiking, kayaking, rock climbing, pole dancing, surfing, playing competitive sports, doing distance athletics, taking martial arts training, and numerous other activities. People are always encouraging others to join them.

When I hear comments from people new to the studio, the top three I hear are how hard the workouts are, how fit / attractive the students are, and how friendly and supportive everyone is. When someone comes and starts taking classes, they will begin making physical progress but they will also meet active people and begin sowing the seeds of friendship. As the person gets more physically capable and immersed in an active lifestyle, they will have a new network of people to try new things with. It’s wonderful to see people do things that they had never dreamed they would be capable of before.

There are many different criteria for evaluating a fitness routine. One of the most useful is the concept of movement planes. There are three movement planes and a good workout routine will incorporate movement through all of them.

The most targeted movement plane at the gym is the sagittal movement. The sagittal movement plane is the one that would split you into two symmetric halves down the middle. Movement along the sagittal movement plane is front to back and called flexion (narrowing the angle of a joint) or extension (opening the angle of a joint). Most symmetric exercises are sagittal (bench press, squats, etc.) as well as things that involve forward or backward movement (running, biking).

The frontal or coronal movement plane is one that is perpendicular to the direction that your face and belly button point. It would split you in half asymmetrically into a front and back. Movement along the frontal plane goes towards or away from the centerline of the body (think jumping jacks). Moving towards the body is called adduction (bringing your arms down towards your side) and away from the body is called abduction (bringing the arms up and out to the sides). Lateral movement,  from side to side, happens in this plane. The chief muscles doing abduction are the glutes (legs) and deltoids (arms). The main adductors are the inner thigh muscles (legs )and the pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi muscles (arms).

The transverse plane is parallel to the ground and movement in this plane is generally called rotation. It tends to be the least targeted in the gym and fitness routines but the most critical to athletic performance (throw the ball, swing the racquet, turn in dance, twist the trunk in swimming). It is the most complicated of the movement planes. In general, it involves muscles that when fired symmetrically in a balanced fashion, result in movement in the sagittal or frontal planes, but when fired asymmetrically, create rotation in the transverse plane.

I like to think in terms of natural movement and synthetic movement. Natural movement generally involves a mixture of motion through all movement planes. Synthetic movement tends to be very rigid and confined.

A good example of synthetic movement would be cycling. The body is fixed to move along a track mechanically and locked into movement in the sagittal plane. Like most synthetic movement, this results in relatively few muscle groups being used. As such, cycling tends to be very incomplete as far as conditioning for the body. In cycling’s favor, the muscles used are some of the largest in the body so the activity burns a lot of calories and the mechanical advantage translates to a pretty efficient way to cover a lot of distance. By itself though, cycling is not a very good fitness solution.

Looking at a sport like tennis, there is a lot of side to side frontal plane movement and forward backwards sagittal movement. In fact, there is generally a seamless mixture of the two. Tennis also features rotation on both sides with plenty of motion in the transverse plane. Tennis is very well balanced across all three movement planes.

Looking at power lifting (squat, bench press, and deadlift) and Olympic lifting (snatch, clean and jerk), the movements are almost exclusively all in the sagittal plane. Except for the clean and jerk, the exercises are all completely symmetric. Weight lifting relies on simplistic movement and confining things to large muscles to be able to tackle higher weight loads. This comes at the expense of the number of muscles targeted and the ranges of motion explored. For this reason, the strength cultivated through classic weight lifting is frequently more for aesthetics than translating to real world athletic performance or any kind of balanced training for the body.

Compared to weight lifting, the weight loads in yoga are relatively small since it is generally limited to that of an individual’s own body. For that reason, people doing yoga alone generally don’t get overly muscular or explosively powerful. On the other hand, yoga excels at balanced movement through all three movement planes. A good yoga practice should contain a lot of twisting motion in addition to a lot of lateral movement to balance the sagittal movement. When I first started doing yoga, I really was taken by the variety and complexity of the movements and how much of it is asymmetric.

The concept of movement planes extends beyond just the realm of exercise. One of the reasons I prefer Thai massage to classic Swedish / deep tissue is that it addresses movement planes better. The dominant positions in Swedish / deep tissue are supine (on your back) and prone (on your belly). In general, two thirds of the massage will be spent on your belly. This mainly presents the muscles largely responsible for sagittal movement. Also, conventional massage focuses mostly on working muscles directly instead of range of motion.

