Catherine Elsworth

Vigorous yoga at dawn not your thing? Well, what if there was a boot camp to ease you in that was so much fun you could almost forget where you were? Think: dark room, loud music, a DJ mixing beats, glow sticks, colorful lights and random footage of skateboarders and astronauts playing across the walls. Sounds like a club, right? And there’s more: Roaming the room while you sweat is a tall figure clutching a stuffed toy cat, BurnKitty, who’s going to help regulate your Chaturanga—the kitten is placed behind your elbows as you drop down from plank, if your elbow hits the cat, uh oh, he's dead. Better fix that now—if you can stop laughing. Welcome to the Burn Yoga Bootcamp, two weeks of 6am "morning yoga fury" and good times starting January 4 that promises flow yoga with cardio, core work and strength building. And plenty of ab-working laughs. The boot camp is the brainchild of Ryan Orrico, a former personal trainer who launched his dawn Burn class at Maha Yoga in Brentwood two years ago. Next month's boot camp is Orrico’s third and, despite the early hour, he’s been known to pack the studio with as many as 70 people per session. "It’s the class I’d want to take if I were taking a yoga class at 6am," says Orrico, 34, who likens Burn to what would happen "if a fun, metabolic workout had a baby with really sweet yoga class. I look at it like sneaking the medicine in with the chocolate—it’s fun from the outside but vigorous and challenging once we get started." The boot camp runs