By Keisha Courtney, Founder, The Driven Yogi
Most yoga teachers can recall their first time taking a yoga class. Ask about the experience and we’ll likely tell you yoga healed us, moved us with deep emotions we’d never felt, transformed us, or made us feel alive in our bodies. It sounds cliche, but these feelings are true, raw, and very real. And, it’s these feelings that draw most of us to go through a Yoga Alliance certified 200-hour teacher training – so we can share the practice with others.
Like many teacher trainees, I didn’t know what to expect in my training. But, I quickly found out on my first full day that it wasn’t going to be a cake walk. There was so much we needed to learn in the short 200 hours we had together – yoga philosophy, anatomy and alignment, sequencing, sanskrit, finding your voice, learning how to multitask times 10, maintaining our own practice, the business of yoga, meditation, prenatal yoga, the list goes on and on. I was quite perplexed as to how we would cover every subject fully and still be prepared to teach, and most importantly, learn how to keep students safe in our classes. And the truth is, we didn’t learn everything we needed to know to teach and prevent student injuries from occurring. The timing just wasn’t realistic. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only yoga graduate who felt this way.
Teachers on Yoga Student Injuries
When I asked my cohort, and went further to ask more experienced teachers about their own post training experience, all of them said they lacked knowledge, skills, and confidence after training, and were terrified that they’d end up injuring students because they didn’t fully understand the muscles and joints that needed to be engaged in asanas. Not only that, they didn’t know how to cue students with varying body awareness into more difficult poses. Instead, they found themselves repeating what their own teachers said in classes without fully understanding what those cues actually meant. This is just one of the reasons there has been a huge increase in yoga student injuries, and why some students have taken legal action against teachers.
The Evidence of Yoga Student Injuries
A 2016 study by the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that from 2001-2014 yoga injuries were on the rise. There are several articles from respected instructors in the field that give insight into the problem, including this one from Yoga Journal. In it, Coral Brown, a teacher trainer, holistic psychotherapist, and one of Yoga Journal’s Art of Teaching Yoga instructors, believes there is likely a combination of factors behind the rise in yoga injuries. “There has been a significant increase in yoga teacher trainings, which makes it very difficult to ensure that the quality of teacher trainings is being upheld,” she says. “The process of getting the credentials to be a teacher trainer should be more stringent and more closely supervised.”
Yoga Alliance, the governing body over yoga teacher trainings, has realized this too, and has recently tightened up the rules around 200-hour certifications. However, the new rules don’t go far enough because it’s still ultimately up to each studio that holds a training how they’re designed and led. This typically means no two trainings are alike and there can be stark differences in what students learn. This is the overall problem with teacher trainings.
Creating Solutions to the Problem
Graduates aren’t prepared to effectively teach and take the next steps they need to in order to ensure their student’s are safe. This is why The Driven Yogi exists. We are the first company dedicated to specifically helping 200-hour yoga teacher training graduates fill the gaps in their training so they can build confidence, knowledge, and learn the skills they need to be successful teachers.
In a recent survey we conducted, over half of yoga teachers said they didn’t feel confident enough to teach yoga after training, and nearly 60% said they didn’t fully understand all they need to when it came to alignment and anatomy to keep their students safe. The same goes for those who completed 300-hour trainings. Our answer to this? Continuing education in a variety of areas curated specifically with new teachers in mind. Our inaugural training, Stepping Outside the Textbook: Intelligible Yoga Alignment by Whitney Walsh is led by Bay Area yoga alignment specialist and E-RYT-500 Whitney Walsh. She takes students through anatomy specifically as it relates to yoga, and teaches teachers how to keep their students safe. More importantly, she shows teachers what can go wrong in poses and why student injuries can occur. She also shows teachers how to effectively cue and prop students so they have a better understanding of what it takes to get into certain poses.
Our hope is that this training is a stepping stone into helping newer yoga teachers grasp the nuances involved in teaching, and to take a step back and realize what they don’t know and how they can improve on it. Our goal is not only to fill in the gaps in teacher trainings, but to make the landscape safer for everyone.
