Does Yoga Cause Falls? What The Numbers Actually Say

Does yoga cause falls: the short answer

In 2025 a large Australian trial reported about a third more falls in its yoga group, and the headline travelled around the world. Does yoga cause falls? On the trial’s own numbers the answer is far narrower than the headline, because the whole result turns on three falls, the extra falls caused no extra injury, and among the people at the highest fall risk in older adults, falls went down rather than up. This article shows the arithmetic, then asks what falls cost Australia and what they take from people.

The whole article is below in short form.

• The 33% is 23 extra falls per 100 people a year, and nothing more.
• Three falls out of the 440 counted decide the entire headline.
• The extra falls caused no extra injury at all.
• One finding went the other way, and it is far more secure than the headline.
• What improved was balance confidence, not what people’s legs could do.
• It was yoga. It was not Iyengar yoga as it is normally taught.
• Falls cost Australia $5.4 billion and 48,034 healthy years every year.
• Why a yoga studio is writing about falls, said plainly rather than left hanging.

What the trial was, in one paragraph

The trial is called SAGE. It was run by researchers at the University of Sydney and published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity in September 2025. It enrolled 700 Australians aged 60 and over. Half were offered a supervised yoga exercise programme, up to 80 classes across twelve months, most of them delivered online because of COVID. The other half were given two one hour workshops of seated breathing and stretching, and nothing else. Everybody then recorded their falls for a year.

The headline that came out of it was that the yoga group had 33% more falls.

What “33% more falls” actually means

Here is the same finding in whole numbers instead of a percentage.

For every 100 people in the comparison group, 64 falls were recorded in a year. For every 100 people in the yoga group, 87 falls were recorded. The difference is 23 falls per 100 people per year.

Twenty three more out of 64 is about a third more, and that is where the 33% comes from.

A percentage makes a difference sound bigger than the same difference stated in people and events. That is not anybody being tricky. It is simply what percentages do, and it is worth knowing when you read a health headline.

It is also worth saying what a fall means here. In falls research a fall is any event where somebody comes to rest on the ground or a lower level without meaning to. Sitting down harder than you meant to on the grass counts. So does a slip in the kitchen that you catch yourself from and end up sitting on the floor. Most falls counted in a study like this do no damage at all.

Could the result have happened by chance?

Yes, and the trial says so itself. The number that tells you how likely that is came out at 0.044.

Here is what that number means, in plain words, because it is almost always explained wrongly.

It does not mean there is a 4.4% chance the finding is a fluke. What it means is this: if the yoga programme made no difference to falls at all, and you ran the same trial over and over, a gap at least this big would still turn up about one time in twenty three, just from the ordinary randomness of who happens to trip over in a given year.

The line researchers draw is at one time in twenty. A result that would turn up less often than that by chance is called statistically significant, and it gets reported. A result that would turn up more often than that does not.

One in twenty three squeaks past one in twenty. That is the whole of it.

Why three falls decide the whole thing

This is the part worth sitting with.

Across the whole trial, 440 falls were recorded. 164 in the comparison group and 276 in the yoga group.

Work the numbers again with three fewer falls in the yoga group, 273 instead of 276, and the result moves from one in twenty three to one in twenty. It stops counting as a real difference.

Work them again with two extra falls in the comparison group, falls that happened but that nobody wrote down, and exactly the same thing happens.

Three falls out of 440. In a study that ran for a year across 700 people in their sixties and seventies.

In our view that is not a reason to ignore the finding, and it is not a reason to say the researchers did anything wrong. The arithmetic in the paper is sound, and we have checked it ourselves. It is a reason to hold the finding loosely, and it is a reason not to build advice to older people on top of it.

Who wrote down their falls, and who did not

This matters more than it sounds.

In the yoga group, 340 people out of 350 returned fall records, which is 97%. In the comparison group, 309 out of 350 did, which is 88%. The comparison group had roughly four times the rate of missing records, and they contributed about 19% fewer person-years of follow-up.

Think about what that means. The yoga group had a programme running twice a week for a year, with people attached to it. The comparison group had two workshops and then a diary to send back.

