World Business

Clubs and classes offer stretching, exercise, meditation, and stress prominence for high-pressure MBAs

by Andrea Castillo

Watch original video:

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, united of the group’s founders.

The Chicago GSB yoga classes reflect a growing popularity of yoga in the U.S., with around 16 million Americans engaging in the practice, according to statistics released by Yoga Journal. The publication said $5.7 billion is spent one time a year on yoga classes and products, stingily twice as much being of the class who four years ago.

During a school-sponsored trip to India last year, Kirchner and fellow student Doug Neal bonded immersing a common interest in yoga. Kirchner and Neal, who both had been practicing yoga for years before they met, eventually unwavering to start a group dedicated to the practice on campus—in relation to 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 assign places to. Of the 1,100 students attending the discipline, about 200 expressed premium.

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

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, with regard to meditation poses, some for relaxation, some by reason of injuries."

Yoga is also on the radar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, where Matthew McGarvey, a rising second-year learner, wants to start a yoga class during Sloan’s Innovation Period, a week in the halfway of each semester that allows students to pry into outside interests. Taught by an outside yoga preceptor, the session would be open to 20 to 25 Sloan students. (MIT already offers yoga classes to the overall place of education community through its health center.)

Like many other practitioners of yoga, McGarvey says the discipline helps him achieve internal focus. He began practicing yoga while starting a affable enterprise in Tibet as a way to find relief from his work-related stress. In business school, McGarvey says yoga helped him stay centered. "I base that during my in the beginning semester I was having to reexamine a lot of my life goals and priorities," he says. "Having a yoga practice helped terminate from one side the gray noise."

Susanna Barry, a health educator at MIT Medical who specializes in disquiet and stress negotiation, teaches some of the yoga courses on campus, including "Yoga for Stress Management."

Several MBAs have enrolled in the course, Barry says, which serves as a respite from the otherwise-busy mode of MBA students. "They tend to be extremely self-driven and highly competitive," Barry says. "To be obliged any hour [that’s] not about self-improvement prevents burnout to get end the hot part of the semester"

At Harvard Business School, restorative yoga, a fashion of yoga designed to aid relaxation and significance relief, has become more popular amid MBA students, according to Carolyn Gould, the program manager in the place of Shad Hall, the gym on the side of HBS students and faculty. "We live in the same state fast-paced lives," Gould says. "It’s something everyone wants and needs in every place. It’s not specific to Harvard."

At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, rising second-year MBA close examiner Priti Mody is the president of the Yoga at Kellogg, which has added than 200 subscribers on its listserv.

Mody, who spent two weeks studying yoga in India while doing nonprofit research before starting B-school, plans to draw upon her experience to lead the unite to share expenses, now in its third year on campus.

Currently, the group offers yoga classes once a week. Next year, Yoga at Kellogg plans to purvey to students with varying yoga expertness levels and set up sessions lasting an hour and a half, among other activities.

Mody says yoga provides her any outlet to unwind from the challenges of B-school. "Business school is a unique experience. There are so many things you cheat at the same time. You’re surrounded by the agency of highly motivated people and want to do everything, [so] you get learning to attain to balance in schedule to be happy," she says. "Yoga is something consistent that lets me calm from a thin to a dense state."