Recent reports have started to surface, leading some to question whether moms wearing yoga pants in public have actually just come from a yoga studio where they participated in a yoga class.

After hearing some rumblings by professionally-dressed moms in a Scottsdale, Arizona Starbucks late last year, Stephen Binning, statistician and researcher at Arizona State University, decided to look further into the matter.

“I had always been certain these women had just completed some form of yoga because what other reason would they have for wearing yoga pants?” said Binning.

“But after hearing the complaints, I thought there might be some validity to them and, being a researcher, I decided that I would conduct a study to get the final answer.”

Binning spent the next six months attempting to determine just how many yoga-pants-wearing moms were on their way to or just coming from a yoga class.

“It was much harder than you might think to obtain the data,” Binning asserts, “because a large percentage of the women I attempted to interview about this did not want to speak to me.”

Binning conducted his research in many different places, including shopping malls, libraries, children’s museums, and wine bars in addition to Starbucks where the whole idea started.

“I was trying to interview women in a carpool line one day when a mom in jeans approached me,” he said. “She would only talk to me briefly and in a whisper, but she stated that she has a sister-in-law who wears these types of yoga pants everywhere she goes, and this woman knows for a fact the sister-in-law has never done a day of yoga in her life.”

Out of the 412 women that Binning spoke to or tried to speak to, he could only verify that 14 had been to yoga and three were going to yoga, for a total of 17, which amounts to 4%.

“I was stunned at these results,” he declared. “It was absolutely not what I was expecting at all.”

Binning did note, however, that his study has a rather wide margin of error as he could not get definitive “Nos” from many of the remaining women.

In breaking down his results, Binning states that 197 of the women gave him some variation of “Piss off, you creeper!” as their only answer while an additional 104 just gave him blank stares. Twelve called the police, six would only go so far as to assure him that Jesus loves him, three attempted to give him their spare change, and one had him lie down on the grass so she could align his chakras. “I’m still not sure what that was all about,” Binning states.

“Only 72 of the women told me that they had not been to and were not planning to go to yoga,” said Binning, “so that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the majority of women in yoga pants.”

According to Binning, “If we count only the women we got actual answers from, then we have a total of 89 study participants: 17 who said yes and 72 who said no. That means only 19% of women in yoga pants are involved in yoga in any way. Eighty percent of them are wearing yoga pants for no discernible reason.

“This is really a groundbreaking study, and people are going to be shocked when this information comes out.”

*****

About the Author

Melissa Coble is a mom living in Phoenix, Arizona just trying to survive the teenage years with a lot of laughs, an occasional rant, and copious amounts of wine. You can find her counting the days until her nest is empty on her blog An Unfit Parent and on Facebook