We cannot say what the missing records would have shown, and we do not claim to know. What we can say is that the whole finding turns on two falls’ worth of under-recording, and that the group with more missing records is the group whose falls make the comparison.

More falls, but no more injuries

The same trial measured something else, and this part did not make any headline at all.

Falls that caused an injury did not increase in the yoga group. The rate was 0.19 per person-year in the comparison group and 0.18 in the yoga group. Measured as a ratio, that is 0.94, and it is nowhere near a real difference.

Injuries here means cuts, grazes, sprains, dislocations, fractures and head injuries. Mostly soft tissue.

So the trial found more falls of a kind that did not hurt anybody more.

In our view, as teachers of the Iyengar style of yoga, that combination is exactly what you would expect. A person who has spent a year practising standing yoga poses is a person who has spent a year learning what to do when their weight goes past the edge of their foot. They put a hand out. They bend the knee instead of locking it. They go down rather than over. The trial did not measure any of that, so this is our reading rather than a finding, and we say so plainly.

Stuart, who runs Flametree with me, fell very badly at Edith River a few years ago. He went down hard and hit his head. His spine was fine. He would tell you himself that decades of yoga practice is why the landing went the way it did, and he would also tell you he has no way of proving it.

One thing we will not say, because the trial did not measure it. Some people have suggested the flat injury rate means yoga built stronger bones, so the falls did less damage. SAGE measured no bone density at all. Stronger bones is a plausible explanation and an untested one. It is a good question, not an answer.

The finding that went the other way, and why it is the strongest number in the study

The trial split its participants by how physically active they already were when they started.

Among the least active, the people doing under 20 hours a week of any activity, falls went down by 39% in the yoga group. The paper prints that as a rate ratio of 0.61. The middle group went slightly up. The most active group went up the most.

Then the researchers tested whether that pattern of three different answers was itself real, or just noise. That test came out at 0.0009.

Put the two numbers side by side. The headline finding would turn up by chance about one time in twenty three. The finding that the programme worked in opposite directions depending on how active you already were would turn up by chance about one time in a thousand.

The finding that did not make the headline is roughly fifty times more secure than the finding that did.

We should be careful here, and we will be. The researchers report this analysis as one they planned in advance. The 39% figure itself sits right on the line at 0.05, the same borderline place as the headline. And a study that splits people into groups after the event can find patterns that are not there.

But the direction is worth saying out loud. In the group who had the most to gain, who were doing the least, who are the people a falls prevention programme is actually for, the yoga programme was associated with fewer falls, not more.

And it is worth saying whose finding that is. It is in the researchers’ own data, from their own trial, tested with an analysis they say they planned in advance. It is a better result than the one that travelled, and nobody has to concede anything to anybody in order to claim it.

What went up, and what did not

The trial measured a number of other things, and the pattern in them is interesting.

What was measured	Did it change?
Hours a week of planned structured exercise	Went up by about an hour
Whether people met their own mobility goals	Went up
Confidence in their own balance	Went up
What their legs could actually do, basic tests	No change
What their legs could actually do, harder tests	No change

Everything that moved was something people reported about themselves. Neither measure of what their legs could actually do moved at all.

In our view that is the most useful thing in the whole trial, and it is a caution for any exercise programme, not just a yoga one. If a programme leaves people more confident and no steadier, and they then do more, some of them will fall over. The problem is not the confidence. The problem is confidence arriving before capacity.

Which raises the obvious question about the programme itself, and that is the subject of our other posts on this trial.

So what was actually tested, and was it Iyengar yoga?

This is where we have to declare something, because it is the part of this story Flametree has spent a year on.

The trial called its programme Iyengar yoga. The Lancet corrected that in March 2026. The paper now describes it as “a supervised yoga exercise programme based on some elements of the Iyengar style”. It now says that two of the four instructors specialised in that style. And it now says, in its own words, that the programme did not include hands-on teacher adjustments, because of the online delivery, or individualised sequencing.

