What Happened to Yoga?
The Atlantic · LC · trust 41/100
It used to be the peak symbol of wellness. Now many studios can barely stay open.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. August 31, 2026, 7:30 AM ET Share Save 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.”
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. Many yoga studios are succeeding by offering less yoga. Walla’s “veteran” yoga studios, defined as those opened for more than three years, have cut yoga class supply by 25 percent this year. ClassPass said that in April, more than 40 percent of its yoga studios also had reservations for Pilates classes. Mindbody, another booking platform, said that the number of its yoga studios offering Pilates grew more than 20 percent from 2023 to 2025. On the yoga Subreddit, people frequently gripe about Pilates and sculpt classes bumping yoga from the schedule.
Fitness trends come and go. But the workouts people choose also reflect the contemporary understanding of what it means to be well. For years, that meant yoga and its promise of stress reduction and mindfulness. In today’s world of fitness-maxxing and social-media-driven obsession over image, though, the cultural ideal seems to have shifted from inner peace to outward perfection.
When yoga first came into vogue in the United States, physical fitness wasn’t the primary goal. During the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, many Americans were drawn to yoga because it was “exotic,” Andrea R. Jain, a religious-studies professor at Indiana University at Indianapolis and the author of Selling Yoga , told me. At the time, some people disillusioned with mainstream American religion and values were “looking for something radically ‘other’ than the traditions they had been brought up in,” Jain said. Yoga was a compelling answer: It originated in ancient India and is deeply intertwined with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Practicing yoga was seen as a rebellious act, an alternative path to spirituality and enlightenment.
Over the next few decades, yoga transformed from a fringe activity into a lifestyle empire. During the gym boom of the ’80s and ’90s, people became much more enticed by the practice’s physical aspects; the Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that yoga was appealing to people burned out from aerobics and craving a gentler workout. In the mid-’90s, “integrative medicine,” a whole-person approach to health, became more widely accepted, and likely gave some of yoga’s messaging more credence. Celebrities also started endorsing the practice’s benefits. Sting appeared shirtless on the cover of Yoga Journal in 1995, one lithe arm wrapped around a leg; three years later, Madonna taught an incredulous Rosie O’Donnell how to do sun salutations and ujjayi breathing on daytime television. They touted deeper connections among their mind, body, and soul, and flaunted the strong bodies yoga had helped them achieve. Madonna told O’Donnell: “I don’t work out anymore. I do yoga.”
In 2004, when I took my first class, the commercialization of yoga was well under way. The industry had spawned countless brands of yoga mats and athleisure, then franchised studios, and, eventually, Instagram influencers. (My mom, who practiced yoga in the ’70s and ’80s, recalls students using only towels or blankets, and wearing whatever comfortable clothes they already owned.) Soon, yoga became more than a workout—it was a lifestyle, at times even an identity. If someone said they were into yoga, the assumption was that they were healthy, spiritually minded, and self-aware. Many dedicated students (myself included) signed up for yoga teacher training , some without any intention of making a career of it but rather to further educate themselves in the practice. Etsy vendors sold hoodies that said namaste , a Sanskrit word commonly spoken at the end of a yoga class. And kitschy iterations such as goat yoga—in which playful farm animals tramp all over students’ backs—emerged, geared more toward entertainment than mindful practice.
Yoga’s ubiquity, however, may have triggered its cultural decline in America. The most devout practitioners started arguing that the expansion had trivialized yoga’s spiritual roots. (One former instructor told me he used to teach brewery yoga—which, yes, involved beer; years later, the memory makes him cringe.) The perceived novelty of the practice,…
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