What’s your Teaching Style? OR, Think you Wanna’ Be a Yoga Teacher?

Yoga Teacher Training

Students are drawn to yoga for a many reasons. Today, yoga is so popular that some foks simply want to be part of a fad and teach a yoga class to be cool. Well now days your can get outstanding yoga teacher training online or off line.

Often baby-boomers discover yoga because they want better health. They may be suffering from a chronic condition such as arthritis, back pain or high blood pressure and they’ve found they don’t like the side effects of the drugs they’ve been prescribed. Or maybe they just don’t want to take drugs at all.

Perhaps a doctor has recommended yoga after a heart attack or to help reduce cholesterol.

You may find students in wheel chairs, office chairs or strapped into a lifestyle that prohibits regular mobility.

If you find yourself wanting to teach yoga, there are many things to consider before you start.

The primary question is to ask yourself "Why"?

What brought you to yoga in the first place? Do you remember the feeling? Were you suffering from an injury? Did you become pregnant and want to take care of your body? Did you have a heart attack and realize you had to make a major lifestyle change? Were you lifting weights and hurt yourself or decided you needed more flexibility?

Everyone has his or her own reasons WHY they're practicing yoga.

Yoga teacher training online.

If you’ve moved beyond merely practicing yoga and feel called to teach it, then you need to consider a few things before making that leap.

Why do you want to teach? Before yoga became so outrageously popular, many yoga teachers would say they felt called to the teaching mission. Today with the increasing popularity of yoga, many athletic people see it as a way to stay fit while making money.

After you’ve determined your primary motivation for becoming a yoga teacher, you will have a better idea of what style of yoga to teach and you can even start getting good yoga teacher training online.

If you’re an athlete, addicted to adrenaline, then you’ll probably want to teach ashtanga or power yoga. This is yoga for strong bodies that need to push themselves. Power yoga is new branch of yoga, created by Beryl Bender and although for most traditionalists, it is the antithesis of “real” yoga, this style has caught on in a big way in gyms where weightlifting and aerobics are common. Power yoga pushes the body and produces a lot of sweat, something athletes adore.

A similar form of yoga is Bikram’s. Bikram Choudhury left India and went straight to Hollywood where he created his own style of yoga. It’s a set of 26 postures that you must be pretty strong and flexible to perform properly. Bikram is also all about sweat. His signature is a hot room, at least 85 degrees. This style is widely popular with the celebrity set and he boasts many star students.

As we notch things down a bit, we find Kundalini yoga. Some folks are attracted to this style for the simple reason of sex. They want to get the Kundalini, or life force energy, rising in order to be more sexual. After a little investigation, you discover that this style is primarily about the breath or pranayama. The postures are secondary to the breathing exercises.

Sivananda yoga has several different branches and styles. Swami Sivananda was a Hindu guru who trained several yoga students that then came to America and created ashrams of their own. Swami Vishnu-devananada created a worldwide yoga system based on his guru’s teachings. Sivananda is a fixed set of postures. There’s no deviation in this routine. The hatha yoga itself is designed to still the body, quiet the mind, open the heart and third eye so that a person can be more loving, kind and compassionate. Although this is physical yoga, the end point is devotion and kindness.

Integral yoga is another child of Swami Sivananda. Swami Satchidananda this style and it too sticks to the postures created by his guru. Like Sivananda yoga, this is geared for students who want a good low impact exercise routine with a touch of the heart of compassion. This flows at the end of the practice when one settles in to meditate.

Kripalu yoga is a wildly popular style, particularly in the Northeast where the ashram is located. Yogi Amrit Desai, the creator of kripalu yoga, (named after his guru) came to America as a young man, started an ashram in the Philadelphia area and was immediately successful. Although he had personal problems, fell from grace and resigned his position as director of Kripalu, he left a legacy of yoga philosophy and practice. Kripalu is a gentle, introspective yoga style that focuses on inner process for spiritual growth.

Kripalu yoga is better suited for people who enjoy their own internal psychological discoveries. It is a wonderful physical workout, but the focus here is going within for spiritual understanding.

A couple of entrepreneurial woman have taken Kripalu and adapted it to "Yoga for Round Bodies," proving that not every yoga star is skinny as a toothpick.

Another wildly successful yoga style is Iyengar. Like other young men of his time, the early 1900s, B.K.S. Iyengar created his own yoga style based on the integrity of the skeleton. His style focuses primarily on bone structure and proper skeletal alignment. Iyengar is characterized by the use of props - straps, bolsters, even wall and floor hooks - that enable students to achieve proper skeletal alignment, which in turn releases tension, strain, stress and many other dis-eases in the body.

Perhaps you're an aerobics or jazzercise teacher who simply wants to add another tool to her kit. If this is the case, then you may simply want to spend a month of weekends becoming a registered teacher. These are intensives that teach yoga postures without all the mumbo jumbo associated with traditional styles.

There's such a call for yoga teachers today that this is a viable option for teachers who already have a following and want to broaden their skills. Registered teachers learn the postures and the cautions associated with them, like not doing Downward Facing Dog if you have high blood pressure. In today's fast food world, this is fast food yoga and is a legitimate skill for people who don't want to go into the mysticism and philosophy of traditional yoga.

Keep in mind that if you Do want to dive deep, you'll also want to practice the yogic lifestyle which involves vegetarianism, the discipline of an everyday practice, the eating of a bland diet which excludes garlic and onions, the practice of ahimsa or nonviolence and other beliefs that yogis practice.

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