On the other hand, Thai massage makes great use of side lying position and also incorporates a lot of range of motion and stretching. Twisting in particular should be a big component of every Thai massage. Twisting is very difficult in a conventional table massage with a client on a narrow table without clothing and just a thin drape covering them. In Thai massage, being on a large mat on the ground with clothes on makes elaborate movements and stretches far more possible. Side lying also presents better access to the abductors (deltoids, glutes) and the adductors (inner thighs, lats, and pecs). Being able to better address the planes of movement of the body gives Thai massage a significant advantage over conventional massage.

With both fitness and massage clients, I thoroughly integrate addressing the planes of movement in both my workout plans and body work. Clients always like to ask what muscle are being targeted or where they should feel the stretch, I cringe and think it points to a fundamental flaw with a lot of training. When we do something physical in the real world, it’s never just one muscle doing the work so it is crazy to train that way. The focus should be on movement instead of individual muscles. Any exercise that doesn’t target several muscles at the same time and perform an interesting motion should be dropped from your fitness routine unless it is a physical therapy exercise to heal an injury.

When evaluating whether or not your current fitness plan is adequate, try evaluating how many movement planes your workout targets. For instance, if you are a runner or cyclist, you are going to need to do something else in addition to balance out your body. If you are a weight lifter, look at your routine and evaluate if everything is symmetric and mostly front to back movement. Very few people in the gym do any kind of twisting. If you are doing more natural movements like sports, dance, acrobatics, yoga, wrestling, or swimming with a variety of strokes, you most likely have this covered. If nothing else, make sure that your workout routine involves twisting and side to side movement (of both the arms and legs as well as the torso).

Every Monday, I teach an hour class, have an hour break, and then an hour training session immediately followed by giving a ninety minute massage (followed later in the day by teaching a ninety minute class). I have to eat something in that hour break or I will run out of energy. Ideally, I plan ahead and bring something but that doesn’t always happen.

For a couple of weeks, I’d walk to the nearby Safeway during this break and buy a 16oz protein drink and two hard boiled eggs. I’m big on patterns and routines and realized that this was quickly becoming a habit and that I should look at it to determine if it is a good one.

The eggs are fine. Each one is packing 70 calories and 6g of protein for 140 total calories and 12g of protein together.

The problem is the protein drink. The label says 220 calories, 15g of protein, and 30g of sugar. This isn’t amazing but is within the realms of tolerable except that there are two servings in the drink and I drink the full 16oz (which 99% of the world will also do) so the true nutritional toll is 440 calories, 30g of protein, and 60g of sugar.

With the eggs, that tallies 580 calories, 42g of protein, and 60g of sugar. Trying to eat 2,500-3,000 calories a day and about 200g of protein a day, these numbers are a bit high for calories (this is basically snack and packing about a fourth of my desired calories for the day), good for protein, and totally out of line for sugar (more than I’d actually like to eat in a day total). The protein drink was also about $4 whereas the two eggs were 98 cents.

I decided to put back the protein drink and just get four hard boiled eggs and drink more water. This meant I was consuming 280 calories, 24g of protein, and pretty much no sugar. It also cost me $2 instead of $5.

This is a savings of 300 calories and 60g of sugar (not to mention $3). Scaled out to 52 weeks, that is 15,600 calories. Divide that by 3,500 calories (roughly what causes you to gain a pound), that turns into 4.46lbs. So all things being equal, doing scenario A over an entire year versus scenario B is a difference in body weight of almost five pounds.

This is just a decision about what to do for a snack one day a week. To me, life is a set of habits and routines. Habits and routines are our friends for staying healthy and maintaining a decent weight in the face of a fairly sedentary lifestyle filled with calorie laden food. People stress about going to a party or eating a big Thanksgiving dinner, but it is actually the regular routine decisions and habits which determine whether we are fat or not.

For instance, studies show that people have way more tolerance for eating the same thing for breakfast every day versus eating the same thing for dinner every day. Given that, it is a good idea to make breakfast a very healthy, well thought-out routine meal. For me, that usually means a mostly vegetable smoothie and steel cut oatmeal.

We also are pretty good about registering calories that we have eaten and physically chewed but horrible about perceiving calories that we drink so things like sugar laden soft drinks, sweetened teas, coffee, energy drinks, and protein drinks are a bad idea. Most people already know this. However, most people forget how many calories and sugar in particular are in juice and milk. People should stick to water for almost all their liquid consumption. People drinking black coffee or diet soda aren’t immune either… these are strong diuretics and are basically like negative water consumption since they require more water to process the diuretic than is in the beverage.

