participate in the design process directly. His reputation is not just behind the scenes. There are Bikram practitioners who know exactly which studios Chad has built and will detour out of their way to take classes at them. He has designed yoga studios in celebrities’ homes and worked for years at Bikram’s International Headquarters in Los Angeles.
Chad is not Yoga Journal. He looks and drinks like a hero from a Richard Russo novel. His body has the approximate proportions of a boiler. Face with slight scruff, receding crew cut hairline, and the blue-collar smile of a goofball who also knows he’s tougher than you are: he hails from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a family dominated by a family-run construction business. In his teens, when he used to bounce for clubs in New York City, people would ask for his autograph because they assumed he played football for the Jets. Nowadays, Chad’s got the type of thick fingers that look well adapted to casually twirling off lug nuts that most of us wouldn’t even consider loosened. When he wears button-up shirts, he tucks them in too tight, revealing a nice overhanging gut. His pants have smudges indicating exactly where he wiped his fingers when working. All of which is to say, in appearance, Chad is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who can disassemble and rebuild a furnace from memory, but not at all what you’d expect from a guy who has devoted his adult life to hot yoga.
“I got into this full-time because I couldn’t afford the phone bills,” Chad is telling me, hunched over a beer. “Studio owners would call at all hours of the night with these emergencies. If you are selling hot yoga and your heater breaks, it’s bad for business. I wanted to offer advice, but I literally couldn’t afford my own phone bills.
“Of course, long before that, I got into this because the yoga works. I had the type of back pain that shuts your life down.” Chad graduated from school with degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering, and he parlayed his general intelligence into a job as an investment banker on WallStreet. But his passion has always been working with things—ripping out insulation, throwing up drywall, rebuilding machines of all sorts and complexities. A lifetime spent crouched while his fingers were tinkering left him with an angry lower back. When he was knocked around in an otherwise minor car accident, the pain grew unbearable. He tried to rehab it. When that didn’t work, he walked into a Bikram studio. “And within my first few months, I had my life back. … No one believes in the yoga more than I do.”
A Chad Clark studio is different because of the control a studio owner has over the environment. “When I first started, it was ‘How can I get this thing hotter?’ Studio owners were just trying to take conventional furnaces and use them to heat commercial spaces.” It was very much a do-it-yourself community of isolated practitioners, all excited to experiment with a new innovation, but with little practical experience. Bikram had brought a fundamental new idea to both exercise and physical therapy. By providing a shortcut to raising heart rate, the heat allows relatively simple movements—which almost everyone can engage in—to have much more potent cardiac benefits. 5 Just as important, it allows muscles to relax in a deeper stretch, leading to more penetrating blood flow. From a rehabilitative standpoint, heat also induces a temporary analgesic effect. This allows people with chronic pain to exercise—often for the first time in years—the areas of their body that cause them pain. Which in turn, allows them to strengthen atrophied muscles whose atrophy is often directly related to their chronic pain in the first place. It stops a vicious convalescent cycle.
As an engineer, Chad can deliver heat any way an owner wants it: dry,humid, filtered, oxygenated, static, or with flow. Depending on those variables, exercise in heat
Chad is not Yoga Journal. He looks and drinks like a hero from a Richard Russo novel. His body has the approximate proportions of a boiler. Face with slight scruff, receding crew cut hairline, and the blue-collar smile of a goofball who also knows he’s tougher than you are: he hails from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a family dominated by a family-run construction business. In his teens, when he used to bounce for clubs in New York City, people would ask for his autograph because they assumed he played football for the Jets. Nowadays, Chad’s got the type of thick fingers that look well adapted to casually twirling off lug nuts that most of us wouldn’t even consider loosened. When he wears button-up shirts, he tucks them in too tight, revealing a nice overhanging gut. His pants have smudges indicating exactly where he wiped his fingers when working. All of which is to say, in appearance, Chad is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who can disassemble and rebuild a furnace from memory, but not at all what you’d expect from a guy who has devoted his adult life to hot yoga.
“I got into this full-time because I couldn’t afford the phone bills,” Chad is telling me, hunched over a beer. “Studio owners would call at all hours of the night with these emergencies. If you are selling hot yoga and your heater breaks, it’s bad for business. I wanted to offer advice, but I literally couldn’t afford my own phone bills.
“Of course, long before that, I got into this because the yoga works. I had the type of back pain that shuts your life down.” Chad graduated from school with degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering, and he parlayed his general intelligence into a job as an investment banker on WallStreet. But his passion has always been working with things—ripping out insulation, throwing up drywall, rebuilding machines of all sorts and complexities. A lifetime spent crouched while his fingers were tinkering left him with an angry lower back. When he was knocked around in an otherwise minor car accident, the pain grew unbearable. He tried to rehab it. When that didn’t work, he walked into a Bikram studio. “And within my first few months, I had my life back. … No one believes in the yoga more than I do.”
A Chad Clark studio is different because of the control a studio owner has over the environment. “When I first started, it was ‘How can I get this thing hotter?’ Studio owners were just trying to take conventional furnaces and use them to heat commercial spaces.” It was very much a do-it-yourself community of isolated practitioners, all excited to experiment with a new innovation, but with little practical experience. Bikram had brought a fundamental new idea to both exercise and physical therapy. By providing a shortcut to raising heart rate, the heat allows relatively simple movements—which almost everyone can engage in—to have much more potent cardiac benefits. 5 Just as important, it allows muscles to relax in a deeper stretch, leading to more penetrating blood flow. From a rehabilitative standpoint, heat also induces a temporary analgesic effect. This allows people with chronic pain to exercise—often for the first time in years—the areas of their body that cause them pain. Which in turn, allows them to strengthen atrophied muscles whose atrophy is often directly related to their chronic pain in the first place. It stops a vicious convalescent cycle.
As an engineer, Chad can deliver heat any way an owner wants it: dry,humid, filtered, oxygenated, static, or with flow. Depending on those variables, exercise in heat
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