Search for “yoga” today and you’ll mostly see bodies: flexible, toned, photographed mid-pose on a beach. It’s no surprise that many people think of yoga as a kind of exercise, somewhere between stretching and Pilates.
The short answer is: modern posture classes are exercise, and yoga is much more than that. Here’s how the two became confused.
What yoga was before it was a workout
For most of its history, yoga meant disciplines of the mind and spirit. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras define yoga as the stilling of the mind and give postures three short verses. The Bhagavad Gita describes yoga as evenness of mind and skill in action. Medieval hatha yoga did develop postures, breath practices and cleansing methods, but as preparation for meditation and higher states, not as fitness.
In 19th-century India, many educated Indians and British observers saw the wandering hatha yogis, with their extreme austerities, as embarrassing or suspect. When Swami Vivekananda introduced yoga to Western audiences in Chicago in 1893, and in his book Raja Yoga (1896), he focused on philosophy and meditation and largely dismissed the physical practices.
How the poses took centre stage
The posture-focused yoga most people know today largely took shape in the 20th century:
- Physical culture was booming worldwide: gymnastics, bodybuilding and exercise systems for health and national strength. In India this mixed with a revival of interest in indigenous traditions.
- In the 1930s, T. Krishnamacharya taught at the Mysore palace, developing flowing sequences of postures for young students. Historians have pointed out that some of his methods resemble the gymnastics of the day as much as older hatha texts.
- His students, B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi, took posture-based yoga to Europe and America from the 1950s onwards.
- In the West, it found a market as health, fitness and stress relief, and later as a lifestyle industry of clothing, studios, festivals and teacher trainings.
None of this was a conspiracy. Posture practice was easy to teach in groups, easy to see working, and easy to sell. Ethics, breath and meditation are quieter, slower and harder to photograph.
What tends to get left out
When yoga is taught mainly as exercise, a lot of the tradition quietly drops away:
- The ethical foundation: the yamas and niyamas, the first two limbs.
- The breath as practice in itself: pranayama as a discipline, not just “breathe in, breathe out”.
- Meditation: the actual goal of the posture practice.
- The texts and the philosophy: why any of this is done.
- The idea of a teacher-student relationship over years, rather than a drop-in class.
A quick test for any class: Does it give time to stillness, not just movement? Is breath taught with care? Is there any mention of why the poses are done? A class can be a great workout and still be yoga, if those threads are there.
What the texts say a posture is for
Patanjali’s teaching on posture is just this:
स्थिरसुखमासनम्
sthira-sukham āsanam
Posture should be steady and easy.
Yoga Sutras 2.46
The next two sutras say this comes from relaxing effort and resting the mind on the infinite, and that the result is freedom from being disturbed by opposites such as heat and cold. The point of the posture is stillness, not performance. We look at all three sutras in what the Yoga Sutras actually say about asana.
So, is yoga just exercise?
The way it’s often sold, it can be. The way it was taught for most of its history, it never was. The good news is that the two aren’t enemies: a posture practice done with steady breath and a quiet mind is already a step down the older path. You just have to know the path is there.
Where to go next
Questions people ask
Is yoga a form of exercise?
Modern posture classes are a form of exercise, and a good one. But yoga as the tradition defines it is a discipline of the mind. Postures are one of eight limbs, used to prepare the body to sit still for breath work and meditation.
When did yoga become a workout?
Mostly in the 20th century. Teachers such as T. Krishnamacharya in Mysore developed dynamic posture sequences, influenced in part by the gymnastics and physical culture of the time. Their students, including B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi, carried posture-based yoga to the West, where it became a fitness practice.
Is it wrong to do yoga just for fitness?
No. Moving well, breathing well and feeling calmer are all good things. It's simply worth knowing that posture practice is a small part of a much larger tradition, so you know what else is there if you want it.
Sources and further reading
- Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010)
- Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga (Continuum, 2004)
- Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga (1896)
- Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 2.46–2.48