According to my investigations most of the students are women – mainly young. Very few of them have young children although some women are there for either pre- or post-natal treatment. But you will also find a couple of men in each class – except the most extreme power yoga forms which of course tend to attract more men.
If you look into the general reasons for why people attend this medical-therapeutic-yoga, one just has to look how the benefits (i.e. the purpose) of postural centred yoga as it is presented on posters, flyers, back side of DVDs and books, front covers of magazines (see above): less stress, calm down, slim down, energise now, change for good, feel serene, back cure (or other body malfunctions), fitness, well-being’. You could summarise the reasons as mainly being medicalisation (fitness, health, healing and therapy). Hence the term medical therapeutic yoga’. The yoga product in other words has a medical-therapeutic use-value. Often this yoga is enveloped in a stint of romanticist-esoteric discourse (de Michelis 2005). In its most commercial forms this yoga tends to drop all connections with spirituality and instead strongly engages with female beauty discourses and branches out into a straight beauty and fitness yoga.
Poses Purpose: To track the alignment of the knee, Four-Limbed Staff Pose Yoga coordinate knee, ankle, foot, and thigh movements made during normal walking, and gently Four-Limbed Staff Pose Yoga strengthen the quadriceps, all with minimal weight bearing. Contraindication: Recent abdominal surgery. Prop: A chair. Avoiding pitfalls: Watch and move carefully, coordinating the movement between all the anatomical components. Do not lift the straight-legged knee above the bent knee at any time. Sit on the edge of a chair with feet flat on the floor and knees bent ninety degrees. The thighs are parallel and at the same level. Slide the right heel outward along the floor until the right knee is fully extended.
