From couch potatoes to triathletes, people of all ages stretched their minds and bodies on Saturday during a national day of yoga awareness.

At the Yoga Health & Therapy Center on West Second Street, free yoga classes were offered throughout the day.

Among early arrivals were Michelle Dumais and her husband David Hoopes, doctoral students in Spanish at the University of Kentucky. The couple had practiced yoga in the past, Dumais said, but they were looking for a new place to take classes.

The center has offered classes since 1981.

Yoga Day USA was designed to increase the public's awareness of yoga's benefits and help make the practice more accessible to people of all fitness levels and ages. Yoga helps improve breathing, develops good posture, increases flexibility and strength, and improves concentration.

Amanda Kelter brought her 10-year-old son Damon Linville to the center for the two of them to take a free class. Kelter knew little about yoga until her recent 11-month deployment to Iraq with the 1163rd Army National Guard Unit

A lieutenant in her medical support unit taught a beginning class in yoga and meditation. "It was well needed," Kelter said. She said it made a believer out of her.

She hopes to achieve an intermediate level of yoga proficiency.

Yoga has moved from being New Age to mainstream over the past 40 years, said Martha Clay, an instructor at the center.

"People have gradually realized the benefits of yoga" on stretching the body and calming the mind, she said.

Yoga emphasizes balance and strengthening your body. Clay tells participants in her classes they can achieve benefits from the easiest of poses. What sometimes happens, she said, is beginners see others do complicated stretches and headstands and "it sometimes scares them off," she said.

Clay took her first yoga class in the 1980s following back surgery when she had a disc removed. "You learn to become comfortable in your body, and listen to what your body tells you," she said.

Most classes close with a period of quiet meditation. Yoga meditation is not about any religion, Clay said, "But it probably could enhance your faith, no matter what that is."

Meditation has a calming, centering effect that helps you live in the moment, she said.