Yoga is the new pilates. Except that pilates probably never became quite as popular as yoga has become today. According to the latest Yoga Alliance survey, 38.4 million Americans practiced yoga in 2022, roughly 11 percent of the population.

It is possible to view this interest in the broader context of why Americans choose to exercise. According to a survey by Mindbody, a service used by many fitness and yoga studios and their clients, most Americans in 2023 said they exercise because they “want to live a long and healthy life”. You might think that this is a pandemic phenomenon, but the uptick in yoga preceded Covid-19. In 2018, A CDC report showed that in the percentage of U.S. adults that used yoga, meditation and chiropractors in the past 12 months, yoga was the most common practice among U.S. adults in 2012 (9.5%) and 2017 (14.3%). The use of meditation also increased more than threefold from 4.1% in 2012 to 14.2% in 2017.

Yoga is more than postures. It is a system whose scope is not easily defined but its generally well understood that it is a means to gain a sense of wellbeing. Meditation and yoga are sometimes used synonymously. It has a third lesser known arm consisting of breathing practices called pranayama. While Yoga workouts are still the most searched of the three aspects in the US, yoga meditation beats the search for most other parts of the English speaking world. For example, even with the same language, the UK is searching for the meditation aspect of yoga more often than the workout aspect (see map). The yoga techniques of breathing are still a secret for most parts of the world.

But even yoga postures span many schools, both of thought and practice. The physical practice of yoga asanas or postures has many forms and varied levels of popularity. An earlier article claimed to assess the popularity of yoga forms in 2022 from Google Trends data. It claimed that ‘Hot Yoga’ is the most popular type of yoga, both worldwide and in the U.S. This form involves doing postures in a heated room. A related form of it, called Bikram yoga, popularized by the now infamous celebrity yoga instructor Bikram Choudhury involves a sequence of 26 postures also performed in a heated room which also ranks quite high. Hot Yoga and Bikram Yoga are close cousins and are not always differentiated in referencing.

Yet, it is surprising that vinyasa yoga, the flowy sequence-based classes most Americans are familiar with, is ranked so low. Can we really interpret google trends as the popularity of a yoga form?

Google trends data is based on search terms, which means it's what people are curious about. Looking at the trends, hot yoga has indeed been and stayed on top for the last two decades. But while all searches have an annual cycle where searches spike in January, this surge is most prominent for Hot Yoga. This means that it might be more prone to the ‘new year new me’ phenomenon, which makes people google new ways of self-improvement.

Mindbody's 2019 survey found Vinyasa Yoga to be the most popular choice. But 26% of their respondents claimed they wanted to try Hot Yoga’. Its Google Trends popularity, therefore, may be from the fact that more people are not doing it but want to. Vinyasa and Hatha yoga may just be more familiar terms, and as is often the case, familiarity breeds contempt, or in this case, indifference.

There are other ways of checking it. Hot yoga is not a very popularly practiced form in India. It's not tough to imagine why that may be given the weather in most parts of the country. There are only 57 Yoga Alliance registered schools in India out of more than 500 that include this form in its training. And yet, search results mimic the U.S. trend but with fewer New Year spikes. Hot yoga overtook the once more popular ‘Power Yoga’ in 2015 just around the time that Bikram Choudhury fled to India from the United States. Hot yoga means little to most Indians but Google Trends would suggest otherwise.

Yoga Alliance’s directory of certified yoga schools can also help put some of this in perspective. If supply is a good indicator of demand in this world, then it would seem that Vinyasa or ‘Flow Yoga’ offerings are the most prevalent across studios. 70 percent of all Yoga schools in the US offer flow-based yoga classes. Only 40 percent of all offer ‘Hot/Heated Yoga’. What is more striking perhaps, is that 70 percent of all affiliated schools worldwide offering ‘Hot/Heated Yoga’ are in the U.S. Much like everything else, the concept might have traveled from here to other places, and generated a certain level of curiosity that makes Hot Yoga so highly searched on Google.