People participate in a mass yoga session on International Yoga Day in Times Square on June 21, 2023 in New York City. The CDC finds about 1 in 6 adults in the U.S. practice yoga.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In the U.S., about 1 out of 6 adults say they practice yoga, according to new survey data published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 80% are practicing to improve their health, and some 30% are using it to treat and manage pain.
“Yoga is a used to promote health and well-being,” says Nazik Elgaddal, an IT specialist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored on the topic.” The stretching and strengthening exercise has been shown to and help with some types of neck and back pain.
The data comes from the 2022 National Health Interview Survey, and is published in a June 2024 data brief. , the NHIS includes questions on complementary health, including yoga.
A previous analysis showed that complementary approaches in the U.S. have grown in popularity over the past twenty years. in that time, going from being practiced by 5% of the adult population in 2002 to 16% in 2022.
In that time, yoga has become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to parse, says , a senior research fellow at the Global Wellness Institute, which studies the economics of the . “There are lots of people doing [yoga] on different online platforms – Peloton, Apple Fitness, Netflix, Youtube” to name a few, Yeung says, “If you ask a consumer which part of their [subscription] spending is for fitness and which part is for entertainment, it’s all bundled,” she says.
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“Parts of the yoga practice are taken out of the context of yoga and put somewhere else…to the point where people are almost unwittingly doing it,” she says.
D’Orsogna traces the current yoga wave to the late 1960’s, when The Beatles brought an explosion of interest to the work of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation after a trip to India.
“[Western adopters] considered it to be ‘more authentic’ yoga because it is connected directly to India, as opposed to what had been cobbled together within the United States [before that],” she says, noting a periodic cropping up of interest in yoga in U.S. pop culture that stretches back to the naturalist philosophers of the 1800’s.
That thread of interest waxed with the new age movement in the 1970’s, and waned with the aerobics fitness trend in the 80’s, but it’s since gained a firm foothold in U.S. mainstream culture, D’Orsogna says. She says the practice is linked with women’s empowerment and self-actualization. “The overarching history of yoga in the United States is that people who popularize it use it for whatever the cultural moment calls for,” she says.
– stress relief, pain relief and cultivating a connection between the mind and the body – can be obtained for little to no money, Yeung says.
“There are tons of free opportunities online and in communities,” she says, such as videos on Youtube that offer high quality instruction. At its core, practicing yoga postures requires a clear surface and a willingness to stretch.
