Hermosa’s Soho Yoga bends stereotypes
On a first visit, one could be forgiven for mistaking Hermosa Beach’s Soho Yoga for a spa. The glass beverage dispenser near a door to the heated studio carries a rotating cast of delicately flavored ice water (Strawberry!). There are complimentary face towels, like the kind given out on nice airlines, but they are chilled rather than heated. A solitary vending machine sells nothing but bottled water.
The spell of formality is broken, pleasingly, by a sign in the bathrooms. In the men’s room, it is perched near the urinal, like the sports page at a Hooters and features a list of guidelines for practicing.
It addresses common yoga courtesies, like arriving early and removing shoes, but with a kind of jocularity that belies the place’s serious workout credentials. Phones are called “robot devices,” and students are kindly asked to leave them outside the practice rooms. “Moaners” are welcomed, but are asked to be sensitive to those around them. (That this list is posted in the bathroom, where one could conceivably come and go from practice without ever seeing it, only emphasizes the gentleness with which it treats its subject.)
“There are moments in life when you need to be serious,” said Soho Yoga director Natasha Snow, the author of that list. “But you also have to have a sense of humor. Especially to be half-naked and sweaty with a bunch of other people.”
This dual nature — levity and intensity, accessibility and challenge — is part of the DNA at Soho, which bills itself as the only yoga studio in the Los Angeles area to offer heated and non heated practice rooms under the same roof. The two studios allows Soho to offer a wide variety of classes.
Built to spec
I’m not sure exactly what the temperature was in my first class at Soho, though I’m certain people working there did. The heated yoga room contains technology that monitors and modifies the temperature and humidity for each class.
The effect is instantly noticeable.. Shortly after stepping into the heated room, I settled into an ujjayi breath pattern — Sanskrit for “victorious” — which usually takes some to time to achieve.
“The misters and the solar-powered heating system produce a very specific humidity and a kind of tropical heat,” said instructor Jeri Reeder. “That’s why you’re able to feel it the minute you walk in.”
These facilities are the result of an extensive build-out of the property. Richard Jefferson, an NBA player currently with the Cleveland Cavaliers, opened the Hermosa Beach studio with general manager Pete Niva and Snow in March 2014.
“It got expensive,” Jefferson said. “But I told Pete, ‘If for some reason this doesn’t work out, it won’t be because we didn’t put everything we could into it.’”
The advanced technology hides behind a minimalist aesthetic. The entrance has the clean openness of an Apple Store, the the practice rooms are spare. Backpacks and purses are stored in cubbies made from what appears to be cherry hardwood. Blocks and straps are an austere black. The only splashes of color come from a giant chalkboard used by Soho’s teacher-training students, which serves as a combination community message board and visual study aide. During my time there, a drawing of a smiling bulldog stood in for Cerberus, appropriately guarding the entrance to the heated room.
The studio is named for the neighborhood in New York City — south of Houston Street by geography — where Niva and Jefferson once shared an apartment. The two met while attending rival colleges, Jefferson at University of Arizona, Niva at ASU. After college, they bumped into one another in New York and Niva ended up moving in.
In planning a design, they tried to bring some of their old home to their new one.
“New York City was such a huge influence on us,” Niva said. “That vibe of the city, which we loved. We wanted to bring that, the exposed brick, the high ceilings. We wanted to bring that energy to the laid-back beach vibe.”
Achieving this naturalistic look meant finding a space and fitting the technology to it, rather than starting the other way around. “It was a question of, how can we get the best technology of a heated yoga studio from there?” Jefferson said.
The commitment of resources is ongoing. Niva notes that the studio’s rental mats are from Manduka. They start, according to that El Segundo company’s Web site, at $80.
“Every dollar we make goes back into this place,” Niva said.
Built for South Bay
While technology and aesthetics were key influences in shaping what Soho would become, Jefferson and Niva concede that they are distant seconds to bringing Snow aboard as yoga director.
“Richard and I were so fortunate to find Natasha,” Niva said. “Her attention to detail is incredible.”
Jefferson and Niva found Snow teaching at a studio in Santa Monica and soon became regulars in her class. Jefferson, a Hermosa resident, noticed that others from the South Bay were also making the trek to take Snow’s classes.
“I was going to Natasha’s class and we kept finding more and more people driving to Santa Monica,” Jefferson said. “Typically, people don’t leave the bubble. I was asking people, ‘Why are you leaving the South Bay?’ And they were telling me they couldn’t find a heated vinyasa flow class around here.”
Jefferson and Niva realized that combining Snow’s teaching methods with a South Bay location could be a winning business formula.