Why that matters to us, and to every Iyengar teacher in the country: Iyengar yoga is a defined method with a training and a certification behind it. Of the four teachers the trial named, no more than two held current Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher credentials. A programme that borrows some standing poses, leaves out the hands-on correction and the sequencing, and runs mostly over a screen is not that method. We think the published record should say so plainly in every sentence, not just in some of them, and our other article sets out exactly which sentences still do not.

Now here is the part that usually gets left out, and it should not be.

It was still yoga.

Standing poses, twice a week, with teachers, for a year, in people’s seventies. And as yoga, in the group who were doing the least to start with, it was associated with 39% fewer falls.

So the honest reading has two halves and both of them are true. The label was wrong, and the thing underneath the label did somebody some good. We are not interested in a version of this story where only the first half gets said.

So does yoga cause falls?

On the evidence, here is the honest answer.

One trial found more falls in a group offered one particular yoga-based programme, mostly delivered online, and the difference was small enough to turn on three falls. That is a real finding and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

No trial has found that falls caused more harm. In SAGE they did not.

The wider evidence on exercise and falls runs the other way. A Cochrane review pooling 108 trials found that exercise reduces the rate of falls by about 23%. Balance and functional exercise is the category with the best evidence.

Yoga is not yet established as a falls prevention treatment, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The in-person studies are small, and most of them measured things that predict falls, like how long you can stand on one leg, rather than counting falls themselves.

So the fair answer to the question is that a yoga programme is not a proven falls prevention treatment, that one trial of one programme found more falls of a kind that caused no more injury, and that the same trial found fewer falls among the people who were doing the least.

The cost of falls in Australia, and what they take from people

Everything above is about one trial. Here is why the question underneath it is worth this much trouble.

In 2023-24, fall-related injuries cost the Australian health system about $5.4 billion. That is the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s own figure and it covers all ages.

About 253,800 people a year are admitted to hospital after a fall. The average stay is 9.5 days. People aged 65 and over end up in hospital after a fall about twelve times more often than adults aged 25 to 44, and half of those admissions involve a fracture.

Money is the easy part to count. It is also the smaller part.

The consequences of falls in the elderly go well past the hospital bill

The same Institute measures something called burden of disease. It counts the healthy years a condition takes away from people. Some of those are years lost to dying early. The rest are years still lived, but lived with pain, or with something you used to be able to do and now cannot.

For Australians aged 65 and over, falls take 48,034 healthy years every year. About 28,865 of those are years of life lost. About 19,170 are years lived with disability.

What does that look like for one person?

Take a broken hip, which is the injury most people picture. Of the people who were living in their own home and had surgery for one, here is where they were 120 days later.

Seventy three in a hundred were back in their own home. Fifteen were in residential aged care. Twelve had died.

More than one in four never went home.

Numbers like these are easy to read straight past. Stuart’s father had a fall. He went to hospital and he did not come home. That is the last column of that picture, and everybody in it is somebody’s father.

And for the people who do come home, the story often keeps going. Nine and a half days in a hospital bed takes muscle off an older person quickly, and it does not come back on its own. Chris has taught enough students through the months after a fall to know what that looks like from the inside: less walking, less confidence, smaller world.

What the finding nobody reported might be worth

Nobody has costed the one result in that trial that went the right way. The economic evaluation the trial was funded to do was not conducted, and the paper says so.

But the arithmetic is not hard, and anybody can repeat it.

Fall-related injuries cost the Australian health system about $5.4 billion a year. Spread across the roughly 5 million Australians aged 65 and over, the share landing on that age group works out at about $700 a person a year. A 39% reduction in that group would be worth about $270 a person a year.

We are not saying yoga would save the health system $270 a head. Three things would have to be true first, and the trial tests none of them.

1. That the 39% is real. It sat exactly on the line, and its range runs from a 63% reduction all the way down to a small increase.
2. That it would hold outside a trial, in ordinary classes, among people nobody randomised into anything.
3. That it would apply to the falls that actually cost money. About 85% of the cost sits in falls serious enough for a hospital admission, and across the trial as a whole, falls that caused injury did not go down at all.

That third one is the one that cuts against us, and we are not going to bury it at the bottom.

