If the name Bikram means anything to you then it probably means either yoga or Netflix or both. Birkam was and is a famous yoga teacher who developed a form of yoga that uses a hot studio to help with practices. Vikram is also an infamous yoga teacher who may have abused his position and power to attack and denigrate woman and others. The Netflix documentary ‘Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator’ covers all the accusations.

For me, he reminds me of one thing and one thing only. Dirty underpants. 

I went to one of his hot yoga studios in Manchester. Everyone there had a designated spot to practice in the studio with each mat carefully set out to get as many people as possible into the room. As the room is set to forty degrees, condensation drips off the wall and, for men, most are just wearing a pair of shorts. Except one man. The man in front of me. He just had a pair of off-white y-fronts. For 90 minutes every time he would bend or stretch I could see his buttocks through the translucent sweaty pants. 

And what was worse, there was no escape. The teacher had locked the door. 

“So no one thinks of leaving.” He said, “if you’re too hot, just have a drink of water. Don’t leave. Leaving is cheating!”

Which was of no help to me as the posterior in front of me crested into my vision again. 

I would have said that was my worse experience of hot yoga but this at least was in a proper studio. When hot yoga started in Glasgow it was started by a man who ran it in his flat. He placed towels around the doors and windows. Cranked up some gas fires and turned his living room into the Sahara desert. Though after 90 minutes of sweating, perhaps the Amazon river would be a better description as the sweat pooled and flowed through a first floor tenement flat. 

It was unofficial. Unregulated. And completely bonkers as the man who ran it would often stop the class and say:

“Does anyone fancy a Greggs sausage roll? Or is that just me?”

We’d be standing on one leg, breathing in out and stretching arms out wide, he’d be thinking of his tea.

And, all the while, we were creating the biggest fire risk since the Human Torch decided to visit a firework factory. 

Anyway, today I went to a sauna in the Westend and thought about how the studio is no longer there. Or, I should say, the flat is still there, but the studio has long gone. It moved into a dedicated studio in the Westend of Glasgow, just off Byres Road. Sadly, it shut down, a victim of lockdown, I think. I passed it today and smiled as it’s now next to a Greggs The Bakers. And before it shut, I hoped the teacher had the opportunity to pop in for a chicken lattice during classes.