The Science of Yoga

relations). No one seemed overweight. The group in general looked fit and attractive.
    Bikram classes follow a routine of twenty-six poses that start and end with pranayama. Our first breathing exercise was slow and calming—good for warming up and helping beginners feel at home. By definition, it was hypoventilation that gently pressed the parasympathetic brake, relaxing body and mind. I felt warm and calm and aware, ready for anything.
    The postures began easy and grew more challenging, as was usual for a yoga class. The bending and stretching got deeper and more pronounced, the tensions rising slowly. Sexologists describe growing muscular strain as an integral part of the human sexual response. The contractions start gently in the arousal phase and develop into tensions and flexions that are quite pronounced in the plateau phase—the time of extreme activity just before climax. So, too, we performed the hardest poses toward the session’s end, pushing ourselves, stretching and straining, bathed in sweat.
    The final breathing exercise was very fast. It was Kapalbhati, the relatively mild form of Bhastrika. To me, it was good old hyperventilation and sympathetic arousal, with the usual buzz and, after we finished, a sense of calm elation. Sexologists call it the resolution phase.
    We lay on our backs in Savasana as the instructor dimmed the lights.
    Yoga classes—with their bending, sweating, heavy breathing, and various states of undress—have acquired a certain reputation. Sex and the City cast the issue in graphic terms. Samantha in one episode gets so hot and bothered that she puts the make on a nearby guy. Rebuffed, she tries another and wins his enthusiastic nod, after which they hurry out of the room.
    The show invented a term to describe the union of yoga and orgasm— yogasm. An ad campaign quizzed readers on the definition. One: a yo-yo trick. Two: sex with Yogi Berra. Three: what Samantha has with a guy from her yoga class.
    The word entered the zeitgeist. In 2009, The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a woman reading in bed next to her husband. “Not tonight, hon,” the woman said. “I had a yogasm in class.”
    Vikas Dhikav was interested in whether yoga could not only arouse individuals but improve the sex lives of couples. In New Delhi, the young doctor assembled a medical team and more than one hundred male and female subjects. Dhikav and his colleagues published two papers in 2010. The results went far beyond the hints contained in decades of physiological research—not to mention the cartoons and videos, scandals and lawsuits, tales and testimonials. The clinical evidence argued that yoga did in fact have a talent for promoting intimacy.
    The medical team asked the men and women to report on their sex lives before and after practicing yoga for three months. The poses of the routine differed slightly from the usual composition. The scientists chose postures for what they called their potential to improve “muscle tone, gonads, endocrines, digestion, joint movements, and mood.” Although the team made no reference to the arousal studies discussed in this book, the pose selections turned out to include a number that those reports had identified as sexuallystimulating. The poses included the Bow, the Wheel, the Plow, and the Locust (all from Udupa’s study), the Cobra (from the Russian study), and Agni Sara (from Dostálek’s study). Other poses included the Triangle and the Seated Forward Bend. The pranayamas included Kapalbhati, the fast breathing we did at the Bikram studio. In usual fashion, the subjects ended their sessions with the Corpse and relaxation.
    The results sang. The novice yogis told of improvements in all categories of sexual experience under investigation—including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction. The men, age forty on average, reported enhanced abilities to maintain an erection during intercourse and increases in their degree of hardness. They also expressed greater confidence.
    The women told of newfound excitement. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-five. As a group, they reported improvements across all measured categories, including several indicators of heightened pleasure as well as emotional closeness with lovers. The scientists also found that women at different life stages differed in what they considered the best results. Women over forty-five reported that the biggest gains centered on enhanced arousal. In contrast, the younger women