For millennia, people have reveled in the ancient art of yoga, stretching and sweating and periodically farting as they bridged the gap between body and mind with some sun salutations. Sometimes they were clothed, sometimes not, but they were always free and uninhibited as the great snake Kundalini rocketed up their spines or whatever.
But today there are few remaining places left where one can practice yoga like our great yogi ancestors, fully unencumbered by the shackles of restrictive clothing—and it looks like Planet Fitness is not one of them. On Sunday, police arrested a would-be yogi at a New Hampshire Planet Fitness gym after the guy stripped completely naked and started doing stretches on a mat, NECN reports.
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According to police, 34-year-old Eric Stagno stripped down, first taking a stroll around the local Plaistow gym. It’s unclear if Stagno was using this initial lap to try to decide what exercises he wanted to do, or if he was just trying to feel a little breeze, but he ultimately got down to business practicing some stretched on one of the gym’s yoga mats in the middle of the afternoon.
It wasn’t long before members and staff of the local Planet Fitness—which markets itself as a “judgement free zone” in theory, but apparently not always in practice—notified the police about Stagno’s workout routine. He was arrested and later charged with indecent exposure, lewdness, and disorderly conduct.
“The only statement that he made [while being arrested] was that he thought it was a ‘judgment-free zone’—apparently referencing the chain’s slogan,” Police Captain Brett Morgan later said, according to WBZ-TV.
Now Stagno is scheduled to appear in court in September, but in the meantime, he should probably start looking into some honest-to-God naked yoga classes—and invest in his own yoga mat while he’s at it, since some unhappy Planet Fitness employee in New Hampshire is probably still trying to Clorox the ball sweat from that mat.
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