Kolar Venkatesh Iyer was born in the village of Devarayasmudra in
Kolar District,
Karnataka. His mother died when he was ten, and he went to school in
Mysore, reaching the Intermediate level. Soon after that he began developing his own system of
bodybuilding. He was a gymnast, bodybuilder, energetic and well-known proponent of Indian
physical culture, and a contributor, like other gymnastics teachers such as
Krishnamacharya, to the development of
modern yoga. He consciously combined
hatha yoga with bodybuilding in his
Bangalore gymnasium, around 1930. He helped, too, to present the sequence of yoga
asanas called
Surya Namaskar, the Salute to the Sun, as a practical, modern, stretching exercise rather than as something spiritual. He toured India doing lecture-demonstrations, accompanied by the yoga guru
Seetharaman Sundaram. This helped to change the perception of yoga from a magical technique intended for the medieval and magical transformation of the body into something immortal, by conquering the five elements, to a view of the body from the point of view of looking good and being physically fit. His first gymnasium was established in the Sultan's palace in Bangalore in 1922. He moved several times, finally in 1940 setting up the "famous" Vyayamsala on J. C. Road, Bangalore. He became "the most important Indian physical culture instructor of the time", attempting "to blend Yoga, Hindu mysticism, and occidental physical culture into something uniquely his own". ==Personal life==