Somehow on its journey west, yoga shifted from a mostly male endeavor to a mostly female one. For as much as I hear about entire professional male athletic teams doing yoga to improve balance and strength, in ten years I’ve never been to a class in which women didn’t outnumber men by at least two to one.

In today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , reporter Jack Kelly writes about what men are missing when they skip both yoga and pilates. “Men in general are less flexible than women. They’re just put together differently,” Dr. Betsy Blazek-O’Neill, Medical Director of the Integrated Medicine program at Allegheny General hospital told Kelly. She added that many of the exercises men do––like weightlifting––tighten up their backs, making them ripe for some deep stretching.

To begin my first one-on-one lesson in gyrotonic, a Pilates-like exercise method originally created for dancers, my instructor, Liza, had me sit down on the contraption commonly known as “the rack.” We would start moving as we talked, she said. So I told her about my torn hip cartilage and we rocked on our sitz bones, tilting back and forth like we were on coil-bottomed horses in a playground.

“Mention posture, and people conjure antiquated images of stiff-backed children with books balanced on their heads,” writes Catherine Saint Louis in this week’s Thursday Styles section of The New York Times. “But today there is a new focus on standing tall that is less a matter of etiquette than a strategy for keeping aging bodies supple and pain free.”

My hips have hurt for about a decade. It wasn’t until two years ago, though, that my pain was vaildated by an MRI that revealed torn cartilage in both hip joints––probably from a combination of hatha yoga, dance, and genetics. Though I’ll probably have to have surgery some day, in the meantime my chiropractor’s been recommending gyrotonic. Called “yoga for dancers,” the fitness method (officially called Gyrotonic Expansion System) was developed in the 1980s by ballet dancer Juliu Horvath. The yellow flier from my local studio says, “he dreamed of a machine that would help a dancer achieve a better pirouette.”