Asana, meditation and wellbeing: what one Hungarian survey found

Yoga Alliance, a teacher registry, will ask its registered teachers to take a 40-question assessment from January 2027, on teaching and leadership, ethics, safety, and multicultural diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, with a 75% pass mark and two attempts. RYT and E-RYT stay as the main titles, and RCYT, RPYT and YACEP become specialty designations. Teachers have until 31 December 2027, after which a credential lapses, and from the 2030 cycle continuing education becomes 30 hours (RYT) or 40 hours (E-RYT) every three years.

An Additional Secretary at India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment visited the government de-addiction centre at Raiwala, near Rishikesh, and said efforts will be made to include yoga and naturopathy in de-addiction and rehabilitation programmes, alongside medicines and counselling. She plans to approach the Ministry of Ayush and to develop a model programme that other centres across the country could adopt. For now this is a stated plan, not a launched programme.

In a planned subgroup of a US multisite trial, 140 women with overactive bladder and urge leakage did 12 weeks of either pelvic floor yoga or a time-matched general conditioning programme. Leakage episodes fell by a similar amount in both groups, about 1.9 versus 1.6 a day, and the difference between them was not statistically significant. Yoga did a little better on a questionnaire about urinary distress and, by a narrow margin, on daytime trips to the toilet.

An Australian and UK team reviewed 20 economic studies of recommended low back pain treatments, all from nine high-income countries, most often the UK. Most non-drug, non-surgical options gave good value against usual care, and yoga was one of six single treatments, alongside acupuncture, cognitive behavioural therapy, self-management support, fear-reduction education and mindfulness-based stress reduction, found more effective and less costly than usual care from at least one cost perspective. The yoga result rests on one UK trial-based study from 2012, and treatments were compared only with usual care, not with each other.

A systematic review of case reports and case series gathered 84 yoga-related adverse events, 15 of them linked to headstand, and recommends screening before practice and better teacher training; it cannot say how common such harms are, because case reports count them but not the many people who practise without one. One side, in a 2015 Yoga International opinion essay by Matthew Remski that gathers several teachers' views, says most people have not built up the neck to carry weight and a teacher cannot know every drop-in student's history. The other side, from teachers quoted in the same essay and Arhanta Yoga's 2019 guide by Dr Ram Jain, says that with time spent in careful preparation and an experienced teacher it can be practised safely by some students.

Nine short steps on a chair: slow breathing, shoulder rolls, gentle neck, spine and side stretches, a seated twist, humming Bee Breath (bhramari) and a two-minute body scan. Each step has a time and a breath cue, and you need no mat or floor space.

A small trial in Türkiye randomised 84 adolescents into four groups to test one health education session plus 12 laughter yoga sessions over six weeks. It found no consistent effect on stress, mixed results on digital gaming habits, and could not separate the effect of the two parts, though students were more satisfied with it.