When yoga was first introduced to the U.S. by Swami Vivekananda in the 1890s, it was primarily taught as a spiritual practice. This begins to shift in the 1930s with an influx of new teachers. Describing visiting Hatha yoga teachers as "traveling salesmen," American author Charles Ferguson writes: “every winter we can find advertisements of the appearances of Yogis in the cities of the East and during the spring and summer they work the back places" (Deslippe, 2019). Bodybuilding magazines begin to include advertisements on the benefits of yoga as exercise.