So treat the figure as an illustration rather than a finding. What it illustrates is why somebody should have done the proper sum. There are about 5 million Australians aged 65 and over today, and on the Bureau of Statistics’ own projections there will be around 7.7 million in twenty years. Whatever the right answer is for this group, it gets bigger every year.

Which makes it a question for more than one yoga studio in Darwin

Falls are the largest single cause of injury death and injury hospitalisation among Australians aged 65 and over. The thing that decides whether any exercise programme helps is not how good it is on paper. It is whether people in their seventies will still be doing it in a year.

Yoga is worth testing properly on exactly that question, because a lot of people do keep doing it, for reasons that have nothing to do with falls. That is not a yoga argument. It is a public spending argument, and the money to answer it has already been allocated once.

Why a yoga studio is writing about falls

There is an obvious objection to all of that, and we would rather say it ourselves than wait for somebody else to say it for us.

We sell yoga classes. A long article about what falls cost, written by a business that sells the thing it is hinting might help, is not a neutral document.

So here is the plain version of what we are doing. We have two reasons to write this, and both of them are real.

The first is the one you would expect from us. If you are over 60, and a headline about yoga and falls has put you off starting, we think you were handed a fraction of a story. We would like you to come to a class. We would rather say that out loud than pretend we have no interest in it.

The second is the one that has taken up most of this page. Falls cost this country billions of dollars and tens of thousands of healthy years every single year. The one finding in that trial that pointed somewhere useful is in the published paper, and it did not make the summary, it did not make the media release, and we have not been able to find it in a single news report. That seems worth saying whoever ends up saying it.

What we are not saying. We are not saying yoga prevents falls. No trial has shown that, and we are not going to be the ones to claim it.

What the evidence does support is narrower, and still worth knowing. Challenging balance work combined with leg strengthening is the best supported way of reducing falls in older people. A well taught yoga class gives you both, in an order that builds. That is the claim, and it is as far as the evidence takes it.

And the group that gained in that trial was the group already doing the least. If that sounds like you, it is not a reason to stay where you are. It is the one part of this whole story that points straight at a place to start.

What to look for in a yoga class if you are over 60

This is the practical part, and it is the same advice we would give whatever that trial had found.

Look for a teacher who can see you. In the studio, or LIVE online with your camera on and your whole body in the frame. A teacher who cannot see your back foot cannot correct your back foot.

Look for props. Walls, chairs, blocks and belts are not a lesser version of a pose. They are how you get the benefit of a pose your body cannot yet do on its own, and they are how a standing balance is learned safely.

Ask how a standing balance is taught. The answer you want involves a wall or a chair first, for weeks, before anybody lets go.

Start where you are. If you have not exercised in years, the SAGE trial’s own most interesting finding suggests you may be exactly the person with the most to gain.

Tell the teacher about your falls. All of them, including the ones that did no damage. It changes what a good teacher does with you.

Where to start with us

Flametree Yoga Studio teaches across the greater Darwin region and LIVE online across Australia. Our beginners classes are small, they use props, and the teaching is structured.

The easiest way in is the half price 10 class pass with 2 classes free, which works in the studio or online.

You can also see when classes run on the timetable.

Frequently asked questions

What does “33% more falls” actually mean?

It means 23 extra falls per 100 people per year. In the SAGE trial, published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity in 2025, the comparison group recorded about 64 falls per 100 people per year and the yoga group about 87. Twenty three more out of 64 is roughly a third more, which is where the 33% comes from.

Could the yoga result have happened by chance?

Yes. The trial’s own figure for this was p equals 0.044. That means if the programme made no difference at all, a gap this big would still turn up about one time in twenty three by chance alone. The usual line researchers draw is one time in twenty, so the result only just crossed it.

What is a p value, in plain words?

A p value answers one question: if the thing you are testing made no difference at all, how often would you still see a result this big, just from randomness? A p value of 0.044 means about one time in twenty three. It does not tell you how big the effect is, how important it is, or how likely it is to be true.

Why did more falls not mean more injuries in the SAGE trial?

