You’re not imagining it: Everyone really is doing yoga.
OK, maybe not everyone. But the ancient discipline, which promises spiritual enlightenment along with long, lean muscles, has indeed boomed in popularity over the past several years.
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Yoga is now practiced by 7 percent of U.S. adults, or 15 million people, according to a market study conducted by Harris International this summer for Yoga Journal. That’s up 28.5 percent in the last two years. And 75 percent of fitness clubs now offer some form of yoga class, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association
Just call us the yoga nation.
Judith Hanson Lasater, a longtime yoga teacher and the author of “30 Essential Yoga Poses,” said the flurry of interest in yoga is really the second to hit the U.S.
“I started yoga practice myself in 1970, when there was a mini-wave of yoga, with the Beatles and the Maharishi and sitar in rock music,” she said. “There was a big cultural divide, and this was sort of part of the counterculture. It wasn’t just yoga; it was how you ate and how you dressed.”
Inevitably, the yoga boom has its dark side too.
Bikram Choudhury has ignited a fiery debate by threatening to sue those who infringe on his copyright by using the term “Bikram” or teaching his patented pose sequence without forking over a franchise fee.
And if yoga is changing Americans, so, too, are Americans changing yoga, with a result that looks distinctly different from the tradition’s roots in India.
For one thing, students in the U.S. are embracing sweaty, strenuous varieties of the discipline, lumped together under the term Power Yoga. Teachers are hanging mirrors in their studios, piping in music and offering hybrid classes such as Disco Yoga and PiYo (Pilates and yoga combined).
“Yoga’s in the mainstream now, it’s in the market, so it’s going to get the same vibe as the rest of the culture,” Santa Fe instructor Tias Little said. “Which is a little bit sad, but it’s good because people get exposed to it.”
Types of yoga
It’s impossible to comprehensively define every type of yoga practiced in the United States, but here are brief explanations of a few popular styles:
Ashtanga: A vigorous and athletic form of yoga that is light on meditation.
Bikram: A distinct series of poses performed in a superheated room.
Iyengar: This slower-moving form of yoga uses props and blocks to assist the less flexible.
Power yoga: Any variety of yoga that incorporates strength-building and aerobic components.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Drew Sottardi ([email protected])