New yoga teaching program at USU inspired by growing student interest

Yoga used to be widely regarded as an abstract form of stretching for hippies and Hindus.

But not anymore. Between 2002 and 2012, yoga practice in the United States nearly doubled, with 21 million adults and 1.7 million children practicing, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, a government agency that researches alternative health and medicine.

And Utah State University is catching on to the nationwide trend, said Emily Perry, a USU yoga teacher.

When Perry started teaching at USU in 2006, only three yoga classes were offered. Now, the university’s 14 yoga classes are in such high demand that class sizes have increased to nearly 40 students per class and waiting lists are often filled. Many students enjoy the classes so much, Perry said, that they retake them “again and again.”

The overwhelming interest in the practice has helped inspire USU’s yoga teachers to create a yoga studies and teacher training program starting in the fall of 2016. Perry said the program will add over a dozen new credits, including new historical, philosophical and theoretical classes.

Students who complete the two-semester, 14-credit program will walk out of school with an accredited 200- or 300- hour yoga teaching certificate, Perry said. Utah State is one of only a handful of universities in the country offering the program, she added.

It’s hard to say why so many USU students are interested in yoga, said Kelly Bradbury, who’s been teaching yoga at Logan’s Whittier Center for years. But she’s noticed there’s been a “movement of movement” around campus, with more and more Aggies realizing the importance of physical exercise.

“I do feel like a lot of younger people are more aware of the benefits of movement,” she said. “Just being on campus, I notice that people are almost always in their workout clothes. You didn’t see that before.”

Students are also becoming more interested in yoga because the practice isn’t tied as closely to Hinduism as it once was, said McKenzie Pitts, a junior in residential landscape design and construction who has taught yoga at the school for one year. Yoga was originally developed in India as a religious practice, she said, but it has deviated from that purpose over the years.

“I think a lot of stigma about yoga is oh, you’re Buddhist or you’re Hindu and you’re praising God with your poses,” Pitts said. “But it doesn’t have to be that.”

Bradbury said spirituality is an important part of the practice, but Westernized yoga focuses more on the physical element than the spiritual.

“You start with something that’s more familiar to us – the physical movement – and then move to the more spiritual part of it,” she said. “That’s how it’s designed. To go from the physical practice to the spiritual one could take a long time.”

People may take interest in the physical expression of a pose, Bradbury said, because pictures of individual poses have been spread over social media that glorify the physical beauty of yoga.

She says yoga can improve strength and flexibility, and many members of the athletic community have started to realize those benefits.

Dakotah Holmes, a USU senior who’s into weightlifting and CrossFit, said he’s recently taken up yoga because he knows it can improve his flexibility. For that reason alone, Holmes is willing to roll out his mat.

“Right now, fitness is fitness, and I just want to be the best that I can be,” he said. “And if that means coming to yoga, I’ll do it.”

Holmes said yoga makes him feel so good that he’s trying to convince his friends to come to classes with him. And that’s how most students find out about the practice, Perry said.

“They fall in love with the practice, and they tell each other, you’ve got to go take yoga,” she said.

Lindsey Boelter, a USU senior, took a beginning class this semester because her friends talked her into it. But once she started, she realized how much it improved her fitness.

“I really like it. It’s relaxing,” she said. “I’m definitely more flexible.”

In a college setting, Perry said, many students have come to realize the relaxation and self-realization benefits of the practice.

“I think that what people find out when they start practicing is that it’s really an introspective practice,” she said. “College students in particular really need that. To come to a yoga class, it brings everything into a simple, present awareness.”

And yoga’s self-realization benefits are a large part of why Perry is so excited about the yoga studies program.

“I think that people will, more than anything, learn about themselves in this program,” she said. “I think it’s something that students will … take into their lives and benefit from forever.”

Those who would like to learn more about USU’s yoga program can visit https://www.facebook.com/YogaStudiesUSU/.

—melmo12@gmail.com