The trial found no increase at all in falls that caused injury. The rate was 0.19 per person-year in the comparison group and 0.18 in the yoga group. The trial did not measure why. In our view, as teachers of the Iyengar style of yoga, people who have practised standing poses for a year tend to land better, but that is our reading and the trial did not test it.

Did anybody in the SAGE trial do better with yoga?

Yes. Among the least physically active participants, those doing under 20 hours a week of activity, falls were 39% lower in the yoga group, printed in the paper as a rate ratio of 0.61. The test of whether the programme genuinely worked differently for different activity levels came out at p equals 0.0009, which is a far more secure number than the headline result of 0.044.

Does the SAGE trial mean yoga is bad for balance?

No. The trial measured falls, not balance, and its own tests of what participants’ legs could actually do showed no change in either direction. Separately, a Cochrane review of 108 trials found that exercise reduces falls by about 23%, with balance and functional exercise the best supported category.

Was the SAGE trial programme Iyengar yoga?

Not as Iyengar yoga is normally taught, and The Lancet corrected the paper on this point in March 2026. The paper now describes the programme as “a supervised yoga exercise programme based on some elements of the Iyengar style”, says that two of the four instructors specialised in that style, and states that the programme did not include hands-on teacher adjustments or individualised sequencing. Of the four teachers the trial named, no more than two held current Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher credentials. It was still yoga, and among the least physically active participants it was associated with 39% fewer falls.

How much do falls cost in Australia?

Fall-related injuries cost the Australian health system about $5.4 billion in 2023-24, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. That covers all ages. About 253,800 people a year are admitted to hospital after a fall, and the average stay is 9.5 days. People aged 65 and over are hospitalised for a fall about twelve times more often than adults aged 25 to 44.

What are the consequences of falls in the elderly?

The hospital bill is the smaller part. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare also measures burden of disease, which counts the healthy years a condition takes from people, whether through dying early or through living on with pain or disability. For Australians aged 65 and over, falls take 48,034 healthy years every year: about 28,865 years of life lost and about 19,170 years lived with disability.

What happens after an older person breaks a hip?

Of people who were living in their own home and had surgery for a broken hip, 120 days later about 73 in 100 were back in their own home, about 15 were in residential aged care, and about 12 had died. More than one in four never went home. Those are Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures on hip fracture care.

Should I stop doing yoga if I am worried about falling?

That is a question for you and whatever advisors you choose. What we would say is that one trial of one programme, mostly delivered online, with a result that turns on three falls out of 440, is thin ground for stopping something you enjoy and that is doing you good elsewhere. If you are worried, tell your yoga teacher about your falls and ask how standing balances are taught in that class.

More on the SAGE trial from Flametree

This is one of four articles. The SAGE trial correction, and what it left alone sets out what The Lancet changed in March 2026 and what it did not. Falls and yoga studies reviews the in-person research that came before it. Yoga for seniors: what the SAGE trial did not test looks at the programme itself.

Sources

1. Oliveira JS, Sherrington C, Lord SR, Tiedemann A, et al. “The effect of an Iyengar yoga-based exercise programme versus a seated yoga relaxation programme on falls in people aged 60 years and older (SAGE): a randomised controlled trial.” The Lancet Healthy Longevity 2025; 6: 100749. 700 participants aged 60 and over.
2. “Correction to Lancet Healthy Longevity 2025; 6: 100749.” The Lancet Healthy Longevity 2026; 7(3): 100825. Published 24 March 2026.
3. Sherrington C, Fairhall NJ, Wallbank GK, et al. “Exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2019, Issue 1, CD012424. 108 trials, 23,407 participants.
4. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Injury in Australia: falls. Health system expenditure on fall-related injury, 2023-24. Hospitalisation counts, average length of stay and age comparisons.
5. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Australian Burden of Disease Study. Falls, people aged 65 and over: years of life lost and years lived with disability.
6. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Hip fracture care. Where people were living 120 days after surgery.
7. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Population projections, Australia. Projected population aged 65 and over.

Flametree Yoga Studio teaches Iyengar yoga across the greater Darwin region and LIVE online across Australia. This article is general information and is not medical advice. If you have had a fall, or you are worried about falling, speak to your doctor.