5 Surprising Things About Yoga Teacher Training

hi friends Kathy Madeo here back with another video this one all about yoga teacher training I'm going to go over the five things that I've noticed students are most surprised by when they're considering doing a yoga teacher training now you might be wondering who am I to come up with a list like this if you don't know much about me I have been teaching yoga for almost 20 years I managed multiple yoga studios in Los Angeles and San Francisco I owned my own Yoga Studio in New Jersey and I currently own a online Global yoga teacher training school called Kathy mideo yoga so not only have I trained hundreds upon hundreds of yoga teachers I have come in contact with and spoken to thousands of yoga students over the years who have been considering a yoga teacher training and it's from them that I have come up with this list these are no particular order but the first thing I'm going to talk about that might surprise you about yoga teacher training is you don't need to be good at yoga to take a teacher training it is the most common question I get asked when someone's considering taking a yoga teacher training is am I good enough and even that kind of thinking is just not the point of yoga teacher training anyone that has a desire to learn more about yoga is ready for a yoga teacher training many years ago the thinking was oh you need to have this amount of years of yoga practice in order to take a teacher training over the years as I began to soften on that perspective and begin to allow interested beginner yoga students into teacher trainings what I witnessed was that they often came out of the program the strongest and that's because I didn't have to spend months of undoing habits that they had collected over the years that might not have been serving them or rubbing up against a perspective that was so different than mine and always thinking through their own previous teacher so you don't need to be anywhere in your practice at least in my teacher training to take a 200 hour teacher training you are going to learn the fundamentals of yoga and how to do the poses in the teacher training in fact oftentimes when you're seeing students in the classes that seem to know everything it's probably because they've done a teacher training the second thing that might surprise you about yoga teacher training is it's not just about yoga poses at this point in modern culture it seems to be that yoga has become synonymous with yoga poses and that's just not the full picture of what yoga is our yoga Alsina practice is one piece of what's called an eight-fold path so it's one of the parts of this Eightfold Path of what yoga is so of course you're going to be learning yoga poses but you're also going to be learning things like the history of yoga what the Eightfold Path is meditation pranayama Anatomy how to sequence voice and cueing how to speak in the classroom Hands-On assists you'll get ethics how to live a modern day yoga life and so much more so again those yoga poses are just a tiny little picture the third thing that might surprise you about yoga teacher training is since it's not just about the yoga poses it's not really the place where you're going to learn those crazy yoga poses in fact a 200 hour level yoga teacher training which is what you need in order to be a teacher spends most of the time focused on the foundational yoga poses why because those are the poses that you're most likely going to teach to the general public and it's most important for you to understand the fundamental alignment principles of those poses in order to have a solid foundation of yoga and I think that once you can understand the alignment and these foundational poses you'll really have a nuanced understanding of alignment in general and thus be able to map those on to the more quote advanced yoga poses so again if you're just looking to put your leg behind your head to get a handstand to do a drop back and that's all you want yoga teacher training probably isn't for you for a thing that might surprise you about yoga teacher training is that yoga teacher training is not just for people that want to be yoga teacher in fact since I've shifted to teaching mostly online yoga teacher training most of the people that come to the training are just wanting to learn more about yoga and to understand the alignment the poses because most people especially these days are practicing yoga at home so if you're feeling curious about yoga teacher training but you have no desire to be a yoga teacher it's still right for you and the fifth thing that might surprise you about yoga teacher training as you're going to get friends for life you're basically going to join a community of like-minded people now of course all yoga teacher trainings are different and some will nurture that more than others but I think that most people that go through yoga teacher training are most surprised by the friends that they make in the community that they have joined more of course I could add to this list feel free to let me know in the comments something I might have missed and if you are interested in an online yoga teacher training I definitely want you to consider mine and if you head to the description box I provided a link where I have a three video sample right from my teacher training so you can get a good idea of what it's all about I'll see you in the next video