The biggest habit that affects health the most is a good sleep routine. While sleeping, our bodies primarily run off of fat. While awake, we mostly run off sugar (which is easily replenished and doesn’t affect weight loss as much). The simplest way to burn more fat is to get more sleep.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of best practices but is merely trying to point out that creating a routine for you and taking a critical look at these routine choices can have a huge impact on your health, weight, and appearance. If you find yourself doing something regularly, it is a good idea to sit down and think about it and whether it is a good idea. Running numbers and tracking metrics is the best way to get results. Look at nutrition info and add it up. Track how much you sleep and how much water your drink. Try different scenarios and see how each impacts how you feel, your energy level, your weight, etc. If you aren’t happy with your results, then look at the data and make better decisions.

Gimmicky at best and dangerous and injury prone at its worst, I hate hot yoga. I’ve tried it many, many times. I’ve read a lot about it and talked with a lot of people about it (pro and con). The more I investigate it, the more I learn about yoga, and the more I learn about the body, the more convinced I am that hot yoga is a bad idea.

You have a stick of butter in the refrigerator. You take it out and leave it at room temperature so that it warms. It becomes far more pliable and easier to manipulate (ie. Spread in this case), but it also becomes less stable and more vulnerable to damage. Then you return it to the refrigerator and it returns to the original state. Warming the butter did not change it. The butter did not become more flexible.

The body is the same. People say they are more flexible when they do hot yoga. I call bullshit on this one. They are in a temporary state (like the stick of butter) where they are warmer. Like the butter, their connective tissue is easier to manipulate and stretch, but like the butter, they are also at their most vulnerable. I hear people say that they are shocked how much further they can go in stretches in a hot room… right up until they tear their hamstring or blow out vertebrae.

We have safe ranges of motion for tissue to operate in and then we have questionable ranges in which injury is likely to occur. When cold, the body is more aware of the safe range of motion. When extremely warm, it is much easier to get closer to the range of motion in which injury is likely to occur. It’s a false sense of flexibility.

As muscles engage and work, a byproduct of their effort is heat. You can generate a lot of it actually. I’ve never understood why people heat their tissue with heaters to stretch when they have muscles that could do the same and heat up from the inside out instead of from the outside in. A set of connective tissues heated via your own effort is far more aware of its safe range of function from another that was heated externally. People rarely overstretch muscles if they stretch with a degree of muscle engagement.

This brings me to my other observation of people whose main fitness vehicle is hot yoga. They are surprisingly weak. Because they rely on generators and fossil fuel to get warm, they focus on stretching and not doing a very physically intense workout. When you are in a 100+ degree room, you aren’t going to be doing crazy hard things. You’d slip off your arms if you tried to do arm balances. Attempting a hand stand in a puddle of sweat likely isn’t going to happen. A friend of mine who had been a Bikram instructor before falling out of love with the practice did a novelty class doing the Bikram series at room temperature. I did it with her and was shocked that there is nothing to that practice out all when you remove the heat. It was borderline silly.

Growing up in a hot desert climate, I learned pretty quickly to do athletic things in the early morning or late evening because it isn’t safe to do anything intense physically in hundred plus degree heat. The Australian Open is normally an outdoor tennis tournament, but they will actually close the roof and turn on air conditioning if the temperature reaches those regularly seen in hot yoga studios.

Having done athletics my whole life, I have been to and practiced my craft in many different facilities. Weight rooms, rock climbing gyms, group fitness facilities, sports complexes, dance studios, gymnastics gyms, and many, many other places… all of them are either chilly to room temperature. If any were hot, it was because they couldn’t afford air conditioning. When people are legitimately exercising, they get hot, really hot, without needing a heater.

Going to the source of this nonsense takes you back to Bikram. If you asked Shiva Rea about her style, she’d probably go on about fusing yoga with dance and movement. If you asked Ana Forrest, she’d most likely talk about core strength, inversions, arm balances, and long pose holds with slow movement.

If you asked Bikram about his style, he’d point to his watch and highlight that it is a Rolex, his suit is Armani, and his car is a Bentley. His lawsuit and profit driven style aren’t yogic in any way. The repetitive 26 poses, Death Valley heat, locked doors, and filthy sweat soaked carpet give yoga a bad name. You have to look at the intention of a practice. His is to create a product and collect your money.

I have heard from people how much they like the heat. I’m not sure why they can’t generate their own. I understand that there are a variety of body types and a lot of people are naturally cold. One of my personal goals is looking at the naturally cold students in my classes starting out wearing layers and seeing how fast I can get them hot enough to peel them off.

