During a moment of downtime, as streaks of afternoon sunlight stream through large windows into the 1,100 square foot main studio at yogapower studio, owner Renee LeBlanc remarks to co-owner Gina Trimarchi, "This is the longest we've just kind of sat in here. It feels nice." Since opening their yoga studio on 740 Main St. in Waltham three weeks ago, Trimarchi and LeBlanc have had few such quiet moments of reflection. But thanks to yoga, they said they rarely get stressed.

"I think yoga makes me more carefree overall," Trimarchi said. "About life, about everything. It is what it is."

There are different forms of yoga but Trimarchi and LeBlanc teach power yoga:

"[Power yoga] takes the flow from ashtanga, the heat from bikram and the breathing of iyengar," Trimarchi said.

More specifically, bikram yoga takes place in a heated room, ashtanga yoga practices the same poses repeatedly and iyengar uses props to assist in postures.

At yogapower, the main studio is heated at 90 to 95 degrees, which might seem very hot, but is actually cooler than many studios choose. Keeping the temperature higher helps to stretch out muscles and keep the body warm. The heat also increases the amount of sweating, which allows the body to rid itself of toxins, like alcohol. LeBlanc said that if it gets any warmer, "the workout becomes an endurance test."

Participants in a yoga workout go through a menagerie of positions, including birds of paradise, crow, eagle, turtle, peacock and pigeon. When LeBlanc and Trimarchi demonstrate most of these, the poses looks painful.

"I got cross-eyed and fell over the first time I saw people doing side crow," LeBlanc said.

But that sort of reaction is part of the learning process that comes with yoga.

"Thank God we learned how to ride bikes when we were kids because you fall off and you skin your knee and you get back on," Trimarchi said. "If you had to learn as an adult, we would just give up."

In order to stick with yoga, LeBlanc and Trimarchi said that it is essential to leave one's ego behind.

"You just do yoga," Trimarchi said. "No one's good at yoga, no one's bad at yoga. You just do yoga."

"It's never a performance, always a practice," LeBlanc added.

As for the difficulty level, while some poses are more challenging than others, anyone can do yoga. Trimarchi has suffered from back and inner ear problems since childhood but has still mastered the exercise.

"People are always afraid that they're not going to be able to do yoga," Trimarchi said. "I am the most inflexible person by nature. If I can do it, anybody can do it."

Yoga provides a total-body workout in a short amount of time. It takes a great deal of strength to balance one's entire bodyweight on a single arm and most of the positions work a number of muscle groups.

These strength-building benefits make yoga popular with men as well as women. Defying the stereotype that men shy away from yoga, yogapower has attracted a number of male clients so far.

"It's just as popular for men because you see so often that football players are doing [yoga] and baseball players are doing it," LeBlanc said.

But it is really the mind that seems to benefit most from these kinds of workouts.

"[Yoga] is just so much into yourself," LeBlanc said. She also believes that the relaxation and concentration honed in yoga make it easier to deal with traffic or talking to her mother. She said it even lessened the pressure that comes from following a certain Boston baseball team.

"It was the only thing that relieved Red Sox stress in 2003," LeBlanc said.

The most critical part of yoga, and the key to this stress alleviation, is breathing.

"It's all about the breathing," Trimarchi said. "The poses are secondary."

The importance of breathing is not limited to its ability to calm someone in the face of a traffic jam.

"It's like fogging up a mirror with your mouth closed," Trimarchi said, describing the correct breathing procedure. "The movement comes from the rib cage. And since it works your abdominals, guess how strong those muscles get?"

Since yogapower is so new, the biggest challenge LeBlanc and Trimarchi have faced is increasing class attendance. One way that yogapower is attempting to build up a clientele is by attracting college students. Several Brandeis students have discovered the studio and have attended classes on at least a once a week basis.

"I've done yoga a couple times before I went [to yogapower] but I had a very good experience because I like that it's a very wholesome workout," Judy Miller '06 said.

Miller attends classes at yogapower about once a week and likes that classes are small, which provides for individual instruction. She also feels that her body has become more toned and that she leaves workouts feeling fresh. But she says that she doesn't go as often as she might because cost is a factor.

The regular price for one class is $12, but yogapower offers a student rate of $10. There is also a 12-class pass available for $120 that is good for 90 days. LeBlanc and Trimarchi say that their prices are competitive with other yoga studios in Waltham, and that if someone feels that cost is an issue, he or she should put it in perspective.

"Taking care of your health is expensive," Trimarchi said. "You can eat at McDonald's, you can eat at Whole Foods. I want to live until I'm 85, not 70. So I eat at Whole Foods."

While yogapower is the only power yoga studio in Waltham, what may truly set it apart is the enthusiasm that LeBlanc and Trimarchi have for their craft.

"We believe so firmly in [yoga]," Trimarchi said. "I really want to share. Look what I found, look what I can do. When you watch someone do their first crow their eyes light up. It's like a little kid eating his first ice cream.