To wonder if yoga is becoming less popular now?

[GardenDreams]

I have been practicing for 8 years. We had one local class, a kind of fast ashtanga with a pretty dire teacher for a few years, which I stopped attending after 6 months.
Around 2019 our local class count grew to around 5, mostly nameless types which just endlessly went through sun salutations for an hour.

The popularity seemed to grow rapidly through lockdowns and has now petered out altogether. The original class finally shut it's doors a few weeks ago. No one here seems to be bothered anymore.

Has anyone else noticed this?
I know a lot of these things are prone to fashion and fads, but I do sense a general drop in interest all around in the past year or so. Online spaces that chat about yoga seem less lively too.

I am wondering if there is a new thing people are getting in to, perhaps?
I asked two people that I am familiar with why they stopped going to classes, and one said she had a small knee injury that grew worse with her teacher's instruction to ease it.
The other said she felt more at home with pilates.

Anyone else noticed it?

I also think many current yoga teacher training courses are very poor and you have people qualifying without the required knowledge to teach safely.

It doesn’t need to be either or. I do more strength training with heavy weights for sure but Pilates helps my back and core.

Pilates hits the smaller muscles that we don’t work in the gym. And loads of posture work.

It’s too expensive for me now at a small local studio (has won awards). I can do it online for free.

Pilates has been pushed more locally for backs and strength work.

I started practising about 4 years ago, just from home with YouTube and I still love it now, also do HIIT and cycling. I don't think it has got less popular. During Covid I think a lot of people reevaluated their lives and lifestyles and people setting up small businesses and going self employed has sky rocketed. My Next Door app is absolutely littered with handy men, yoga classes, MLMs, nail technicians, dog walkers, baby sitters, cat sitters, house sitters, people trying to sell crap crafty stuff. I think they have a very rose tinted view of what being a business owner involves though and I do believe it will die off when people return to normal employment when they realise it isn't as easy as it appears.

I used to be into yoga myself but encountered so many teachers who, as you say, just do sun salutations all hour long and want to charge £20 per hour. I prefer mat pilates as it is a lot better for my back, hips, etc.

Jessica Valante pilates YouTube

I also think a lot of the youtuber favourites over use downward dog, too. It's a great transitional asana for me, but am a bit tired of the same old stuff online. I do prefer a more traditional Hatha approach though.

Agree about the market filling up with new ventures and businesses. I have been self employed for 17 years and it's actually taken a dive since covid, so I suppose I've seen the dark side of that. So much more competition in general.

The yoga teachers that worked in my area were pretty awful. I recall one woman not being able to do downward dog without pain and she repeated asked the teacher for tips. At the end of a class where I was still packing up I overheard her telling the student to keep. pushing it and work through the pain

I used to do Ashtanga yoga at the Triyoga near my office, but post-Covid we all stuck with WFH and I found a lovely small class in a local community centre.

The teacher always asks about injuries, offers variations and props & goes round checking on everyone, and varies the practice according to the moon cycle - at the full & new moon times we do moon salutations & restorative / yin yoga, at other times it’s vinyasa. It’s much more fun than the Ashtanga classes were.

For strength I’ve got weightlifting at the local gym.

sounds lovely

Depends where you are I think. The studio I go to in London (not central), runs 50+ Yoga classes a week, all different types/levels. The couple I regularly go to are always fully booked (22 per class). I also went to a leisure centre gym for a little while where the Yoga classes always seemed to be fully booked too.

The plus side of the place I go to is there are so many teachers/types you can try and find a style you like and teachers you gel with. I tried a teacher I hadn’t tried before the other day as I couldn’t attend my regular class time and hated every second of it. Far too advanced despite being an all levels Vinyasa class and offered 0 modifications and seemed visibly irritated at the fact I couldn’t do some of what she was asking. If she was the only teacher there I’d have never returned. I wonder if that’s the case in smaller areas = less teachers = less people able to get into it because there’s less opportunity to love it.

I teach yoga and my aim is to help people improve their mobility and strength rather than flexibility alone. This means engaging muscle groups rather than stretching in an unfocused/floppy way.

Not all teachers have had the anatomy and physiology training to understand this though.
I only teach a few classes a week and the one I run and publicise myself is very popular. The other drop-in class, run by the local authority, less so.

There's been an explosion in the number of yoga teacher training courses over the last few years and, as a result, there a lot more teachers, not all of them good nor authentic.

Is it that there are so many teachers and classes now that they exceed the demand?

The area is saturated round here. It's a hippy part of the country with millions of yoga teachers so they struggle to fill their classes.

If you can't bend over without farting, there may be something wrong with your diet

It’s the time of day of classes though. In my area it’s 7 pm ish so it’s a bit tricky after dinner! I have a healthy diet but eat lots of fibre and veg .😂

The yoga teachers that worked in my area were pretty awful. I recall one woman not being able to do downward dog without pain and she repeated asked the teacher for tips. At the end of a class where I was still packing up I overheard her telling the student to keep. pushing it and work through the pain

That's not like the yoga teachers I've had. They've been very much, you know your body and its limits, and usually given different options for poses, and to recognise the difference between working a muscle and pain and to stop beforethe latter. My current teacher once showed us x-rays of different pelvises to explain some people will never be able to do certain poses who their fullest expression, without cutting off bits of bone - you can stretch soft tissue over time, but dolid bits will stay solid. She's especially keen on protecting knees and shoulders, though I think that's partly because of people in the class telling her about injuries, that she focusses on them.

Anyway, the class I go to is always busy, but she is a good teacher. I haven't been on a yoga retreat for a couple of years because I was made redundant and couldn't afford it, so I don't know how they're doing, but the ones I've done before still running, going by the mails I get.

Yeh we definitely had a bad run of luck with teachers here. It was a sort of sped up vinyasa with no real interaction, could have gained far more knowledge watching a video with Adrienne.

I've been practising yoga for 30+ years and I have recently 'defected' to pilates. The class is women only, subsidised by the LA and the instructor is very jolly... it's also only 45 mins and starts at 6 30pm. Yoga starts at 7.30 on a less convenient day. Many of the good teachers in the past just moved on. Yoga teaching can be a bit of a lifestyle stop gap. I still go sometimes, practice with Adrienne every January and found a teacher who runs relatively affordable weekend breaks - I got a cancellation, she fills her breaks with repeat custom - ladies of a certain age and the occasional guy.

Yoga is booming in my village and the next village too. There are two dedicated yoga centres and individual classes too. Even the 7am classes are full!

Move with Nicole is good for pilates. At my gym yoga is still popular but not as popular as Pilates which is very difficult to book in for

For me, it's that I can do basic yoga at home for free with a youtube video, but I will go to a Reformer Pilates class and pay for it because I can't replicate it at home (unless I want to spend 3 grand on a machine).
Plus strength training is definitely more popular in the last few years, and RP covers that.

There can be. Joesph Pilates developed a reformer machine.

Definitely still thriving in my quite-far-out part of SE London, lots of classes to choose from, well attended by a wide variety of students and high quality of teaching. I'm quite surprised to hear what you say! I guess I think of yoga as being quite timeless

lol!😂

I really enjoy doing Yoga, teacher is good

I don't get involved with the spiritual side and am not keen on that aspect of it