Abby Hoffmann - "Boutique Fitness Ain't What It Used To Be"

·1 hr 37 min·5 clips

Abby Hoffman turned down a yoga franchise at the last minute to build her own studio from scratch.

This episode features host J. Brown in conversation with Abby Hoffmann, a UK-based yoga teacher and former academic with a PhD in yoga and dance. They explore the evolution of yoga teaching and studio ownership, particularly comparing experiences across different eras and locations. Abby shares her journey from practicing Ashtanga in London in the late 1990s to opening her current studio, Yantra Studio, in Norwich in 2023. She began teaching accidentally in London after her regular teacher was absent, despite having no formal certificate at the time. Abby moved to Norwich around 2004 and, alongside teacher Hayley Winter, introduced Ashtanga classes there using flyers and word-of-mouth for promotion. She later completed a teacher training at The Life Center (now Yoga Campus) and earned a PhD studying the integration of yoga into professional dancers' training. Abby hosted teacher Kino MacGregor during her early UK tours, witnessing the rise of "rock star" yoga teachers. She closed her first studio, The Yoga Room, around 2010 due to financial challenges, relying on simple punch cards and cash payments. After a career in university lecturing that led to burnout, Abby took a deliberate break from teaching yoga starting in 2019. The pandemic lockdowns extended this hiatus, as she chose not to pivot to online teaching due to a preference for in-person instruction and personal difficulty with screens. A surprising insight is Abby's early resistance to the traditional Ashtanga authorization path, despite studying in Mysore in 2006. She notes the practice was originally more individualized, citing how teacher Derek Ireland incorporated splits into his sequences based on his own body. Abby argues that bone structure and proportions, not just strength, determine one's ability to perform certain movements like a straight-legged jump-through. She observes a recent liberation in Ashtanga practice post-Pattabhi Jois, with more adaptation accepted as practitioners age. Abby opened Yantra Studio partly because she believes people need varied movement beyond repetitive yoga, including lifting, pushing, and pulling. The conversation reveals that financial viability was a major challenge for independent studios even before the rise of modern booking systems and boutique fitness. The tone is a reflective and conversational exchange between two experienced teachers comparing notes across the Atlantic. The style is anecdotal and exploratory, weaving personal history with broader industry observations. This episode would appeal to yoga teachers and studio owners interested in the business's evolution, historical shifts in practice, and post-pandemic reopening strategies. Listeners seeking a highly structured debate or actionable business advice might find it less directly applicable.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at how a yoga teaching career changes when the business side stops cooperating.

Jay Brown keeps the focus on the parts of a yoga career that rarely get polished over: closing a dedicated center after it stopped paying its way, patching together lecturing work, teaching in Malta and at Rambert, and then stepping back before the pandemic pushed everything…

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Why you'd press play

When you want a yoga-business backstory wrapped around a frank burnout-and-breaks conversation.

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