MENDHAM - The temperature is ramped up to 98 degrees while a group of men and women sweat out their toxins while concentrating on their breathing.

It is called hot yoga and it is the newest twist on a timeless practice.

The latest hot yoga facility is the Inferno Hot Yoga Studio in the Mendham Village Shopping Center on Route 24. Livingston resident Dorothy Dootsie Risch, 41, opened the studio on April 14 after giving up a job as a medical assistant.

Before 2011, Risch had never practiced yoga but her arrival to the field has come at a blistering pace.

Married with five sons, Risch said that prior to opening the studio, she worked for seven years for a Roseland pediatrician. A recreational runner, she began to suffer chronic headaches and a painful, bulging disc. She was using headache medication and had an epidural shot to help reduce the pain. None of it worked very well.

Hot Yoga

About two years ago, she stopped in to a newly opened hot yoga studio in Livingston and within two weeks, she was hooked.

The next thing I was off headache medication and there were no more neck problems, she said.

Risch was so impressed that she enrolled in the Samadhi Sun Yoga Academy in Stirling. She completed a 200-hour program and was certified as an instructor with the National Yoga Alliance. Risch also gained certification in the healing art of Reiki.

She spoke with her husband, Ronald, a retired Livingston police officer, and by last fall, she decided she would open her own hot yoga studio. Risch checked the Internet and spoke with a friend from Brookside before deciding on the storefront formerly occupied by a Verizon store.

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Yoga for those who like it hot in Mendham