The benefits of hot yoga

Most yoga studios will tell you their classes burn a thousand calories and sweat the toxins out of your body. We went and read the actual published research instead, including the studies that disagree with us. Here is what holds up, what does not, and why we would rather tell you the truth.

We are a hot yoga studio. It would be easy, and profitable, to repeat the claims everyone else repeats. But you can find most of them debunked in about ten minutes, and a studio that overstates what a yoga class does to your body is not a studio you should trust with your body.

So this page is organised by how good the evidence actually is. Where the research is strong, we say so. Where it is thin, we say that too. And there is a whole section near the bottom of things we will never claim, because the science does not back them up.

What hot yoga does for your body

The thing most studios will not tell you

Here is the finding that should reshape how you read every hot yoga advert, including ours. When researchers put heated yoga head to head against the exact same yoga at room temperature, the heat mostly did not add anything measurable.

In a randomized crossover study, participants did the same standardised sequence at 105°F and at 74°F. Energy expenditure was effectively identical, 156 calories in the heat versus 151 at room temperature. In the three-arm trial mentioned above, blood vessel function improved significantly in the room-temperature group, only trended in the heated group, and showed no meaningful difference between them. The authors' own conclusion was that the postures do the work, with or without the heat.

The most comprehensive review of the field, covering 43 studies and 942 participants, puts it bluntly: claims that hot yoga delivers greater health benefits than other forms of yoga or traditional exercise are, in their words, at present unsubstantiated.

So why do we keep the room hot? Because it is a practice people love, it makes the postures feel accessible, and it creates the focused, sweaty, everything-else-falls-away hour that keeps our members coming back for years. Consistency is the thing that actually changes your health, and the heat is what makes this practice the one people stay consistent with. That is an honest reason. We do not need to invent a physiological one.

Practising safely in the heat

The heat is a real physiological stressor and deserves respect. In studied classes, core body temperature has been recorded between 38.2 and 40.1°C (100.8 to 104.2°F), and heat illness risk climbs meaningfully around 40°C. Most people also badly underestimate how much they sweat, replacing only about a quarter of what they lose during class.

Yoga is not risk free, in a heated room or otherwise. Across observational studies, roughly one in five practitioners report some adverse event at some point, most commonly minor sprains and strains, with serious events rare at under 2%. That is broadly comparable to other physical activity. It is not comparable to sitting still, and we would rather you knew that going in.

The honest summary

Yoga will make you more flexible and stronger, and the evidence for that is good. It will probably help your mood and your stress levels, and the evidence for that is decent and getting better. It is a recommended first-line option for chronic low back pain. Practised regularly, it is associated with modest improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol.

The heat does not appear to multiply any of that. What it does is create a practice that a lot of people fall in love with and keep showing up for, which is the part that actually matters, because none of the benefits above come from the class you did not attend.

Come try it and see how you feel. That is the only result that will ever really convince you, and your first class is free.