Yoga is still practiced in airports, offices, prisons, and schools. What it has lost is its standing as the default symbol of American wellness — the practice a person named when they wanted to signal that they were healthy, spiritually minded, and self-aware. Rheana Murray’s Atlantic report on the studio economy argues the change is structural rather than a matter of fashion, and that it tracks a larger shift in what Americans mean by being well.
The studios are selling less of it
Yoga studios have always run on thin margins. The pandemic closed independents, YogaWorks filed for bankruptcy, and in 2020 The New York Times asked whether the New York yoga studio was finished. Even after the fitness industry recovered, many studios kept struggling — costs, competition from other workout styles, and students who stayed with the at-home practice they built during lockdown. In May, a studio near Murray’s home in the Hudson Valley emailed a plea for students to return, calling the business “unsustainable.”
The counter-evidence is real: ClassPass and Walla both say yoga remains one of the top choices at boutique fitness studios. But the same platforms show something else. Walla’s “veteran” studios — open more than three years — cut yoga class supply by 25 percent this year. More than 40 percent of ClassPass’s yoga studios also took Pilates reservations in April, and Mindbody reports the share of its yoga studios offering Pilates grew more than 20 percent from 2023 to 2025. Teachers on Reddit trade notes about low attendance and sculpt classes pushing yoga off the schedule. Suzanne Davis, an Oregon studio owner, describes adding lifting classes and wall-mounted resistance machines as a “no-brainer.” Studios have rent to pay, so they meet customers where they are, even when that place is no longer a mat.
How yoga got here
When yoga first spread in the United States, fitness was not the point. Andrea R. Jain, a religious-studies professor and the author of Selling Yoga, tells Murray that during the late-1960s counterculture Americans were drawn to the practice because it was “exotic” — a radically “other” alternative for people disillusioned with mainstream American religion and values. It was tied to ancient India and to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, and practicing it read as a small rebellion.
Then the gym boom of the ’80s and ’90s pulled the physical side forward; the Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that yoga appealed to people burned out on aerobics and craving something gentler. Celebrity endorsement finished the job: Sting shirtless on the cover of Yoga Journal in 1995, Madonna teaching an incredulous Rosie O’Donnell sun salutations and ujjayi breathing on daytime television three years later. “I don’t work out anymore,” she said. “I do yoga.”
Commercialization followed — branded mats and athleisure, franchised studios, influencers, teacher trainings undertaken for self-education rather than careers, namaste hoodies, goat yoga, brewery yoga. Murray’s read is that ubiquity may have caused the decline: devoted practitioners argued the expansion had trivialized the spiritual roots, and the novelty that once attracted outsiders meant less to younger consumers who grew up around more religious and spiritual diversity. Yoga lost its cool.
What replaced it
Part of the problem is taxonomic. Yoga carries a reputation for gentleness and flexibility, and more women have taken up strength training with weights and resistance — many of them over a certain age and heavily marketed to about the bone and muscle loss that comes with getting older. Murray grants that a vinyasa class will fire up the triceps, but yoga is not known for building mass quickly.
The larger shift is in wellness culture itself. Exercising and eating well are no longer sufficient: biohacking is the genre now, with continuous glucose monitors clocking blood-sugar spikes in real time and $400 titanium rings tracking heart-rate variability and REM sleep, all in service of 24/7 self-improvement. Yoga’s ethic runs the other way — letting go of ego and striving, and surrender. Those principles sit awkwardly in a culture organized around optimization, which is also what happened to the body-positivity movement as GLP-1s rose and sculpting and shrinking came back into fashion.
The counter-current
There is a signal pointing the other way. The Global Wellness Summit’s 2026 trends report suggests the appetite for maximizing every moment has peaked: “Optimization itself has become a stressor.” Laura Munkholm, president of Walla, tells Murray she knows plenty of people who have abandoned tracking altogether. “People are shifting into a conversation of I don’t care what the numbers are. I just want to live well.”
Two caveats are worth holding onto. The hard numbers here measure class supply and boutique bookings, not total participation, and the platforms supplying them have an interest in the trends they describe. “Yoga is dead” was one former teacher’s hyperbole, and Murray flags it as such. But if wellness seekers are now looking for something restorative rather than something measurable, the practice they abandoned may be the obvious candidate — which is roughly where Murray leaves it, with a light hand and the observation that she may have just the activity for them.
Read the full story at The Atlantic.