Walk through the halls of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business during the school year, and along with students cramming facts for macroeconomics and operating strategy you may encounter some students stretching their bodies and doing something really unusual for business school students: relaxing.

They’re members of Chicago’s yoga club, a student group founded earlier this year by two GSB students and which last term attracted 15 to 35 regular attendees to classes in the school’s Harper Center. The classes are “time to shut your brain off,” says Jody Kirchner, one of the group’s founders.

The Chicago GSB yoga classes reflect a growing popularity of yoga in the U.S., with about 16 million Americans engaging in the practice, according to statistics released by Yoga Journal. The publication said $5.7 billion is spent annually on yoga classes and products, nearly twice as much as four years ago.
Indian Odyssey

During a school-sponsored trip to India last year, Kirchner and fellow student Doug Neal bonded over a mutual interest in yoga. Kirchner and Neal, who both had been practicing yoga for years before they met, eventually decided to start a group dedicated to the practice on campus—after Kirchner noticed that other business schools had yoga groups, but Chicago didn’t.

In midyear, Neal, a 2008 MBA graduate, and Kirchner, a rising second-year student and co-chair of the club, conducted an interest survey for the group. Of the 1,100 students attending the school, about 200 expressed interest.

Kirchner said she was surprised at the large response the survey garnered, finding that a sizable portion of the student population already practiced yoga, at least to some extent. “People I know outside of school say the same thing,” she said. “After a stressful day, it’s time they can do something easily to take their mind off their stress.”

Neal says yoga isn’t just for stress relief. “Yoga is very multifaceted, and the benefits of yoga are different for each person,” he said. “Some use it for exercise, for meditation poses, some for relaxation, some for injuries.”