Welcome to Power Yoga, Baptiste style.

Forget all your yoga assumptions. Forget the harmonic bells and meditative minions, forget the chanting and the pretzel-shaped poses. Forget that you're boycotting new-age anything.

It's the 21st century, this is Boston, and Baptiste's Power Yoga rules.

For centuries the ancient yoga masters and mystics ruled minds and bodies with a physical and mental discipline that required a lifetime of near monastic study to perfect. But some in the American fitness industry realized that their Type A clients would respond to the inherent benefits of yoga - flexibility, strength, stamina, stress-reduction, weight loss - if it was packaged more like a workout than a religion - voila! Power Yoga!

"This is a new yoga," says Baptiste, sitting comfortably cross-legged on the studio's wooden floor, "a non-dogmatic, progressive yoga," and one that focuses on results, not ritual.

For starters its not like any workout you have ever done. Forget air conditioning, cooling fans, or even open windows. The studio is sealed tight and heated to 90 degrees, more like a convection oven than gym. That's your first tip this isn't going to be the kind, gentle, contemplate your navel type of yoga.

Instead, you sweat. The stinging in your eyes, soaking through your clothes, dripping off the end of your nose and splashing onto your mat kind of sweat and you don't stop for nearly two hours as the class keeps going and going and going.

"Healing heat," Baptiste explains of the sweltering class, "when solid heats it becomes liquid and you are more able to move. Shaking and baking your muscles, I call it."

Call it what you will, Baptiste has demystified yoga, given it a very American availability, and teaches each class more as exercise with a little enlightenment on the side. It's yoga as exercise and exercise as therapy. What makes it Power is Baptiste's adaptation of traditional yoga poses into

"I'm kicking myself for not discovering yoga sooner," says former Boston Bruins great Cam Neely, only 34, who was forced into early retirement because of persistent hip and knee injuries. "Now I'm just looking to improve the quality of my everyday life through greater flexibility in my hip."

Neely is just one on a list of Baptiste clients which stretches from coast to coast, and includes Helen Hunt, Raquel Welch, Chynna Philips, the starting line of the Philadelphia Eagles, and members of the Kennedy clan.

The secret of Power Yoga's success, Baptiste says, is in taking the best of Eastern traditions while recognizing American's need for a vigorous workout without destroying our aging joints in the process.

"The old fitness mentality is over because it failed us, leaving us a nation of aerobic refugees," he says.

"Yoga is philosophy in motion," he says, "there is no quick fix, no short cut to physical health and fitness, just a process, and in yoga the goal is the process."