Beth Shaw of YogaFit has done it again. Not only has she created a successful style of yoga that has infiltrated many gyms and health clubs across the country, she just recently developed a user-friendly version of hot yoga called YogaFit Sweat.
I love hot yoga. However, as an educated yoga teacher who understands the value of giving options and offering modifications, I realize there is not much room for hot yoga participants to honor their limits, until now. Too often, hot yoga is an all-or-none situation, and because of the high temperatures, the risk of a systemic emergency, such as heat stroke, is elevated. But thankfully, Shaw’s YogaFit Sweat has made safety a priority.
The hot yoga craze began with Bikram Choudhury of famed Bikram Yoga. He designed a class of 26 yoga postures, practiced in temperatures exceeding one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, in a room with a touch of added humidity.
Bikram’s hot yoga class is not for the faint of heart. In fact, anyone with a weak heart might just faint while trying to survive a Bikram Yoga class. Although thousands of people have reaped the health benefits of Bikram’s hot yoga, it is certainly not for everyone.
Beth Shaw’s YogaFit Sweat is right on target. Congruent with the care she gives in her other teacher training programs such as YogaFit Seniors and Prenatal Yoga, Shaw makes her instructors aware of the various medical conditions that might occur in a heated environment. As part of the YogaFit Sweat yoga teacher training, instructors also learn how to modify poses (something I feel is of upmost importance) and how to recognize when hot yoga might be inappropriate for someone based on their health history.
For those of you who think Shaw is just trying to bask in Bikram’s hot yoga fame, please think again.
Just recently, Bikram lost to the California courts in an avaricious effort to copyright and own his sequence of 26 yoga poses. Who thinks they can own yoga? As thought by many, Bikram, who lives in a Beverly Hills mansion equipped with not just one Rolls Royce, but more than thirty, might not have the yoga student’s best interest as his number one priority.
Beth Shaw has not only created a unique system of yoga that is accessible to everyone, the YogaFit Network, under Shaw’s direction, has also delivered more than one million hours of community service work. Beneficiaries of YogaFit’s success support global humanitarian causes as well as animal welfare.
Yoga is a multibillion-dollar industry because it benefits millions of people worldwide. People like Shaw not only work to help those via yoga by offering a safe and user-friendly system of yoga, she also gives back to the greater community.
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