Lots to Love About Hot Yoga!

It’s fantastic to have a career you’re as passionate about as I am about my work as a REALTOR®, but we all need a solid work/life balance. After all, there’s more to life than just work, work, work all the time: There’s family and friends to spend time with, and favourite hobbies to enjoy. This is especially true if you own your own business or don’t work standards “9 to 5” hours (and, trust me, a REALTOR® doesn’t know the meaning of “9 to 5”). It can be hard to justify stepping away from work to take some time for yourself and your family when it seems like “The To Do List” just keeps getting longer, but it’s so important to take time away so we can come back feeling more focused, more energized, and more productive.

One of my favourite ways of de-­stressing is my hot yoga class, which I take a few times a week. If you’ve never tried yoga or hot yoga, I absolutely recommend giving it a try. It’s a great way to build strength, flexibility, and concentration, and I love how it feeds both my body and my spirit.

What Is Hot Yoga?

Take a series of intense yoga postures and mix in a studio that’s around 40°C, and you’ve got the basics of hot yoga. The heat warms up your muscles, allowing them to stretch and move into the postures more deeply, but it also increases your heart rate, making hot yoga a great cardiovascular workout.

Be prepared to sweat in a hot yoga session, because that’s definitely one thing you’ll be doing constantly. (If you’re not absolutely dripping in the first 10 minutes, you are some kind of heat­-resistant superhero!) And all that sweat from the heat and the effort of the postures gets the blood circulating and washes out the toxins, leaving you feeling stronger and more relaxed at the end of the session.

I’ve been doing hot yoga regularly for a couple of years now, and so far I’m loving it! As a way to combine a body and mind workout, it can’t be beat. These are just a few of the benefits I’ve found in hot yoga so far:

• Better strength, flexibility, and body tone. My body works hard during every session, and I feel stronger than ever!
• Better concentration and focus. It takes a ton of willpower to hold some of those yoga postures, especially in the intense heat. I wouldn’t say hot yoga gets “easier” the more you do it, but I’ve definitely found I can more easily find the right frame of mind and call upon the determination and concentration I need to make it through a 90 minute session.
• Spiritually, I feel more balanced during and after a session of hot yoga. I feel more mindful of the present, less anxious about the future, and more aware of my body and the world around me. And the longer I do hot yoga, the more those feelings flow into my day-­to-­day life.
• I have never felt more relaxed than at the end of a hot yoga session. My muscles are loose, my entire body is relaxed, and yet I feel energized instead of exhausted!

Setting aside time every week to go to my hot yoga class is just one of the ways I take time for myself to recharge so I don’t feel overloaded. I love my work as a REALTOR®, but I’ve discovered I love it even more when I take time away from work to enjoy the other great parts of a good life. And that’s a great thing for my clients, because they know every time they see me I’ll be fired-­up and ready to help them win in the real estate market!