Why More Men Should Practice Yoga

by Al Russell (@aldoesyoga)

More men should practice yoga. I want to talk about why - and I'm not going to mention improved flexibility, although that's important too!

I've been practising yoga, on and off, for over 25 years. For much of that time I was the only man in the room, or one of very few. That never bothered me. But it always left me wondering why more men weren't experiencing what I was.

Then I became a yoga teacher and when I was given the opportunity to teach a weekly men-only class, the questions started. Why men only? And answering that pushed me to put into words what I'd experienced and witnessed. This is my answer...

A lot of men are running on empty and don't know it. We measure our worth by what we produce, what we achieve, what we provide to others. We carry a near-constant internal critic - a voice that evaluates, compares, finds wanting - and we've learned to try to ignore it, to treat it as background noise.

The stress accumulates. The shoulders and back muscles tighten. The mind races at 2am. And still we push on, because stopping feels like falling behind.

Now, let’s be honest, a lot of what I've just described applies to women too. Stress, self-criticism, measuring worth by output - that's definitely not exclusively male territory, not by a long shot! The thing is that women are already coming to yoga in large numbers, which is wonderful. What we tend to see is that women have more outlets, more permission culturally, to talk about how they're feeling, to ask for help, to prioritise their own wellbeing without it feeling like a confession. For men, that permission is harder to come by. That's why the specific invitation matters.

Yoga asks you to do something different. It asks you to notice what is going on for you without judgement. And what most men find, when they slow down enough to actually look, isn't weakness. It's just a person who's been carrying a lot, for a long time, without much acknowledgement. And without much self-compassion.

My own understanding of the power of self-compassion has been shaped a lot by the work of Dr Kristin Neff - and what strikes me about a men's yoga class is that it seems to naturally create the conditions she describes, without anyone trying to manufacture them.

Take the simple fact of being in a room with other men who are all showing up for themselves. There's something that quietly shifts when you see another man also struggle with a pose but keep going, or close his eyes in the breathing and actually let himself rest. You realise you're not the only one carrying something. That you're not unusual or behind or broken. That this - all of this - is just part of being human.

And then there's what happens on the mat itself. Yoga teaches you to be present - not as a nice idea, but as a practice you return to again and again. To notice what's actually happening in your body, your breath, your mind. I mean the reality of it, rather than the story you've been telling yourself about it. For a lot of men, that's revelatory. We can spend so much energy managing our perception of ourselves - performing, defending, avoiding - that we lose touch with what we actually feel. The mat strips a lot of that back. What's left is usually much simpler, and much kinder, than the story we'd been carrying.

That's where self-kindness stops being a concept and becomes something you feel. The simple act of taking care of yourself, physically, with attention and without criticism, for an hour a week. For a lot of men, that's genuinely new territory.

That's what the class is for. To put it all down for an hour. To breathe. To check in with yourself. To be in a room where that's not just allowed - it's the whole point.

The mat is just where you practise all this. The rest of your life is where the benefit shows up.

So to all the men out there, if you're curious about exploring what yoga has to offer you then go to a class. You don't need to be flexible, fit, or experienced. You just need to show up. That's the best thing any of us can do for ourselves.