Flexibility, Strength, and Good Health

If you value your health, you may want to meet Brandie Frommelt.  Brandie Frommelt is the owner and director of the Bikram Yoga Westside studio in Las Vegas, Nevada where she and her staff are dedicated to helping others build strength and flexibility in order to maintain a good state of health.

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With more than 20 qualified instructors leading classes 7 days a week and beginning as early as 5:30 in the morning and running as late as 8 in the evening, you are sure to find a teacher and class time that will fit your schedule.  In addition to the camaraderie that you will experience with your instructors and fellow class mates, you will find that after developing your yoga practice on a regular schedule that you will feel stronger as well as better able to rest and sleep at nights.

By tapping into a discipline that has proven its efficacy over the centuries, you can overcome many physical obstacles that slow you down and make your life more difficult.  Even students who are retired or have suffered injuries and ailments that restrict their movements and joints have discovered a new vitality and energy once they take on the Bikram Yoga practice on a frequent basis.

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Bikram Yoga is also popularly described as hot yoga, as the room is typically heated to as much as 105 degrees Fahrenheit.  As you might imagine, this allows a student to sweat out all kinds of toxins and tends to make the body more flexible than in a cold environment.  This form of practice is intended to benefit the whole body, from muscles and bones to internal organs.  By practicing both postures and breathing methods, you can take advantage of the many benefits connected with each of these exercises.

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If you are already in good health and want to remain so or if you are suffering from physical conditions which limit your activities and may perhaps cause you pain, joining the community at the Bikram Yoga Westside studio could be just the right prescription for an improved and healthier life!

REPOST: What is Bikram Yoga?

In recent years, many people from different age groups have started practicing Bikram yoga to lose weight, reduce stress, and improve flexibility. LiveScience.com explains in detail this type of yoga and its many health benefits.

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Bikram yoga, often called "hot yoga," is a form of yoga popularized by Bikram Choudhury in the 1970s in California. Bikram yoga instructors go through a nine-week training program in which they learn a set practice and dialogue. Currently, there are more than 1,650 Bikram studios around the world.

The yoga practice involves repeating the same 26 poses in set cycles over 90-minute classes. In most classes, rooms are heated, often up to a sweltering 105 degrees Fahrenheit (41 Celsius) and kept at fairly high humidity. Proponents claim the temperature improves blood flow and helps oxygen reach muscle tissue, which may make practitioners more flexible. Hot yoga advocates also say the practice can flush out toxins from the body and even help with weight loss.

Studies have shown that a regular yoga practice can help lessen back pain, sharpen the mind, improve mood and even lower blood pressure. However, no large-scale scientific research has backed up benefits specific to the Bikram practice. Toxins, for instance, are typically flushed out not by sweating, but by the liver and the kidney, and are removed through urination or bowel movements.

However, the practice does have some potential dangers. The profuse sweating involved in Bikram yoga can lead to dehydration if practitioners don't drink enough water. A 2012 study in the British Medical Journal Case Reports described a woman who developed seizures and went into a coma after losing so much salt through profuse sweating in a Bikram yoga class. And the increased flexibility can actually be a bad thing, because it can make practitioners prone to overstretching that can facilitate strains and sprains, according to "The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards," (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Hot yoga can also worsen the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and people with high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart conditions should also steer clear, experts say.

Generally, if someone starts feeling nauseated, dizzy or otherwise ill during a Bikram yoga class, it's a good idea to have some water and take a break.

Still, there's little risk of developing heat stroke during a Bikram yoga class, at least if it's practiced in a room kept between 90 and 95 F (32 and 35 C), according to a small 2013 study by the American Council on Exercise. That study tracked 20 people practicing both hot and regular yoga found virtually no difference in core temperature or heart rate between the two groups.  Those practicing the hot yoga, however, did perceive it to be harder, even if their bodies didn't register the increased difficulty.

Brandie Frommelt is a certified Bikram yoga instructor. Visit this Facebook page to learn more about this workout.

REPOST: The fantasy, then the fashion

Fashion photographer Tim Walker uses his skills to make mermaids come to life.  Check out this story in this article from The New York Times.

TIM WALKER is a listener, taking in conversational cues and stray bits of wisdom with a mind that whirs incessantly, much like the camera he carries wherever he goes.

And that may be why, as he stood gazing seaward during a shoot last year on the northern coast of England, he was all ears when Kristen McMenamy, his model and muse, confided that she had long been enchanted by mermaids. She told Mr. Walker, as he recalled, “This is the one character I’ve never been able to play,” her wistful confession giving rise to a mutual, and mutually obsessive, fantasy.

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At the time, the customarily flame-haired Ms. McMenamy wore a silver-gray mane — perfect, she decided, for her imagined role. “I’m not going to cut it until I’ve done the mermaid,” she told Mr. Walker playfully. “So you’d better make it work.”

Their shared vision eventually took shape in a series of eerily unsettling photographs that made their debut in the December/January issue of W. In the fashion portfolio, theoretically conceived to show off a selection of Vionnet dresses, Ms. McMenamy is seen immersed in a giant fish tank; seated at a vanity, a pearl ring through her nose; or resting her tail fin on a homely brass bed.

That shoot was a high point in an annus mirabilis for the British photographer, 43. With the publication of two books, a flurry of high-profile advertising campaigns and a film in progress, he is, as he tells it, only now hitting his stride.