My experienced students get annoyed if the temperature in the studio starts to hit or creep above 70 degrees. They are athletes and people with any appreciable amount of muscle and strength don’t want to be held back by over-heating. If you do hot yoga, be careful, respect your limits, and make sure you cross train doing something at a normal temperature range.

I usually focus on fitness and health in this blog, but today I am addressing the topic of something that affects the health and wellbeing of myself and many good people that I know. I opened Knotty Yoga to improve the lives of others. I would not have been able to do this without the love and support of my partner, Kit Williams. We have been together two and a half years which is about when most couples decide to take the next step in their relationships. The legislature and Governor have passed legislation to allow us to take that logical next step but that ability has been suspended so a spending contest to sway public opinion can allow people to vote on my rights.

That’s correct. People are going to vote on my rights in a little more than a month.

I’ve been in multi-year, heterosexual relationships before and almost got married. None of those relationships came close to the level of mutual respect, concern, and love that I share for my partner. I supported him in finishing flight school. He encouraged and has been integral in me pursuing my dream of leaving the tech industry to start a fitness business. We have made hard sacrifices, compromises, and built something special.

We live a very conventional, suburban existence. We both are college graduates, do community service, and pay taxes. We have built a common dream and want to own a small, sustainable farm in the future. We have joint goals and work hard to support each other to achieve them. We actively participate in the community and the world is a better place with us in it together.

We deserve the ability to get married. In fact, we deserve it more than many of the heterosexual couples that I know.

Marriage, as acknowledged by the state, isn’t a religious concept. It’s a civil contract. It allows for division of property in the event of a breakup, hospital visitation rights in the event of an emergency, power of attorney, right of survivorship, immigration status, and many, many other rights. There have always been gay couple and there will always be gay couples.

It all comes down to people being uncomfortable with what my partner and I do in the bedroom. Let’s all just agree to really being uncomfortable with the thought of what most people are doing sexually and leave it at that. Sexual acts behind closed doors should not define what marriage is. It’s really no one else’s business and is a very small part of what constitutes a loving and supportive relationship.

It all comes down to people wanting to tell my partner and me that we are not equal. That we are lesser and that our love and relationship don’t deserve to be titled the same as that of another couple. Title or not, our relationship looks like and will continue to resemble pretty much any other married couple union.

The groups that are opposing gay marriage are the same people who opposed giving women the right to vote and equal rights to blacks. They are the same people who would rather see women die than have an abortion and would like to see evolution be removed from the public schools. These are the same people who burn books and who had people killed for arguing that the world is round. These people took us from an advanced society to the dark ages.

I grew up in Utah. This is a place that was founded by people with multiple spouses and where a serious debate had to be taken in the 90s to raise the legal age of marriage from 14 to 18. I fled this backwards thinking place to the state of Washington to get away from a Mormon theocracy. The Mormons used tens of millions of dollars in the last election to fight gay marriage in California. Now, there is a Mormon candidate for President and religious groups are sending in millions of dollars to defeat gay marriage in Washington. Washington has the ability to become the first state in the nation to confirm gay marriage in a popular vote. Nothing would make me prouder than to see my adopted home and safe haven make this happen.

This election is an all-out war. It’s all about money and campaign spending. I’ve never made a political donation in my life but that’s changing this election. I’m doing a fundraiser for Washington United / Ref 74 today at my studio. Please come and donate to a cause that is very near and dear to my heart. This has a huge impact on my life and I would really appreciate your support. I have received numerous messages of support from a wide variety of people. That’s amazing. Now you need to get out your wallets because the opposition is organized and well-funded. Donate, publicly support ref 74 to anyone who will listen, and vote!

One of my consistent, mid thirty-something students was commenting that friends her age complain to her that they don’t get hit on much anymore, and, when they do, the guys aren’t as attractive as they once were. My student, who has a rocking toned body, said that she gets hit on more than ever and the guys are hot!

Much as we talk about exercise being good for your health and peace of mind, that isn’t enough motivation for most people to exercise. These are the reasons people got sold on eating vegetables growing up, not reason enough to make time during the day to drag your ass to the gym. Exercise is more than just about hard to quantify, abstract notions of health. It can completely change your life.

With nothing else to go on initially, we are judged at first glance by our appearance. When you see a fit person, you think that this is someone who manages their time well enough to find balance in their life and make good decisions about food, sleep, and exercise. When you see someone out of shape, you immediately question their ability to make good decisions about time, health, and priorities. Fit people are more likely to get asked out, hired, friended, or have people eager to do business with them.

