Are you an experienced yoga teacher looking for a manual so you can offer a yoga teacher training (YTT)?
You might relate to our struggle getting our training started. We’ll also share some guidance on writing your yoga teacher training manual.
We wanted to offer YTT for years but had a hard time prioritizing the task of creating the program. At first we worked on our own but didn’t get very far. Then we decided to work together and created a weekly schedule to meet and make the training a priority. We planned in the meetings then worked on our own while continuing to teach our classes, workshops, courses, and run two studios.
We started strong for a few months, but before you know it, a year had passed and there was still no end in sight. There were so many decisions to make about the curriculum and syllabus, so much research and writing, planning, and delivery. We hadn’t even considered the layout of the manual. We even let go of some classes to make time.
In the end, it took us years to open registration for our first 200-hour YTT in 2014. The first module had 4 people, eventually it grew to 11 students because of the modular format we chose.
Yoga Alliance Enhanced Standards Changed the Curriculum
Then Yoga Alliance came out with Enhanced Standards in 2019 and we were back to writing. We took the opportunity to make changes, knowing what we knew, after delivering the training for a few years. We tried to look on the bright side of that work and made the most of it.
Well, you know what happened next, COVID lockdowns changed everything again!
We feel like we’ve seen it all over the years, delivering the training since 2014, maintaining a 5 star rating on Yoga Alliance. Now we help other experienced teachers offer training.
If you’re writing a manual on your own, this video about “How to Plan a Yoga Alliance Curriculum” and the pointers below will help with the process.
How to Plan and Write a Great Yoga Manual
Writing Yoga Teacher Training Manuals is not a piece of cake. The first version manual took us two years to complete but with help and planning it can be faster for you. Here are the steps we followed to create our 200 Hour Yoga Teacher training manual and delivery:
- Outline Your Curriculum: We started by using the Yoga Alliance Core Competencies to outline the topics we wanted to include. We used Post-It Notes to color code the Educational Categories and competencies.
- Outline Your Delivery: Then we looked at the delivery of the training, all the competencies and how much time to spend on each. For example we assigned 3 hours of training for a blend of 1.5 hours of “sequencing” in the Techniques, Training, and Practice category and 1.5 hours of pacing and sequencing in the Teaching Methodology category. In the manual this would include a complete lesson plan and training on the topics. We outlined the full 200 hours of training and how both synchronous and asynchronous hours could look.
- Start Writing: Then we divided the topics between us and began to research and write the manual.
- Prepare the Yoga Alliance Syllabus for Your Application: We regularly met to troubleshoot and make decisions, adjust the hours and move our post it notes. We added new topics and removed others. We didn’t have time to cover all our original ideas and put the overflow in a file called 300 Hour Yoga Teacher Training. As we completed each topic we transferred our notes to a spreadsheet, which would do the math and count the hours for us, and prepare us for the Yoga Alliance Application.
- Create the Manual: The final step was creating the written manual with images, footnotes and table of contents.
There was a point, around step 4, where the living room looked like the scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind when the wife in the movie walks into her husband’s office and realizes he had gone over the edge.
Writing those manuals had a price, in time, lost income, mental energy, not to mention the physical stress of being at the computer.
Oh, how we wished the manuals were just done already!
Those days were not easy for us, but it can be much easier for you if you are open to getting help.
Start a Yoga School without Years Writing Manuals and Planning the Training
Do you know what our true desire was? To TEACH the training, not write it. We love holding the training and we’re so glad the writing part is over, time where we had to teach less and work for nothing, so that we have this new revenue stream!
If this is what you want, we can help. We have a program that makes it easy to offer Yoga Teacher Training using our already written and tested YTT.
Click the button below for a one step closer to your dream.
If you are working on writing your own program, give yourself lots of lead time. Get help and support where you can, and set up some accountability to help you get the work done. If you stick with it, you’ll be able to offer Yoga Teacher Training to your students and take the seat of Trainer.