Why Don’t More Men Practice Yoga? Pain, Stigma & How to Start
It is slowly changing but most yoga classes are still 80% female. But why? There are many reasons: physical pain, emotional barriers, feeling unwelcome, or simply thinking yoga isn’t challenging enough.
I’ve asked different men why they don’t practice yoga and in this post I’ll share their stories alongside my own.
Physical Pain: The First Barrier to Yoga for Men
Physical pain. I believe Yoga is the gateway to our problems, but it does not necessarily solve our problems. It brings to light what we need to work on.
So, in a world where men say ‘I’m good’ or ‘I’m fine’ when we and we are not, Yoga can be very confronting.
I’ve asked different men why they don’t practice yoga and I’ll share their stories in upcoming blogs but to begin with, I’ll start exploring this subject from my own experience.
I arrived on the mat seven years ago, physically broken. I came because my injuries were impacting my work and my life.
I’d taken too many drugs, fallen down some concrete stairs, and continued to party for another 48 hours. Got the 6 am mega bus from Manchester back down to London just in time for an eight-hour shift at a supermarket. It was my job to replenish the water aisle.
I went to lift a heavy pack of water and I felt my back rip. My body had had enough. I couldn’t lift anything heavy for some time and worryingly the only time my back didn’t hurt was when I took tramadol or got drunk and high.
I tried physio and other treatments, but people kept telling me ‘You should try yoga’. A visceral aversion flared up within me. I’m not doing the same hippy shit my mum does.
The hippy stigma is a big one that deserves its own blog so alas back to the physical pain. Once I gave ‘Yoga with Adrienne’ things started to change. She gets a lot of stick in the yoga world, but I think she’s incredible, she’s made yoga accessible and fun. So slowly my pain started to diminish. Nothing major but it was helping.
Then I went to my first yoga class and realized I had been doing everything wrong. The physical pain was so strong. I was completely out of alignment, and I was compensating in ways that could worsen my injuries. In a room full of 30 women, what washed over me was shame.
I felt useless and pathetic. In the end, as I lay in a pool of my own sweat, it became so clear that I had not taken care of my body and I believed everyone in the room was better than me. Stories ignited in my mind ‘It’s too painful’ ‘This isn’t right’ ‘I don’t belong here’ ‘I can’t get anything right’ ‘I’m a piece of shit’ I wanted to run away. And almost did.
What happened during that Savasana is the same thing many other male friends and clients have told me – “my mind goes crazy”.
The physical pain had brought to light what was really going on. The emotional pain.
That’s why yoga is the gateway. It’s the bridge that helps us realize it’s all connected. And that can be scary. Seeing into that window of our thoughts and feelings. Not turning away when we feel discomfort.
Emotional Pain: What the Mat Brings Up
Now let’s explore emotional pain. There are enough great sources out there proving to us it’s all connected, I highly recommend ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bessel van der Kolk and ‘When the Body Says No’ by Gabor Maté. Highlighting some Injuries and physical ailments that have manifested from rooted trauma, stress, and core beliefs. Well, It’s time to break free.
But it’s hard. Some men arrive on the yoga mat and are bombarded with so much physical and emotional pain no wonder they don’t return. Paying for pain? No thanks. But that’s what we’ve been doing our whole lives. Post childhood we’ve been paying for pain to numb the pain. Whether it’s a brutal workout, blowing our salary, or hitting the booze and drugs. We’ve all developed coping mechanisms to cover and soothe that emotional pain. Some are more successful than others.
As I hold space for more and more men in yoga retreats, workshops, and men’s groups I recognize I am not alone. There are thousands, if not millions of us out there who at times feel lost, and lonely and have moments where we simply don’t want to keep going so no wonder there’s a need for soothing.
This pattern of constant soothing is something I’ve identified in myself and many others. It’s a hard one to break but I believe yoga is one tool that can help break it. In the first section, I mentioned how Savasana felt confronting instead of relaxing as my mind ran wild. This soon settled. Practice by practice I started to notice the mind would quieten and eventually, I started to feel that bliss people spoke of during savasana.
