YOGA:Yoga isn't just for willowy wisps and hippy dippy chicks – the guys are getting in on the act, too, and some of them are rugby players, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
SO YOU THOUGHT yoga was all about a room full of supple twiglets and the occasional man with long hair and a leather string necklace? Well at least one yoga studio in Dublin has found that not all their practitioners come straight from central casting.
Ciara Cronin and her husband Michael Ryan run The Yoga Room on Merrion Road in Dublin 4, and they have seen their client profile shift to include GAA players, businessmen, parents of those teenage twiglets, and some of the members of the Leinster rugby team.
“It’s probably still a 70/30 mix of women and men,” Cronin explains. “But not so long ago that would have been 80/20. There’s a really wide demographic now, including older guys who see the benefit of flexibility.” Cronin has been teaching yoga to Leinster players for several seasons. Under her tutelage at least one player has been able to open his shoulders enough to stretch into a full back-bend. Imagine the crab position from school PE class, with feet and hands on the floor and back arched in a bridge between them. Now imagine a rugby player who stands over 6ft tall doing it.
How do rugby professionals react to their first yoga class? “They know their bodies very well. You don’t have to explain too much to them. They usually have very specific aims,” she says.
Ashtanga yoga, the faster, more energetic style, is usually the yoga to which men are attracted. And if Cronin outlines an easy way into a posture or a more advanced attempt, she finds that male yoga students go straight for the most difficult approach.
Since it first became the boomtime pastime, yoga has expanded to appeal to different generations. She has mothers and daughters who come to classes, and even one dad and his teenage daughter.
The couple built a studio at the back of a terraced villa house on Merrion Road almost four years ago. Cronin had been inspired by her yoga practice in custom-built studios in the US. The large, peaceful room looks on to a bamboo and gravel garden and is full of light from rooflights and glass doors.
Just before Christmas, they opened a second studio upstairs, where a mothers-and-babies massage class is run and which has a small kitchen where tea and bottles can be prepared.
Was it a brave move to expand the business when other businesses are finding times tough? Cronin says that their class numbers have never been as high, and she believes a yoga class is not seen as a luxury item for most regular practitioners.
“On a spiritual level, with the church not being as relevant any more in lots of peoples’ lives, you have a huge lack of any space for communal worship. You don’t get to sit in a room with your neighbours anymore with the aim of improving yourself or your world, even if it’s just physical improvement.” In recent months “people have had to look at what’s important in their lives”, she says, “and we’ve learned that it’s not the cars and houses. Yoga offers a space for you to look at that real self, your true self and the more you can become aware of that the more central it becomes. And €16 for a drop-in class isn’t as daunting as paying out €500 or €1,000 for gym membership.”
Cronin met her husband Michael Ryan when he came to one of her classes with some male friends. “I like to say it was the pupil who seduced the teacher,” she laughs. He works as an organic caterer as well as teaching yoga and doing outreach classes for schools and other groups. Cronin is also teaching a twice-weekly class at a centre for recovering addicts near her home in Laragh, Co Wicklow. Eight other teachers use the studio for various classes. “It’s like a family business at this stage,” she says.
The Yoga Room has also begun a four-week introduction to meditation course, which has been booked out for its initial run, along with a four-week introduction to yoga, which goes through the different styles and basic postures. She has had a lot of inquiries from men about the introduction course.
The growing number of men in yoga classes is frequently a result of injury referrals from physios and sports coaches. “The strength and flexibility of yoga is very balanced. Gym work will emphasise certain muscles, so that you might be able to lift an incredible weight in barbells but could not lift your own body weight in a handstand,” Cronin explains.
“I heard of a yoga teacher in London who had the world’s strongest man in for a class – one of those guys who pulls trucks. The moment he saw a 70-year-old woman gracefully kick herself up into a handstand, he knew that was something he wasn’t strong enough to do. You can’t really hide from yourself in yoga.”
Cronin and Ryan are holding a residential yoga weekend at Glendalough, Co Wicklow, from Friday, April 24th to Sunday, April 26th.
The Yoga Room, 262 Merrion Road, Dublin 4, www.yoga.ie, tel: 01-2196666.