The W shoot began haltingly, too sweet, or alternately too stilted, for his taste. But eventually shooter and model found their rhythm, the experience one of several this year that taught him, he said, “to simply let go, to give in to the uncontrollable force that leads you to do your best work.”

Struck by the fluidity of Ms. McMenamy’s gestures in and out of water, he accompanied his stills with some seven minutes of Super 8 footage, unveiling his mini-film during Art Basel in Miami Beach earlier his month.

An expanded version, now in the editing stage, is the extension of Mr. Walker’s natural proclivities. “His shoots, they don’t start with the clothes,” said Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, who commissioned the photographs. “They start with an urgency for him to tell a story.”

Which is part of what makes Mr. Walker, among fashion photographers, “the last romantic,” Mr. Tonchi said. In short, “not the kind of guy you can call and say: ‘I have 12 white dresses. Can you shoot them against a blank drop?’ ”

Mr. Walker concurred. “I’m not so motivated by fashion and brands,” he acknowledged by phone from his studio in Brick Lane in East London. Apart from fantasists like the late Alexander McQueen and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, he finds little in fashion to sustain him.

“We’ve gone into a super-commercial moment,” he said. “There has never been more fashion, but it’s never been more bland.”

Oddly, his tendency to obscure clothes in favor of elaborately staged, dreamy narratives has only endeared him to the art and fashion set. His works are in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

His books, “Tim Walker: Story Teller,” with images like an outsize owl glowering in the corner of an ornate room, or a model dwarfed by a madly grinning doll; and the charmingly dotty “Granny Alphabet,” which introduces a parade of willfully eccentric old ladies, are among this year’s coveted coffee-table volumes. Luxury brands including Dior, Givenchy and Mulberry continue to sign Mr. Walker for ad campaigns, and his fashion work crops up regularly in W and in international editions of Vogue.

True, his fairy-tale interpretations, sugary to the casual eye, can on close study seem downright menacing. “A fairy tale without darkness won’t resonate emotionally,” Mr. Walker said. He takes his own emotional cues from, among others, the spooky work of the 19th- and early 20th-century illustrator Arthur Rackham and uncanny fables of Hans Christian Andersen.

“They get the balance of light and darkness right, and isn’t that the point,” Mr. Walker said.

“Don’t forget, the Little Mermaid has to walk on broken glass.”

Brandie Frommelt is the CEO of Press Talent Management & Development, a talent agency recognized for its stable of models and actors sought by high-profile clients in the entertainment and fashion industry.  Visit this website for more details.

Brandi Frommelt Can Help You to Reclaim Your Life with Bikram Yoga

Your friends have been trying to get you to join the “yoga” train, telling you how it helps to relieve stress and provide health benefits.  Yoga, which has become increasingly popular during the past few years, certainly can help you to relax and to see life from a different point of view, but in many cases, it can do more than that: It can give you your life back – literally.  With the help of Brandi Frommelt, director of Bikram Yoga Westside in Nevada, you can discover how Bikram Yoga especially can add to your life.

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Bikram Yoga involves 26 postures that have been proved to keep all parts of the body functioning at their maximum levels.  This type of yoga involves not only your ligaments and muscles but also your veins and internal organs.  A certified Bikram Yoga teacher at Bikram Yoga Westside can introduce you to the various postures that will give your body a renewed sense of vitality – right after you go through one of the studio’s “torture chambers.”

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A “torture chamber” provides the heating you need in order to perform the postures correctly.  Heat is essential because it softens your body and makes it more flexible, thus allowing you to reshape it properly through Bikram Yoga postures.  Hatha Yoga at the studio specifically flushes away waste products from your organs and glands through the respiratory system, and Bikram Yoga continues this process by enabling you to sweat in order to further cleanse yourself. 

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Bikram Yoga can keep you in good health overall, improving your breathing ability and increasing your chances of living longer.  This type of yoga also has been known to relieve incapacitating pain from herniated discs, thus helping you to overcome debilitating back pain.  Bikram Yoga Westside truly can make you feel like a brand new person so that you stop merely surviving and start living again.                                          

Brandie Frommelt's Bikram Yoga Vegas

What is Bikram yoga?

Bikram yoga is often known as hot yoga, because it is practiced in a room that is heated to 105 degrees with 40% humidity. Classes are made up of 26 postures and two breathing exercises, and last for 90 minutes. To qualify as "official" Bikram yoga, the classes must be taught by teachers who have undergone intense training and are Bikram certified. In Bikram yoga, the teacher stands at the front of the room and recites the Bikram dialogue verbatim.

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Why is the room so hot?

In such a hot room, blood flow is improved and oxygen is distributed more efficiently throughout the body. This results in improved physical performance during the yoga class. Toxins and impurities are also flushed out of the body.

Who practices Bikram yoga?

Recently, many people have discovered the benefits of Bikram yoga. Professional athletes like it because it leads to increased strength and flexibility, and can even help to improve mental clarity and the ability to concentrate – all of which can mean more success in their athletic career.

However, you don't have to be an athlete to reap the benefits of Bikram yoga. Anyone interested in improving their physical and mental well-being can enjoy a Bikram yoga class.

Is it dangerous to practice yoga when it is so hot?

Of course, when you are doing any kind of exercise you should stay well hydrated by drinking water or a sports drink. If you have a medical condition or take medication, it is best to check with your doctor before starting a Bikram yoga program.

At Bikram Yoga Vegas, owner Brandie Frommelt and her expert staff are more than willing to answer all of your questions about Bikram yoga – and they are ready to get you started with this rejuvenating and popular form of yoga.