What Happened to Yoga?

At a recent Pilates class, where I pumped and pulsed under infrared heat panels until my fingertips were sweating, I ran into a former yoga teacher of mine, our mats inches apart in the neon-lit room.

Afterward, I said hi and told her that I hadn’t seen a yoga class that packed in a while.

She shrugged.

“Yoga,” she told me, “is dead.” She was being hyperbolic, of course—yoga is still plenty popular.

In some ways, it’s more mainstream than ever.

People practice it in airports, offices, prisons, schools.

But her words illuminated something I’ve noticed: Yoga, it seems, is no longer the defining symbol of holistic health in America that it used to be.

The decline has been building for a while.

Yoga studios, which have long been plagued by razor-thin profit margins, took a hit during the pandemic.

Independent studios closed; YogaWorks, a California-based chain, filed for bankruptcy .

In September 2020, The New York Times asked , “Is This the End of the New York Yoga Studio?” Even after the fitness industry rebounded and people returned to in-person workouts, many yoga studios continued to struggle for all sorts of reasons—rising costs, increased competition from other workout styles, the decision by some students to stick with at-home practices established during the pandemic.

On Reddit , teachers commiserated about low class attendance.

In May, a beloved studio near my home in the Hudson Valley emailed a desperate plea for students to return, calling its current business “unsustainable.” [ Read: The enduring appeal of being hot ] Plenty of studios are doing just fine: Representatives from apps that track fitness attendance, such as ClassPass and Walla, told me that yoga remains one of the top choices at boutique fitness studios.

But the data reveal something else, too.