“Part of what we were talking about is that the South Bay is the most fit area of the most fit city on the planet,” Jefferson said. “You go down the street, you see professional athletes, you see volleyball players, you see Olympians. It was almost a no-brainer.”
Since opening, the place has become a favorite of the area’s elite athletes. In addition to its proximity, the studio has capitalized on the way yoga fits in with the stresses sports place on the body.
Snow was the instructor for TPT Athlete Yoga, the first class I took at Soho. The class is an ever-changing mixture of poses, or asanas, and “Trigger Point Therapy” for myofascial release, which involves applying targeted pressure to various parts of the body. The goal is to improve muscle recovery and to eliminate painful knots.
“Our trainers are always saying, ‘Roll out,’”Jefferson said. “You can try to do that at home, but the good thing about a class is that you’re trapped.”
Once the domain of professional athletes, the technique has recently become more widely practiced. For the class I took, each student was armed with two vulcanized rubber balls. Snow walked around the room, monitoring each student’s progress.
Her grasp of the human body seemed almost intuitive. With half-a-dozen students, including me, she suggested tiny modifications that, judging by the suddenly surfacing grimaces on people’s faces, made big differences.
“I have big love of anatomy,” Snow said. “I don’t want to be militant or micro-manage. But some teachers might not want to say to a student, ‘Oh, you’re compensating because your right pectoral is too tight.’ For me, it’s imperative.”
Instructor-driven
Snow’s regularly takes her instructors’ classes to gives feedback and build relationships. Instructor Dene Logan Selkin has been working with Snow for seven years.
“It’s nice that our studio director is so involved,” said Reeder, who has taught yoga for 30 years. “She sees to it that everything is carried out with passion.”
Snow is a unifying force in a studio that would otherwise be at risk of multiple personality disorder. Having both a heated and non heated studio brings together two kinds of yoga, each with passionate followings.
Snow’s first visit to Hermosa Beach convinced her it was an ideal place for the venture.
“Juxtaposition is such a part of yoga, you can’t have too much of any one thing,” Snow said. “And there’s such a nice energy of work and play here.”
The non-heated room shares the industrial vibe of its heated sister, with heating ducts criss-crossing the roof. But it is smaller and more intimate. A ballet bar, unused in the classes I took, runs along the north wall and a lack of mirrors urges students to look inward.
Niva said that having two different rooms allows Soho to match the moods of its students.
“That was the inspiration to have two different studios,” he said. “We’re all at different places in our lives and our practice. We like to think that if someone were to come in and ask, ‘What is yoga?’ we’d be able to find class for them.”
Those thinking that classes in the non-heated room will be a breeze, though, would be sorely mistaken, if not just plain sore. The Roots Flow class I took with instructor Samantha Wyman had the same flavor of anatomical precision that I encountered in my class with Snow and, though it wasn’t heated, I was definitely sweating. Wyman, like all good yoga teachers, has a novelist’s ability to describe exactly what to do with your body (“Imagine a piece of string tied around the crown of your head”) and an upbeat aura that puts students at ease.
“Sometimes, you really want to sweat,” Jefferson said. “Other times, you’ve just had a long day of work. You got out of a hot sweaty, car ride, and you are looking for something more restorative.”
Why they do it
At the close of my first class at Soho Yoga, I stepped out of the studio, grabbed some water and went to the bathroom. I was packing up my things to go, when I realized something was amiss, or more accurately, missing: my T-shirt.
I had never done heated yoga before visiting Soho, in large part because I had some preconceived notions about what it would be like. I worried I would encounter a steamy crowd of exhibitionists, Type-As so focused on sweating that they missed the deeper benefits yoga could provide. Shedding clothing would seem only to perpetuate this. But I started perspiring about 30 seconds after setting foot in class and, after looking around at the mixed and minimally clothed crowd, decided I would set my shirt aside.
Kim Kahl, another student in my TPT Athlete class, also had never done heated yoga before joining Soho. She was familiar with yoga asanas, but was skeptical that adding heat to the mix would make the practice different, let alone more enjoyable. She said that the instructors elevated the experience beyond “an hour in a sweatlodge” and she was surprised at how quickly classes went by.
“At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it,” said Kahl, a Hermosa resident. “But after the first class I was hooked.”
Once class ended, I retraced my steps, and found my T-shirt in the studio, right where I had left it. I slipped it over my head, its just-out-of-the-dryer warmth settling nicely on my back. It was then that I realized how wrong I had been about what my experience at Soho would be like. Forgetting where I’d left my shirt came from a feeling more potent than the haze of dehydration or exhaustion. It was rooted in the sensation that the best sort of exercise provides: that of being temporarily swept away from the concerns of everyday life.
“We opened because we’re fans of yoga,” Niva said. “We’re the most stoked people here.” B
