Trend Alert: The Morning-After Workout

It's Sunday morning, and your dry mouth, pounding head and churning stomach are telling you to stay in bed. What's the last thing you want to do with this evil hangover? Head to the gym.

Yet some medical researchers, exercise experts and even old wives say that might be one way to beat those morning-after blues. If you can handle it, getting your blood flowing and boosting your metabolism will move alcohol and its associated toxins out of your system much faster than groaning on the couch. Questionable stomach contents aside, you're less coordinated and more injury-prone after a night of drinking, so you might want to skip your usual spin class or high-impact aerobics. Crunch gyms had this in mind when they developed the "morning-after workout." It's essentially a 45-minute extra-gentle yoga class, but it's not called that to avoid the association with Crunch's typical, tough power yoga classes.

"Compared to most of our yoga classes," said Kate Duyn, who teaches the class in New York City, the morning-after workout "is very slow and quiet so it's tolerable to someone who might be hung over. It's geared to the non-yoga person who needs a gentle workout and more of a restorative class. There's no oms, no chanting and not a lot of crazy arm balances or things like that."

Instead, teachers treat the students like invalids: keeping the lights dim and the music soft, and always suggesting rest if a certain pose or action suddenly induces nausea or fatigue. The focus is on feeling better, not on pushing toward any fitness goals. The class starts out in child's pose (crouched with your head on the floor and legs tucked under your chest), to which you'll return often for breaks between more active poses. After getting on all fours and alternating between arching and curving the back in "cat-cow," you'll move into downward dog (making an inverted V with hands and feet flat on the ground and butt pointed up in the air) and then some slow sun salutations. For you non-yogis, that's a series of movements in which you flow from standing into lunges, downward dog, upward dog (toes tucked in, hands on the ground, back arched, face to the ceiling) and back to standing. While these aren't exactly jumps and kicks, all that pointing the head towards the ground and the ceiling definitely starts to get the blood flowing. The peak of this pseudo-cardio segment is when you switch between downward and upward dog 21 times, but again, the instructor reminds anyone who starts to feel woozy to sit back in child's pose and chill. Drinking plenty of water through the whole process will also alleviate your symptoms.

The other important element to the class is twisting poses ‑- in a lunge, seated, pigeon pose and ankle-to-knee pose. Duyn explains that the twists massage organs like the pancreas, kidneys and liver that are working overtime to rid your body of those pesky toxins. During the stretches, the teacher emphasizes letting go of physical and emotional tension. As class winds down, you'll do your only upside-down pose, the shoulder stand, in which you prop up your back with your hands and point your body straight up in the air, feet first, with your neck, shoulders and head still on the ground. This stimulates the thyroid gland, yet another key instrument in metabolism. Finally, you finish with what Duyn calls a back-neutralizing position: a bridge/half wheel with all your weight resting on a block under your sacrum. After this, the sighs around the room are audible.

If you're not a Crunch member, you can get the same benefits from a gentle or basic hatha yoga class; you just won't get the specific references to your night of hard partying or that pounding head. While it's hard to prove that this will rid you of a hangover, and it's just as enjoyable if you skipped the booze the night before, Duyn offers a different guarantee: "Everyone is in a better mood when they're done." That should be enough motivation to get you out of bed!