Okay, who’s leading the world of yoga on TikTok? Because, at first glance it seems like no one is.
Thanks to popular TikTok yoga challenges like #couplesyogachallenge and even the design of the platform itself, yoga on TikTok seems to belong to the many instead of the elite few:
“Anyone can see your videos, whether they follow you or not,” yogi TikTok stars Bholi Parihar and Divyansh Sharma, @proyogaexpert, explain. “So good content generally gets its appropriate appreciation.”
That being said, there are a few yogis thriving on this platform, amassing huge amounts of views and followers. And they’re not the usual suspects either. Some of the top yoga influencers on other sites haven’t yet made the leap to TikTok – take Adriene Mishler who rose to fame on YouTube and is now killing it on Instagram with 1.3million followers. Where is she on TikTok? Where’s Dylan Werner?
Looks like TikTok is fair game for yogis, so let’s see who’s getting there first:
1 Urmi Pandya @yogaurmi.india
Urmi is the owner and founder of Urmi Yoga Academy and has a huge 2.6 million TikTok followers. She infuses her Indian culture into her videos that largely consist of her pulling off mind-boggling yoga poses. But she’s a true TikTok yoga girl if there ever was one; making the most of filters and tunes (we even spied a bit of lip-syncing).
2 Cathy Madeo @cathymadeoyoga
If you’re a fan of step-by-step, informative videos, then why not become one of Cathy Madeo’s 222k followers? She makes yoga accessible with lots of ‘how to’ content and bite-sized workouts. She demonstrates everything from beginner core workouts to flying pigeon poses (she’s also an impressive forty-five-years-old – not that you’d ever know it!)
3 Tiffany Crow @tiffanycroww
Have you heard of Tiffany, otherwise known as ‘FatYogi’? With 176.4k fans, her content is fun, helpful, and down to earth, containing lots of body-positivity messages and humorous life updates. She’s also a bit of a TikTok pioneer, breaking out of the usual snappy mould and creating three-minute yoga flows.
4 Zacharia Zenios @zenergyfit
There seems to be lots of space for men in the TikTok yoga world, and friendly Zacharia has jumped right in there. He’s a yoga, fitness and health enthusiast, producing easy-to-follow routines for beginners as well as mini yoga flows and informative videos like, ‘6 benefits of yoga’. He has a solid 48.9k followers and climbing.
5 Faustine Chef @fau.yoga
Yoga teacher Faustine is on a mission: She intentionally made the switch to TikTok (while admitting that it’s mainly a teenage social network) because she noticed there wasn’t much yoga. “I want to raise awareness of this generation of yoga with little tutorials,” she wrote on Instagram in April. She’s definitely making a mark with 32.6k followers and beautiful videos of tricky yoga poses.
It’s clear that there’s a strong yoga community on TikTok and some emerging figureheads. But the virtual world changes quickly, and pretty much anything could happen.
So keep watching this space.
By Gina Vaughan