I have a student who wanted to learn to play tennis so I started hitting with him last fall about when he also started training at my studio. He got the tennis technique down but there was no power behind his shots. We didn’t hit at all during the winter but he did my classes regularly and got in very good shape. When we resumed hitting in the summer, he was immediately better without having hit a single ball since we last played. Whereas his balls barely cleared the net before, they now penetrated with power and spin. He could get to balls with ample time and be ready to take a full swing. Improving his fitness radically improved his athletic ability.

I have another student who was in a dating funk when he started training with me. He was dating someone who was one of the blandest and boring people I had ever met. The relationship languished until my student got dumped. After a year of getting fit and being around more active and exciting people, my student resumed dating. He went on couple of dates, and I asked how it was going. He said he was going to end it. I asked why and he said that he didn’t find the person “attractive, funny, or interesting.” A year before, with his lower standards, he would have stayed the course.

I have students who I have repeatedly corrected and improved their posture via yoga and massage. These slouch masters have commented that when standing upright, they initially felt silly as if they were strutting and puffing up their chest. However, when shown themselves in the mirror, they realize that they look normal. People who slouch don’t just look like they lack confidence, they actually do lack confidence. It’s amazing to see the emotional change that tracks a physical change. The mind and body are extremely linked; more so than most people realize.

One of the most touching moments I have had was working with a woman who was in her fifties and had been a somewhat reluctant house wife and stay at home mom for years. She told me that she had always felt like she was supposed to do more in life. I introduced her to acrobatics and she really took off with it. She commented that she felt exciting again and like she wasn’t just a boring middle aged mom. It’s a total thrill to help someone relight their pilot light and see them fan the flame of passion. Your body is the only thing you ever really, really own. You better damn well take of it and explore all the amazing things that it (and you!) are capable of. Whether you are going to climb a mountain, a rope, or on top of your partner to have amazing sex, being fit will change your life.

I worked at Microsoft as a software engineer for ten years before starting Knotty Yoga. It took a while to actually make it happen, but I remember when I knew that this was the path I wanted to take. It all started with a teenage female student who I will call Jenny to protect her identity.

Jenny was fifteen and showed up in my aerial acrobatics class one day. She skulked in the back of the room and seemed pretty miserable. I generally focus on positive people and went about teaching my class and just let her stew in her glazed over funk. The class and students were an absolute blast and some of the greatest people I’ve ever known.

Jenny didn’t participate but she kept coming back each week. I was puzzled why she was there. I found out her dad was making her come. I continued to just focus on the people who wanted to be there.

Eventually, she got interested in what we were doing. The energy of the group was contagious so she really had no choice. It was subtle at first but then she got more and more curious and tried more and more things.

When she first showed up, Jenny was a typically inactive, pudgy teenage blob. She struggled to do pretty much even the most basic aerial things but she kept pushing at it.

I generally don’t care at all what someone can do or how fit they are as long as they have a positive attitude and are willing to try. Each week, she was able to do more and more of the things that had previously eluded her. From starting around the beginning of the school year, Jenny was able to take part in a Christmas student recital by the time the holidays rolled around. We got very close and she became an acrobatics fanatic.

It was fascinating to see the transformation. Within her body muscle began to grow outward as the fat layer started to thin. She was beginning to look like an athlete. More important, her personality and confidence increased. She went from being the shy one in the corner to being the outgoing one welcoming the new people. It was fun to see.

By the time the school year wrapped up, Jenny was amazing. She asked to have me help her set up to perform at her school’s end of year assembly. I went to the school and rigged up a fabric and came back to watch her perform. She totally dazzled and basked in the attention from her classmates.

After the performance, Jenny’s grandparents came up to me and asked, “are you Mason?” Then they told me that they were thrilled to meet me, had heard a lot about me, and credited me for changing Jenny. I wasn’t sure what they meant. Then they revealed to me that this was an alternative high school for problem children. Jenny’s mom had abandoned the family before the school year. In response, Jenny stopped trusting adults, wouldn’t interact with her dad, and got in trouble with substance abuse and behavior issues. As she started training with my group and me, she started trusting adults again and began to clean up her life.

I was blown away. This was at a time when I was really feeling lost and lacking passion in my career. It was strange to realize how little impact I had at Microsoft and compared to what I had in this area that was my simple hobby and novelty. At this moment, I realized that one day my hobby would become my career and software would go back to being a hobby.

Exercise can and should be more than just sweating and burning calories. It can be truly transformative. A physical change rarely occurs without an emotional change. Over the years, I’ve had many clients undergo amazing transformations, but this was the one that transformed me the most. The most powerful thing I am capable of doing is being able to be a part of another’s life and knowing that they are much better off as a result.