“I practice yoga.”

As a personal trainer, I hear people express (or accept) this popular concept without a second thought. But if you said “I practice working out,” people would be very confused.
There is something about yoga that allows us to approach it as a lifelong practice; we somehow know we can continue to improve ourselves through yoga forever, without reaching an end or conclusion. I think this has something to do with yoga’s origins in Eastern traditions. Yoga's ancient spiritual roots seem to make people more forgiving of some of its less tangible aspects. For example, if a yoga instructor tells us that we store a lot of emotion in our hips, it may not occur to us to ask what that means or how anyone could know that. By contrast however, if a Western medical doctor shared some of the physiological specifics of running intervals or doingdeadlifts, you might be tempted to ask for evidence—like solid research—that backs the claim.p