Independently-owned fitness studio operator Ten Health and Fitness has created a new “injury-proof” yoga class catering for the “way people live now, rather than the way they lived centuries ago”.

Designed by experienced yoga teachers – in combination with Ten Health’s in-house physiotherapists – the new class aims to meet the needs of today’s office-bound, sofa-slouching, screen-focused population.

“Yoga was developed for people who lived and moved very differently to the way we live today,” says Ten Health founder Joanne Matthews. “They were physically active, they stood, moved, squatted, sat cross-legged but rarely sprawled in a chair like we do.

“They weren’t spending hours every day in offices hunched over screens and phones.”

According to Matthews, among the Yoga exercises that exist, there are some that may have been perfectly fine for their original audience, but can exacerbate the postural and lifestyle-related musculoskeletal issues that today’s sedentary lifestyles make people prone to.

“The new class avoids or adapts exercises that compound the more harmful postural impact of 21st century lifestyles and focuses on those that restore balance, lengthen over-tight muscles, and help reset and re-educate the body into a more natural set of movement patterns,” she said.

Class sizes for the new programme will be kept smaller than is usual in mainstream yoga in order to allow greater focus on individual attention and adaptation, precision, clear cueing and hands-on correction.

Matthews opened the first Ten Health and Fitness studio in 2007 and now operates six locations across London.