As morning sunlight pours through the window of a second-floor studio in New York's Flatiron District, Nick Lachey and I are both on the ground, contorting our bodies and dripping in sweat. If this isn't pornographic enough for you, consider that about 30 other people are also here, hot and moist and semi-naked, and we've all signed consent forms so that cameramen can film it and post it on the Internet.
Yep, it's pretty porn-y up in this hot yoga sesh: a 98-degree class with 98 Degrees, the semi-legendary boy band best known for the 1998 ballad "I Do (Cherish You)," as heard on the soundtrack to Notting Hill. The class is part of Bud Light's Up For Whatever Summer Bucket List campaign. When the invitation arrived in my inbox, I at first found myself assaulted by the same conflicting emotions I'd faced as a middle-schooler who stumbled across 98 Degrees' music: enticed, embarrassed that I was enticed—because: This is, like, totally for chicks, right?—and then a sort of meta-embarrassment about my own gender-shaming. But then I thought to myself: I'm a grown-ass man now! I am Up For Whatever! You're damn right I'm doing hot yoga with Nick Lachey, and if he wants to bring along his younger brother and former bandmate Drew Lachey to join us in our motherfucking sun salutations, then I am up for that too.
I arrive early and ascend the two flights of stairs. The room at the top smells like a eucalyptus plant left out in a locker room. I sign a form consenting to be touched by the lead yogi (is Nick Lachey going to touch me?), and also a medical waiver where the emergency contact section only provides one line for a phone number. I think very hard about drawing a second line, just so they have my mom's home _and _cell. My fellow students include athletic girls in all shades of Lululemon and two guys wearing their hair in samurai topknots. These guys crush yoga. You can just tell. I myself am wearing an old SEC T-shirt. Later when Nick Lachey sees me, he'll just say, "SEC. You're no stranger to [points at cooler full of Bud Light]."
The yoga room is awash in Bud Light logos. We find our nametags on our blue Bud Light yoga mats, complete with white and blue Bud Light towel. I'm in the second row of about eight or nine rows of four mats, surrounded by the topknot guys and many, many limber women.
"We always used to say the best place for a guy to go, if they wanted to meet girls, was a boy band concert," Drew Lachey would tell me later.
"Second—and a close second—is a hot yoga class," Nick Lachey adds.
Soon, a fit blonde woman named Donna comes out and, with cameras rolling behind and around her, puts us into child's pose, or "Balasana" in the native tongue. This pose is meant to be a "restful" one, in which you sit back on your knees, resting your weight between your hips and your forehead on the floor. My forehead's on the floor, but my knees feel like they might snap, so while everyone else is back on their haunches preparing for the more difficult poses to come, I rest with my ass in the air like a giraffe who'd just had his two front legs shot out from under him by that Minnesota dentist.
Eventually, Donna tells us to "slooowly" come out of our pose, and face front. And BOOM! There they are at the front of the class: Nick Lachey and Drew Lachey. Donna smiles wide, and while I can't see everyone behind me, apparently we didn't quite match her enthusiasm, because at the end of the class the Bud Light folks will make us fake the entrance all over again to get the proper level of excitement, which points to the real issue at hand: We don't really drink Bud Light because we're Up For Whatever; we're Up For Whatever because we drink Bud Light, and it's 8:00 a.m. and we've had no Bud Light.
"Are you guys ready to check hot yoga with 98 Degrees off your Summer Bucket List?!" Nick Lachey asks the class, totally natural and unscripted, and it strikes me as an oddly particular, relatively obscure thing to have on a bucket list, like "Laser Tag with O-Town!" or "Mini-Golf with Boyz II Men!"
Nick Lachey and Drew Lachey now take over, flanking Donna and reading poses from a kind of yoga setlist on the floor. The poses have been cleverly renamed things like "your friend has serious FOMO pose" or "what should I caption this Instagram pose," which makes me feel many ways, but mostly sad about being a Millennial.
Drew Lachey is the more advanced yogi of the two and it shows.
"As I've gotten older, I've gotten more away from weight training and more into yoga and Pilates and stuff," he says. "So this is kind of more in my wheelhouse right now."
Nick Lachey and I struggle together. He's sweaty and a little out of breath and I am too. He later gives me a breakdown of what went wrong.
"A couple of poses there, I was trying super hard and holding the breath. That's not a good approach."
He falls over once too, when trying to come out of a posture that brought both of us face-to-face with our inflexibility: the eagle pose. It requires wrapping one's legs around one another, one's arms around one another, and squatting.
"That spoke to me," Nick Lachey tells me. "I don't know if it was spiritual. But it was speaking to me."
We work through eight to ten poses, and the class wraps in about a half hour. A cooler of Bud Light is rolled out. It's now 8:30 in the morning, so I wait until it's after 9 and then I open one as Nick Lachey tells me that One Direction's Harry Styles strikes him as a "yog-er". Drew Lachey says he'd like to see 'NSYNC's Joey Fatone do hot yoga, but "Fatone from maybe five years ago."
I head for the door with my half-empty Bud Light, through a crowd of damp compatriots, and leave the Flatiron apartment feeling a little bit like I just had a one-night stand: slightly refreshed, somewhat disoriented, sweatier than I'd like to be, and with embarrassingly sore calves from some unusual positions. With the morning sun waxing I head south on Fifth Avenue, still unsure what a Namaste is, but pretty confident I never found it.
Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQNew York City