[2] Swami Kuvalayananda was born Jagannatha Ganesa Gune in a traditional Karhade Brahmin family in the village Dhaboi in Gujarat state, India.

[3] During his student days, he was influenced by political leaders like Sri Aurobindo, who was working as a young lecturer at the university, and Lokmanya Tilak's Indian Home Rule Movement.

[5] In 1919, he met the Bengali yogin, Paramahamsa Madhavdas, who had settled at Malsar, near Baroda, on the banks of the Narmada river.

In 1920–21, he investigated the effects of the Yogic practices of uddiyana bandha and nauli on the human body with the help of some of his students in a laboratory at the State Hospital, Baroda.

[8] As early as the 1930s, Kuvalayananda trained large groups of yoga teachers as a way to spread physical education in India.

[9] In the anthropologist Joseph Alter's words, "what he himself had to prove was that this truth [of classical yoga] was based on natural laws and universal principles.

In some sense, pure, objective science was to be deployed as the handmaiden of spirituality and orthodox philosophy so as to establish what came to be the theme of his life's work".

"[11] Alter notes that although these experiments ranged over a wide variety of types of measurement—including oxygen consumption, systolic pressure, heart rate, adrenocortical activity, cardiovascular endurance, fibrinolytic activity of the blood, psycho-motor performance, dexterity, serum cholesterol, asthma, obesity, cancer, diabetes, sinusitis, anxiety, urinary pH, lymphocytes and stomach acidity—all of these were "regarded as epiphenomenal in their relationship to the real object of study—the phenomenal meta-material power inherent in Yoga.

K. T. Behanan, a doctoral candidate from Yale University, wrote his dissertation on yoga after visiting in late 1931, and staying for a year.

The Gordhandas Seksaria College of Yoga and Cultural Synthesis was established in 1951 at Lonavla to prepare young people spiritually and intellectually for selfless service to humanity.