We recently celebrated our fifth birthday in Bournemouth with our doors open and since then you have noticed a few changes here and there. The yoga studio formerly known as One for All Hot Yoga has had a little makeover and we’re now Yoga One Bournemouth.

In this blog I wanted explain what this change entails and why it’s happening.

What’s happening?

Well apart from the name change the only thing that’s happening really is as of April all our Hot Yoga classes will be Vinyasa Yoga classes and the temperature in the studio will be around 30c. In terms of the transition from hot to vinyasa we’re fairly sure you won’t notice much difference; we’ve alway taught vinyasa in our classes so you’ll find it all reassuringly familiar.

We wanted to change our name to move away from the “hot” in One for All Hot Yoga and it’s been good to have the opportunity to think about who we are now as a studio after five years; how Lucy and I have changed as people and teachers and how we can best serve both ourselves and our community in the long term.

Why is this all happening?

There are three main reasons why this is all happening:

• The energy crisis exacerbated by Putin’s war in Ukraine.
• The environmental cost of being an energy intensive business.
• The ethics of being an energy intensive business when we have the choice not to be.

You will be unsurprised to hear that there has been a dramatic increase in our energy costs. Even if we wanted too there’s no way we could pass on any of this cost to our students without the cost of practising becoming untenable. We’re being squeezed but so is everyone else. Once we understood that our choice boiled down to close the business or reduce our energy costs then the decision became very easy.

The upsides of reducing our energy footprint are pretty clear. From the very beginning we’ve tried hard to be as low impact and sustainable as we can as a business; we’ve alway used green energy, but what’s better than using green energy? Using less green energy obviously! I used to imagine our daughter asking if we really needed to run a hot yoga studio when it could just as easily not have been hot but I couldn’t ever imagine a good answer for her. We are fortunate to be in a position where we can choose to make a minor little pivot and still make good on our promise as a yoga studio.

We’ve been thinking about this seriously since last August and in that time have moved from anxiety to acceptance to excitement for the future. This is the right thing at the right time and honestly we’re stoked about this opportunity to reinvent ourselves a little and open up our timetable and what we offer as a studio.

The future

We hope that you’re already enjoying some of the new styles that we’ve been slowly introducing since the start of the year. I’ve got to say that we’ve been really lucky to have some incredible teachers who have made all this seem pretty effortless. A small studio like ours is the very much the sum of it’s teachers and we’ve got a really great bunch who all offer something worthwhile and unique.

Ashtanga Yoga

After resisting for many years we’ve finally got some Ashtanga on the schedule. Introducing new styles has all sorts of challenges but none more so than finding the right teacher. Evelin has recently returned from India bursting with new ideas from her trainings and we feel that in her Ashtanga classes she has truly found her voice as a yoga teacher. Ashtanga is the original vinyasa yoga style that all other vinyasa yoga has evolved from. It has an extensive history and some of the most well known and respected teachers globally and locally are ashtangis. To the uninitiated it can prehaps seem a little ridged, maybe a little masculine. But taught with both passion and compassion by a teacher so genuinely enthused by the practice as Evelin is, it really does become something worth making part of your yoga journey.

Rocket Yoga

And talking about the evolution of vinyasa yoga, enter stage right, Rocket Yoga. Rocket is a contemporary vinyasa yoga style that draws on the ashtanga lineage, repurposes it and repackages it as something both accessible and inspiring. Again we are extremely fortunate to have Harriet leading our rocketeering. Harriet is not just a very capable yogi but a national level competitive gymnast and has been coaching Women’s Artistic Gymnastics for eighteen years! If you haven’t already tried Rocket yoga at Yoga One Bournemouth we really do urge you to give it a shot. It’s just really fun and in Harriet’s experienced hands both refreshing and recognisably familiar.

Roxanne

Felt unfair to leave Roxanne out. She’s great as you know, and her packed Vinyasa Yoga classes speak for themselves.

Workshops, Master Classes and the rest

I’ll write more on this another time but we have an Inversions and Arm Balances Workshop with Harriet coming up in April on the 22nd. Roxanne and I are planning Yang/Yin Master Class with a focus on adjustments and depending on how quickly I can get my act together a Spring into Spring 30 Day Challenge in April or May.

Lucy and I have been talking about a bunch of stuff we’d like to do in the future. Maybe a proper Hatha class – I’m trying to convince Lucy to do a Sivananda Yoga Master Class and I’d love to teach a regular Yin with Myofascial Release class. Lots of ideas but we are always conscious of balancing what we want to do with what’s commercially good for the studio and there’s only so much space on the timetable!

Other good bits

It’s been great to have Lucy back in the studio practising. No timeframe yet on her return to teaching – she’s slowly building her strength and enjoying a bit of time to herself to reconnect with her practice. The babas are doing great – snotty and grizzly and needy but beautiful:

My intention from this point forward is to use this blog as our outlet for studio news. It has felt for a while that emailing is largely a waste of time and that I spend more time managing an email list than I do teaching. Hopeful no-one will miss their inbox being gummed up by us.