This moment was transformational for me. After so many half-finished projects in my life, this discovery started to reprogram my brain. It was so simple but for the first time, I truly acknowledged that regular practice and consistency are needed to progress in anything. I also leaned into the notion that some discomfort is ok, we just need to keep coming back, gently and slowly.
Pattahbi Jois famously said ‘Practice and all is coming’ I can see that with myself and my clients who practice regularly things shift for the better. It’s blindingly obvious Men need to heal. But the men I have witnessed reconnect with their mind, body, and spirit prove that anyone can do it. Anyone can heal. Be willing, be open, and then we start healing. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. It’s simple but not necessarily easy. Just Practice regularly. I’ll often say whilst teaching ‘Yoga is not a quick fix, it’s a wonderful long-term solution’.
Why Men Don’t Feel Welcome in Yoga Classes
I asked the men’s group that I co-facilitate, “Why don’t more men practice yoga” and some of their thoughts were fascinating.
They said they had felt they were not welcome in a few experiences. Now, these may be projections and I do know so many women who do enjoy having men in their classes, but having half the group say something similar, I feel there is some truth here to explore.
When you are in a room full of men and a woman enters, the energy changes. The same is true when a man enters.
Do All Women Welcome Men Into Yoga Classes With Open Arms?
Apparently not and understandably so. Most of the people who have truly and deeply hurt me in my life have been men. Female friends have also provided enough ammunition to warrant much caution around them. Men have continuously been leading the polls for crime and assaults for…well…ever.
So this begins to expose a much larger problem. Safety. People come to yoga to feel safe and to purify in their own way. If a few men come in all boisterous, that safety can feel breached. I’ve experienced this two or three times in my history of teaching where I witnessed a bravado that one would find in some pubs.
It definitely affected the atmosphere but I try not to judge someone for coming in and behaving as they are used to. I’m still a man and I still have a lot of work to do on myself. We need to respect each other, we need boundaries and we need patience.
But likewise, I have had many female friends say they don’t feel safe around men. So culturally a lot of perspectives need to shift. We look through the lens of our own experience and most of the time it halts us instead of helps us.
I’ll never forget when a woman in a Teacher Training tried to pigeonhole me into this Joe Rogan alpha male image. It felt so bizarre and off cause it certainly wasn’t me but as we got to know each other over the course she had recently had a very unpleasant experience with a man and was officially ‘done with men’. So if someone is looking through this lens, then a man is certainly going to receive a different kind of welcome from a woman.
How Do We Create a More Welcoming Yoga Space for Men?
How do we shift any of this? I think we need women’s circles and men’s circles, so both can have a space that is solely theirs, where they can meet to connect and heal. However, I feel a lot of the healing comes from mixing and opening the door to one another.
I’ve been to some tremendous yoga classes where it’s getting close to 40% men. Here, it does not feel like women are being pushed out of their space or men are unwelcome. It feels like a community is being born through the very essence of yoga, a safe space to work on oneself through breath and movement.
When we regularly come and purify together we see that no gender should affect our visit to a yoga class as long as we all come in with the right intention. To spiritually connect with ourselves and others.
Is Yoga Physical Enough for Men?
In my men’s group, some of the men vocalized a need for a workout. Yoga looks too easy or slow for them and they need to sweat it out.
Now this is where I believe fast styles, hot classes, and inversions serve a wonderful purpose – they get more men into yoga. Yes – it also invites competition and ego, which needs to be constantly addressed by yoga teachers instead of encouraged.
But the strong yoga and dharma yoga classes I attend have 30-40% men. They are the most challenging classes I’ve come across in London. Many poses require strength and boy oh boy do you sweat.
Is this yoga? Some people would argue no. But instead of tearing apart a yoga style that’s helping others, focus on yourself. Focus on what works for you. If it gets you onto the mat then within reason I’m all for it.
In some of my yoga classes, I make sure we sweat it out, build some strength, do some handstands, and have fun! As long as it’s done mindfully, I love a strong practice! Inversions help us get present, they release endorphins and they get more men involved! We just need to honor that it’s a spiritual practice.
