Hi, my name is Aaron Tong and I’m the Sweaty Yogi.

Welcome to my home on the internet. It is a place where I share my journey as an Aspiring Yogi.

I started practicing hatha yoga in 2008, when a studio, Bikram Yoga Saanich, opened up in my neighbourhood. They were offering free classes during their grand opening so I thought, why not? 

The yoga they were teaching was called Bikram Yoga. It is a 90 minute class, in a room heated to 104º with a 40% humidity, and with floor to ceiling mirrors covering the front and side walls. It defied all my preconceptions of what a yoga class was. Instructions of the “twenty-six postures, two breathing exercises”, were given, in a boot-camp-like fashion, by an instructor who stood upon a dais. 

While I suffered in the back row, there were seniors in the front row moving with such tranquil grace, it made me question my own physical capabilities. I was by no means a prime athletic specimen, but I certainly did not consider my self to be unfit. I could not breathe comfortably; I could now move with the instructions; I could not stop thinking, “why?”

After class I signed up for a two week pass. The studio claimed that this yoga could be practiced daily! I aimed to find out if I could.

What is a Sweaty Yogi?

Much has transpired since that fateful first class. 

In 2018, I became a certified hatha yoga teacher with the Raja Yoga Academy and I started to teach at the studio where I had taken my first class, at the time called Found City Yoga. I was learning that hatha yoga’s origins stems from Yoga philosophy and is one of the six major schools of Hindu philosophy! Having found that the claims that were touted from a Bikram Yoga, now commonly called the 26&2, or Original Hot Yoga, practice are in fact real, I have set out too see if the claims of Yogic philosophy are indeed real as well.

When I chose the moniker, The Sweaty Yogi, I did so due to the fact that a Bikram Yoga practice is a sweaty endeavour. In my studies of Yoga, I have learned classical Yoga philosophers put great emphasis in the fact that Direct Experience is the Cornerstone of Yoga Practice. Or perhaps more cheekily put, Yoga Requires Sweat Equity, and that is why I continue to call myself the Sweaty Yogi.