Hot Yoga Built an Empire, Lost Its Founder, and Kept Going
Bikram Choudhury turned a 90 minute sequence in a heated room into a global wellness phenomenon. Then he fled the country to avoid a $7.4 million judgment. The practice he built outlasted him and the research behind why it works is worth understanding.
Max Stephens
7/25/20265 min read
In the 70s, a man named Bikram Choudhury arrived in California from India claiming to have developed a revolutionary approach to yoga. The format was specific: 26 postures performed over 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees with 40 percent humidity. He called it Bikram Yoga, trademarked the sequence, and built a certification system that required aspiring teachers to complete a nine week training program costing $10,000 per student.
By 2006 there were over 1,500 Bikram studios worldwide. Lady Gaga, Madonna, and George Clooney were among many notable celebrities associated with the practice. Choudhury was running one of the most recognized wellness brands on the planet, teaching from a podium in a black Speedo and a Rolex, and was reportedly worth close to $3 billion at his peak.
Then the lawsuits started.
The fall of Bikram Choudhury
Multiple women came forward with allegations of serious assault and abuse, describing a pattern of behavior that stretched back years across his training programs and studios. The legal proceedings ran for years. In 2016, a jury ruled against him in a case brought by his former general counsel, who alleged harassment and wrongful termination after she refused to help him cover up an assault allegation. The jury awarded $7.4 million in damages, finding that Choudhury had acted with oppression, fraud, and malice.
He fled the United States rather than pay.
An arrest warrant was issued. His company filed for bankruptcy. To date he has never paid the judgment and has never faced criminal prosecution. As of the most recent reporting, he continues to teach yoga internationally, conducting training programs in various countries outside the reach of US law enforcement.
The Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, released in 2019, brought the full scope of the allegations to a mainstream audience that had largely moved on from the original news coverage.
What happened to the practice
Studios across the country and internationally quietly dropped the Bikram name and rebranded as hot yoga studios. The 26 posture sequence in many cases stayed. The heated room stayed. What left was the trademark, the certification requirement, and the man's name.
Over time many practices evolved beyond even the original Bikram format. Studios built their own sequences incorporating heat around different yoga styles, less strict about the specific 26 postures, less rigid about maintaining exactly 105 degrees and 40 percent humidity. The core idea became the defining feature rather than any specific choreography. Move intentionally, and make it hot.
The industry effectively separated the art from the artist, kept what worked, and moved on. Whether that's a reasonable response to the circumstances or a convenient one probably depends on your perspective. What's clear is that hot yoga as a category has continued to grow well past the point where the Bikram brand collapsed.
Why the heat actually matters
The physiological case for practicing yoga in a heated environment is more solid than the origin story might suggest, and a 2025 review in Sports Medicine examining 43 studies across the hot yoga research base makes that case fairly clearly.
The review found that regular heated yoga improved flexibility, balance, mobility, and functional fitness. The mechanism behind the flexibility finding is specific. Heat reduces muscle viscosity, essentially making the tissue more pliable, which allows deeper range of motion with less resistance and lower injury risk. Poses that would be uncomfortable or inaccessible at room temperature become more approachable in a heated environment because the muscles are warmer and more extensible throughout the session rather than just at the end of a warmup.
Bone density also showed up in the research. Poses that create beneficial mechanical stress on bone tissue, combined with the physiological demands of working in heat, appear to support bone density maintenance in ways that have particular relevance for older adults and postmenopausal women, where bone loss accelerates.
The cardiovascular picture
Heart rate during hot yoga typically matches the demand of moderate intensity aerobic exercise, comparable to brisk walking or cycling. Blood vessels dilate in response to the heat, blood pressure improves, and the cardiovascular system is working in a way that produces real training stimulus even without the explosive movement patterns of more conventional cardio.
A 2021 study found that chronic heat exposure in hot yoga promotes cardiovascular and cellular adaptations, meaning the heart adjusts to handle thermal stress and improves its function over time as a result of repeated exposure.
A clinical study through Massachusetts General Hospital found improvements in depression symptom scores among participants who practiced heated yoga regularly over an eight week period. GABA, a neurotransmitter associated with reduced anxiety, has been found to increase following yoga practice, and the heat appears to amplify some of these neurological effects.
One 2025 systematic review did pump the brakes on some of the bolder cardiovascular claims. For vascular health specifically, conventional exercise outperforms yoga as an intervention. The heat adds cardiovascular demand but doesn't replace the benefits of actual aerobic training. Hot yoga is not a cardio session in disguise. It's its own category of physical practice with its own specific benefits and its own specific limitations.
What makes it different from regular yoga or heat alone
The distinguishing feature of hot yoga isn't the heat on its own and it isn't the yoga on its own. It's what happens when physical demand and thermal stress hit the body simultaneously.
During a hot yoga session, the body is regulating core temperature, maintaining yoga poses that require strength and balance, breathing intentionally in a way that affects the nervous system, and producing heat shock proteins in response to the thermal load. That combined set of demands produces physiological adaptations that neither yoga at room temperature nor passive heat exposure like a sauna fully replicates in the same configuration.
The heat shock protein angle connects this practice directly to the sauna research. The same cellular housekeeping mechanism that gets triggered by sitting in a traditional Finnish sauna also gets triggered by the sustained thermal stress of a hot yoga class. The difference is that hot yoga layers intentional movement, breathing, and balance work on top of that thermal stimulus, creating a more complex physiological demand.
Who it makes sense for
Hot yoga has a lower barrier to entry than some of the more research-heavy interventions in the wellness space. The equipment requirement is a mat. The skills requirement is minimal, particularly in beginner formats where the postures are straightforward. The accessibility compared to something like Zone 2 cardio or progressive resistance training is higher for people who don't come from a fitness background.
The caveats are the same as with any heated exercise. Hydration matters more in a hot room than in a standard yoga class. People with cardiovascular conditions, heat sensitivity, or certain medications that affect thermoregulation should get medical clearance before practicing in the heat. Pushing through dizziness or nausea is a worse idea in a 105 degree room than in most other exercise environments.
For people who enjoy the practice, the research supports continuing. For people who have been curious but haven't tried it, the evidence base is strong enough to make the experiment worth running.
My thoughts
Bikram Choudhury was definitely onto something when he brought heated yoga to the West. He was also, by the finding of a unanimous jury, someone who caused serious harm to people who trusted him.
Both of those things are true simultaneously, which puts hot yoga in an awkward cultural position that the industry has largely resolved by just not talking about it. The practice kept going. The man behind it is somewhere overseas, warrant outstanding, apparently still teaching.
Whether the practice deserves to be evaluated separately from its origins is a question each person answers for themselves. The physiology doesn't know who designed the sequence.
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