You might have heard of goat yoga, but the latest animal addition to the exercise is puppies. Lucy Coxon has brought the phenomenon that is puppy yoga to her studios in Bristol.
The 24-year-old from Bedminster says she saw it in London and thought it was a “really cute idea”. But what is puppy yoga? Created in America around 2002, puppy yoga is as it sounds - yoga with puppies. During a session, puppies wander around as participants attempt to hold one of the many difficult positions, such as the downward-facing dog or the mountain pose.
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Lucy, who borrows the pups for the yoga sessions, said having seen bigger companies doing it elsewhere, she decided she wanted 'to do it better', by providing more transparency on where she was finding the puppies and the process of planning and delivering her sessions.
After being a yoga teacher part-time for the past 18 months, the popularity of her puppy yoga sessions has allowed Lucy to take her yoga teaching full-time, “It's been really popular and it’s enabled me to be full time, whereas before it was more of a part-time thing.”
Most of Lucy’s sessions take place at the weekend, with tickets costing £34 per person. Each session varies in size depending on the studio and litter sizes, she said “If it’s a litter of six puppies, I'll sell about 14 to 15 tickets, I want to make sure everyone gets a good amount of puppy playtime.”
Since setting up puppy yoga Lucy says she has seen many sessions sell out and has many regulars who come back for more, but says it’s normally new faces each week. She even gets office groups who bring their teams in for “workplace wellbeing days”.
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