Yoga helps people keep their spirits up

Patients take a class at a Wuhan's makeshift hospital on Feb 28. CHINA DAILY

A growing trend

Wang, a 39-year-old yoga coach in Beijing, is said to be among the earliest yoga practitioners in China. He first heard of yoga during high school, and he began doing it regularly in 2004.

"There were then very few teachers in China," recalls Wang, who started his yoga journey by learning from a British coach at a studio in Beijing's Shunyi district, named Beijing Yoga, which later changed its name to Fine Yoga, now a leading center for the activity in China.

"At first, I didn't know yoga well and my practice was just imitating the instructors' moves. My fellow learners in the same class were mostly dancers or housewives," he says.

He began to teach yoga in 2006, coaching at Beijing Yoga, and set up his own studio in 2010, giving morning classes from 6 am.

He has led the morning class for 10 years, with about 60 trainees each time. Many of the practitioners have themselves become yoga instructors.

In the past decade, the number of Wang's students has risen to more than 10,000 and he has trained more than 5,000 teachers. Besides teaching in classes, he has also conducted 200 workshops nationwide, including many times in Beijing, and 10 times each year in cities outside the capital.

Some yoga instructors, like Wang, teach in bigger classes, while other instructors prefer smaller classes. Zhang Meijia is one of the latter, a yoga instructor with 12 years of experience in Beijing.

Zhang also witnessed the growth of the market since she became a coach in 2008. Then, many practitioners in her class were foreigners, and most yoga classes took place in gyms where coaches were more dance instructors than specialists in yoga.

"At first, almost all of my Chinese students were young women whose main purpose was to keep fit, which is also a main reason that draws people in," says Zhang. "But now, my class trainees vary from 20 to over 70 years old, and many come to improve their health."

She also says that a decade ago, coaches had to go abroad to learn yoga professionally, but now there are many Chinese coaches domestically, who focus on training professional instructors.

According to a report released by market consultancy iResearch in August 2018, the yoga market in China had seen 20 years of consecutive growth. The report said that there were more than 14,000 yoga studios by 2016, a number set to rise to 30,000 in 2018, and the market was expected to be worth 39.39 billion yuan ($5.67 billion) by 2019.

According to the iResearch report, about 70 percent of practitioners are 26 to 40 years old, and 94.9 percent of practitioners are women.