It’s about being respectful and playful! Yoga can be the best of both!
Spirituality as a Barrier: Why Men Resist Yoga
I hated anything that was spiritual until I was 24.
It seems to be a part of many peoples journeys, rebelling against their parents and whatever their parents are into. My Mum does yoga & meditation every morning. When I was younger I would come downstairs and feel this energy emanate throughout the house. It’s that calm, ethereal energy only a morning has, made even more significant by a spiritual practice, however I was not ready to embrace it, let alone even enjoy it.
I also grew up with photos of my Mum’s spiritual teacher throughout the house ‘Barry Long’, who heavily influenced Ekhart Tolle in the 90’s. Having a photo of an elderly man who you didn’t know stare you in the face in the toilet was not the one.
So my barriers were firmly being built upon day by day. To me Yoga was spiritual. It was something my mum did. So therefore I also subconsciously adopted the narrative that it was something hippy women did and it was not for me. Even today, statistics consistently show that women make up the overwhelming majority of yoga practitioners in many Western countries. Many women seem more open to spirituality. So it seems I was not alone, spirituality can become a barrier for men.
The Stigma Around Spiritual Language in Yoga
However we adopt this barrier, it appears to be a lack of understanding. The memes and videos I’ve seen making fun of Yoga are often wildly exaggerated. I’ve still never heard a yoga teacher say “align your chakras” in a class, yet I can’t tell you how many times male friends have mocked me for it. And then when they do come to my classes they often reflect on how enjoyable it was, and how surprised they were by the whole experience.
EXPERIENCE. That’s what we need to highlight here. We look through the lens of our own experience and if we never experience a yoga class we only have instagram reels, memes, videos or our hippy mums to go by. This creates the narrative, this creates the culture. This creates a space that men don’t feel a part of, nor want to be a part of, because they are simply not experiencing for themselves what yoga really is.
Spirituality, in its broadest sense, is often seen as a central component of yoga.
It doesn’t matter if it’s rooted in ancient wisdom, for men who are more focused on practicality and less familiar with spiritual practices outside of their own, spiritual language can feel uncomfortable or unnecessary, ‘fluffly or too woke’ Even simple sentences like ‘Be kind to yourself’ or ‘Be kind to your body’ are alien to many men. To show myself kindness was seen as weakness. It contradicts the culture of ‘No pain, no gain’
To Be Spiritual, You Have to Be Strong
It’s incredibly ironic that spirituality is seen as soft. When it’s completely the opposite. To be spiritual you have to be willing to truly look at yourself. Working through my blockages and releasing them. Was at times – painful. So one could argue that there is ‘pain & gain’ in yoga. It’s about transformation on and off the mat.
The more I practised, the less I wanted to drink and eat chicken wings. I was trying to live both lives for many years and it brought me a lot of pain. Yoga was making me feel good but it was also showing me what made me feel bad. To be spiritual on a daily basis requires tremendous strength.
To conclude, I believe we need to change the narrative.
To be spiritual, you have to be strong. To be a yogi, you have to be strong. Obviously not all the time but I feel even in a Yin practice when you’re asked to stay in a pose for five minutes shows incredible bravery. You stayed still with your body and your mind and you didn’t run away. Whilst there is a much needed space for love and compassion I feel more adoption around words like ‘strength, resilience, transformation’ will help get more men on the mat.
You can make your yoga practice as strong as you like. I’ve left some classes pouring with sweat and I have still had profound spiritual experiences where I felt like I had died and was reborn. The answer is simply coming along to a yoga class and finding what works for you. If more men practised yoga they would realise it’s not always easy, it can be really hard, and it can change your life. And through this change comes a spiritual experience that allows any barriers around spirituality to dissolve. In order to understand it, you have to live it.
Taking That First Step
I thought I was a physical mess but turns out I was an emotional mess as well. Yoga was the first step to dealing with my emotions. So, this is one reason why men don’t do yoga. They don’t want to take that first step but I’m so glad I did. Thanks for reading and keep practicing.
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