Yoga for the fast set: CorePower Yoga targets business.

• Author: Tillman, Ashley
• Position: Attitude at Altitude

Trevor Tice, a former competitive skier, has a new career that has taken him on a ride that has been about as fast as any downhill run: He's become a yoga guru for the business set.

CorePower Yoga, started by Tice in early 2002, has already snowballed into a network of eight Colorado studios and one in Minneapolis, with a contract in place to open a 10th facility in Portland, Ore.

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"Yoga is for everyone," says CorePower Yoga's corporate mission statement. "The practice must be demystified and made widely accessible to the masses." Tice interprets those masses to include modern business people; and, in order to make the ancient art of yoga appealing to business, he has introduced several innovations to the traditional yoga studio.

Yoga Sculpt, one of his classes, integrates dumbbells and weight-resistance into a yoga workout. Tice has also shortened classes to accommodate the fast-paced schedules of business customers, and installed locker rooms in studios so that people have a chance to change and clean up after a workout.

Tice, an entrepreneur who started and sold a successful technology company before turning to yoga as a business, says the American lure of yoga as exercise is not drawn from its ancient and mystical history, but rather from its health benefits and accessibility. According to the Yoga Journal, 15 million people regularly practice yoga in the United States; Nike has released a new yoga line including: yoga shoes, clothes and accessories to cater to the growing industry.

Tice wasn't the first Coloradan to discover that growth industry. Susan Winter Ward, the creator of the Yoga For the Young at Heart series of exercises, videos, TV segments and books, started her...