About Bikram Yoga

One line of teaching,
three generations deep.

Bikram Yoga did not begin in a hot room in Beverly Hills. It began in Calcutta, in a family that gave the West two of the most consequential yogis of the twentieth century.

Bikram Choudhury with his championship trophies, Calcutta.

The Lineage

Yogananda · Ghosh · Choudhury

The method taught in every Bikram Yoga class descends directly from the Ghosh family of Calcutta — from Paramahansa Yogananda, who carried yoga to America, through his brother Bishnu Charan Ghosh, who made it a science of the body, to Bishnu’s student Bikram Choudhury, who gave it its final form.

1893 – 1952

The Elder Brother

Paramahansa Yogananda

Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh, Gorakhpur, India

The eldest of the Ghosh brothers left India for Boston in 1920 and became the first great yoga master to make the West his home. He founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles and spent three decades teaching Kriya Yoga and meditation to Americans who had never heard the word.

His Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, has never gone out of print and remains the book that introduced more people to yoga than any other. In it he writes with obvious affection about his youngest brother, whose gifts ran toward the physical rather than the contemplative — and whom he encouraged to make that his life’s work.

1903 – 1970

The Teacher

Bishnu Charan Ghosh

Youngest brother of Yogananda, Calcutta

Where his brother took yoga inward, Bishnu Ghosh turned it toward the body. Trained as a physical culturist, he became convinced that hatha yoga — practiced with precision and discipline — was the most complete system of physical health ever devised, and that it could be taught and tested like any science.

In 1923 he founded Ghosh’s College of Physical Education in Calcutta, where yoga was taught alongside weight training and muscle control, and where the therapeutic use of asana was studied systematically. His demonstrations of strength and control drew crowds across India and abroad.

Among his students was a small boy who arrived at the college at the age of four, and who would become his most famous disciple.

1944 – Present

The Student

Bikram Choudhury

Born in Calcutta, India

Bikram Choudhury began studying at Ghosh’s College as a young child and trained under Bishnu Ghosh for years, absorbing the college’s rigor, its emphasis on exact form, and its faith in yoga as medicine for the body. Under Ghosh he became a champion in the yoga asana competitions of his youth and, later, a teacher in his own right.

What began as one studio in Beverly Hills became the Bikram Yoga Teacher Training, and the sequence Bikram carried from his teacher’s college is now taught, word for word, in studios on six continents.

“Never too old, never too bad, never too late, never too sick to start from scratch once again.”Bikram Choudhury

From the Archive

Bikram Choudhury, Calcutta

Before Beverly Hills. Photographs from Bikram’s years as Bishnu Ghosh’s student, when yoga, strength, and showmanship were taught as a single discipline at Ghosh’s College — and the young man who would carry the sequence west was still building the body that would demonstrate it.

Bikram Choudhury chained at the waist pulling a car with passengers

Bishnu Charan Ghosh with young Bikram Choudhury

The Ghosh Method

Bishnu Ghosh believed that yoga and modern bodybuilding were not rivals but partners. At his college in Calcutta, asana was practiced beside the barbell, and the result was a body that was flexible and strong, calm and powerful at once. Bikram was the proof of the method: a champion yogi who could also pull a car.

From the hundreds of postures in the classical hatha canon, and with his guru’s guidance, Bikram selected and sequenced twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises — a single ninety-minute class designed so that a beginner and a master could stand on the same mat and be worked, systematically, from head to toe.

“It is mental and physical health, with amazing strength, if yoga is combined with modern bodybuilding exercises.”Bishnu Charan Ghosh

The Practice

Twenty-six postures. Two breathing exercises. Ninety minutes.

Bikram Yoga is a sequence of 26 postures and 2 breathing exercises selected and developed by Bikram Choudhury from the classical hatha tradition he learned at Ghosh’s College. Practiced in a room heated to 105°F, the series is always taught in the same order, with the same words, so that the practice is the practice wherever you find it.

Each posture prepares the body for the next. Over ninety minutes the sequence works every part of the body — muscles, ligaments, joints, veins, and internal organs — systematically, so that each system receives what it needs to function at its best.

26Postures

2Breathing Exercises

90Minutes

The Original Hot Yoga. Same sequence, same dialogue, in every certified studio worldwide.

Teacher Training

Carry the line forward.

Over more than two decades, Bikram Yoga Teacher Training has certified more than 15,000 instructors from over 50 countries. Trainees take two classes a day and attend lectures on posture technique and yoga history with Bikram and visiting professionals, along with coursework in anatomy and physiology.

Graduates leave with a thorough working knowledge of the sequence and the ability to teach it professionally across the globe.

Apply to train Find a teacher

Standing Head to Knee — Bikram Yoga Teacher Training.

Daily schedule: Two 90-minute classes a day, with lectures and posture clinics between them.
Curriculum: The 26 & 2 dialogue, posture technique, yoga history, anatomy, and physiology.
Certification: Graduates are certified to teach the Original Hot Yoga sequence worldwide.

In the News · Clinical Research

The Harvard study on heated yoga and depression

In 2023, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School published the first randomized controlled trial of heated yoga for major depression — using the Bikram Yoga sequence, in a 105°F room, delivered at ordinary community studios. Adults with moderate-to-severe depression who took roughly one class a week for eight weeks saw a substantial reduction in symptoms compared with a waitlist group. The findings appeared in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

59%of yoga participants had their depression scores fall by half or more (vs. 6% on waitlist)

44%reached remission — scores so low they no longer met criteria for depression (vs. 6%)

8 wksof classes, about one 90-minute session per week

105°Fthe standard Bikram Yoga room, at partnering community studios

One line of teaching,
three generations deep.