Firstly why would anyone want to get so hot during yoga? Well my teacher at the Brighton Natural Health Centre  http://www.bnhc.co.uk explained it quite succintly – the heat is the fire of your engine and without it you won’t go anywhere. From my point of view it serves two purposes – firstly it gets my muscles nice and relaxed and two it gets me all slippery and wet – and in the totally wholesome sense of sweating on the outside of my body.

The first reason is easy to understand – but the second one? Well when you are all limbered and and your muscles are as long as they are ever likely to be then the nest thing is not getting stuck in a not. Too much friction makes skin on skin quite difficult and nobody likes a yoga chaff. The sweat is nature’s lube and helps arms get past legs and through knotted limbs.

So that’s why it’s important but how to create it at home – on a cold blowy day? I’ve tried turning up the central heating as high as it goes and placing ice cream tubs of water onto the radiators to add a bit of humidity to the situation but to no avail.  It simply does not get hot enough for me. I’ve tried wearing lots of clothes and that works – sort of – but the problem is that wearing them creates all of the friction that I’m trying to avoid.

The other solutions I tried included having the hottest bath bearable – it was actually painful but  served very little good because I rapidly went from too hot and all lobster, blistered and red into a shivering hypodermic mess…

The best I can come up with is rubbing a bit of bay oil into the parts that are most likely get stuck – but the problem there is that I am left slipping and sliding over a mat because it is unavoidable to get some of the oil onto my hands and feet .. and that leaves the problem thoroughly unresolved!

and just look at the sweat in this Bikram video to see how to do it properly – that is what I am trying to recreate!

So let me introduce myself …I live in the south-east of England and have a great little flat with a view of the sea. This is another way I get to go out whilst staying in. By simply looking out of my window I can be either a boat being tossed about on the ocean – miles from land – or on other days I can be there paddling through azure waters…

I work as much as I need to – mainly from home – connected as I am to the world with my Talk Talk internet line – once again I get to go out whilst staying in.

I have two kids- as precious as diamonds wrapped in silk! They are the centre, edge and reason for my world. They are in equal measures genius and stupid and very much of the say-what-you-see persuasion. There will be much, much more about them later – I intend to keep up this blog whilst they are asleep – due to the high energy, hi-impact lives that they lead they do tend to flake out quite early.