The 30/60/90 day bikram challenge

I have decided to do a bikram yoga challenge. Somewhere between 30 and 90 days.

The thing about the 30 day challenge is that I’m already halfway through one, technically. So it’s sort of like cheating to start now. So then I decided to bump it up to 60. And then maybe I’ll decide to bump it up to 90. Because, why not?

The reason why I’m not committing to 90 days is because, well, bikram is really time consuming. Between the travel to the studio and the getting there early to spend time in the room getting used to the heat and the 90 minute class and the shower afterward and the traveling to wherever you have to go next, this is a multi-hour endeavor. And while I’ve only missed one day since February 27th, I’m not positive I can continue finding the time to do it every day from now until the end of May.

Also, there is the whole moving-to-Brooklyn thing that’s happening in May. Though apparently there is a bikram studio 4 blocks from my new apartment (!!!!). So at some point in the 90 days I might switch studios. Or maybe I’ll just quit bikram altogether because kids, I may as well have picked up a really fancy drug addiction for this price.

So anyway, I’m going to do bikram yoga every day for as long as I feel like it, but if I could do it for 90 days I would feel...accomplished, I guess. I’m pretty bad at motivating myself to do a lot of things unless there’s a CONTEST or a CHALLENGE or a COACH or some other word that brings motivation that comes from outside one’s self (such words do not have to start with “C” even though these all do).

Here are the rules for my challenge:
- My studio allows for 2 missed days (and thus, 2 doubles on other days) for a 30 day challenge. So I’ll allow for 6 doubles in 90 days.
- Der..I guess that’s it for rules.

Here are my goals for the challenge:
- Stop falling out of the balancing poses so much. While my balance is typically pretty good (I used to do back handsprings on a balance beam in gymnastics, ya’ll), but you would never know this by my practice.
- Assorted other posture-specific goals that I'm not going to go into for fear of boring everyone.
- Learn to use my biceps more in the poses where you’re supposed to use your f’ing biceps to pull your body this way or that way. Sometimes I rely on the fact that my quads are pretty strong and my hamstrings are pretty flexible to not work as hard in some poses. Not okay.

On this note, the other day I had the privilege of having a spot in the room near a side mirror. So I had a rare view of myself during the poses that face the side, whereas normally you just get a view of the wall or of the person next to you. Guys, my quads are scary. I almost died during triangle pose (where you work your quads pretty hard) because I realized exactly how much I would not want to meet my quads in a dark alley.

This is Bikram in triangle pose. I'm going to wager that mine does not look quite like this yet.
Photo credit.

Goal for my quads: do not get bigger.

The word “quads” has officially lost all meaning to me. Quads quads quads.

Okay, that’s about it for now. I will try not to turn into a bikram-obsessed blogger, even though it’s sort of all I want to talk about recently. I am totally drinking the Kool-Aid.