‘Boot Camp’ Yoga at Pure Yoga and Circuit of Change

Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

Circuit of Change classes, led by Brian Delmonico in a Union Square studio, fuse yoga, martial arts and cardio exercises.

AN ideal exercise routine might involve strength training to build muscle, cardio sessions to get the heart pumping, and yoga classes to improve flexibility and calm the mind. But many of us can barely commit to a few workouts a week, let alone a multipronged attack.

Enter “boot camp” yoga, a breed of classes in New York that combines all these essentials into one intense calorie-burning session.

Bassett’s Bootcamp, for example, is a 75-minute class offered as a four-week series at Pure Yoga, which has two Manhattan studios. Created by the yoga teacher Loren Bassett, it is held in a room heated to 100 degrees and blends vinyasa-style stretching with high-intensity cardio intervals of jump squats, jump lunges and mountain climbers. Strength work involving curls and presses with free weights; abdominal moves are also integrated. The only rest comes when you hold a plank position for 20 seconds.

“My yoga students were asking for a workout that would be extra challenging, and I am a big advocate of cross-training,” Ms. Bassett said in a telephone interview. “Here you get everything in.”

While yoga alone can help to build strength and increase flexibility, it’s not considered a major calorie burner or a particularly taxing cardiovascular workout, said Michele Olson, an exercise physiologist at Auburn University at Montgomery, in Alabama. “Even power yoga burns only up to seven calories a minute,” she said. “Running a 10-minute mile burns upward of 10 calories a minute, and plyometrics is upward of 12. So if you’re taking yoga classes, which add these moves, you can double your calorie burn.”

If working out in a heated room for more than an hour is too intimidating, Circuit of Change, with a studio in Union Square, is a tamer (though hardly tame) alternative. The program’s founder, Brian Delmonico, labels his 60-minute classes “for the yoga mind and the boot-camp body.”

As a triathlete and a muay thai martial artist, he wanted to create an activity that would blend his various disciplines and be rooted in yoga. A typical session — there are more than a 100 a month — begins with meditation followed by yoga postures and martial arts moves like fast punching and kicks. He also includes cardio intervals of running in place and jumping jacks.

“It’s a hard-core workout and Zen at the same time,” Mr. Delmonico said by phone.

Juan Carlos Diaz, a 32-year-old actor who lives in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, has been taking five to six classes a week at Circuit of Change for several months. He said that he dropped nearly 20 pounds from his 5-foot-8-inch frame and that he finds the grueling workouts spiritual and grounding.

“I used to run every day before discovering this,” he said. “It was O.K., but I never saw the dramatic physical or mental benefits I get here.”