Everything You Need to Know About 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training

Hi, I'm Angelica Govert, also known as Yoga Liberty, and in this video we're going to talk about everything you need to know before signing up for any 200-hour yoga teacher training. Thank you for watching. I'm so glad that you're here. If you could do me a huge favor of hitting the like button and commenting, subscribing that helps the video get out to more and more people so that more and more people can know about this important topic. Also, I'd love to answer any of your questions, so definitely put them in the comments below. I have a ton of experience doing this. I've been teaching yoga teacher trainings for almost 20 years now. I owned 3 yoga studios, over 50,000 people have taken my in-person yoga classes. And not only have I taught yoga teacher training in person in 3 different countries, but I also now teach private one-on-one and online yoga teacher training. So I have tons of experience in this. The first thing I want to cover is what is a 200-hour yoga teacher training? What does that even mean? There's a lot of videos out there that tell you a lot of different things, and a lot of them are wrong. 200-hour yoga teacher training is a trademark term by an organization called Yoga Alliance. Yoga Alliance formed in the 1990s to help to standardize yoga. They have specific rules of what a Yoga Alliance registered school can do. And so if you are saying that you're a 200-hour Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher training or a 200-hour yoga teacher training, that means that you're saying that you follow these rules and you signed up with that organization. Now most of the time that's actually not what happens and people just do whatever they want and don't follow. And there's a lot of controversy around Yoga Alliance and whether or not they even should continue to exist what kind of power they have over the yoga community, and whether or not it's doing any good for yoga teacher trainings, and is it actually harming them. 200-hour yoga teacher training literally means 200 hours of training. Now Yoga Alliance has some specific things that you're supposed to complete in those hours, like 75 hours are supposed to be teaching techniques and practice. 10 hours are supposed to be practicum. 25 hours are supposed to be physical anatomy. So there's like some specific things that they break down, and if you go to their website, you can actually see exactly what it is that these trainings are supposed to include in the 200 hours. So 200 hours really does mean 200 hours. It doesn't mean that you practiced at home for 200 hours or part of that 200 hours. It means that you got 200 hours worth of learning, and not just time that you spent on own. Now, it could include time that you spent reading a book, or time that you spent watching videos, or time that you spent creating your sequence, or working with your instructor on your sequence. But it's not just sitting around doing practices and trying to figure things out. It legitimately is like 200 hours. I mean, it could be practices, but they're structured, and they're practices that are already chosen for you by the training. And this is what Yoga Alliance expects. Now again, this doesn't typically happen in every training. Not every training is following the rules that they're supposed to. So you want to ask a lot of questions about what is it that they include and do they follow these rules and how strict are they about Yoga Alliance. They're probably not going to tell you all the truth, heads up, but ask around and see what kind of information you can get about a training. I'm super strict about Yoga Alliance. I actually overdeliver in my trainings. It's really important to me to give you extra education. For instance, Yoga Alliance only allows you to have 5 hours of business training in the course. So you can only do like 5 hours of social media training total, or website design, or how to get an email list. Like, all of that stuff is a tiny portion in a Yoga Alliance approved 200-hour yoga teacher training. It's not a big part of it. They don't allow that. And I actually wrote them a really long email about I don't think that's right, but it is what it is. Now I do extra because I think it's important, and that's the number one place where people will fail is that they don't know how to market themselves. They don't know how to build a business. So my training's really in-depth in that, but not all trainings are. So I wanted you to know that sometimes 200-hour yoga teacher training is shortened to 200-hour YTT or just YTT. So a lot of us will just say YTT, all the YTTs, all the people in the YTT. So just so that you know, that's what that means when people are saying that. And it also opens you up to a whole new search term when you're looking for yoga YTTs. The next thing you're going to want to know is that not all of the trainings are going to deliver the same thing. Even if a training is Yoga Alliance approved, they're going to be vastly different. It's going to matter who the teacher is. They're going to give you different instruction based on who the teachers are. Some teachers are going to focus a lot on physical practice, on your physical practice, and some teachers are going to focus a lot on the aspects of teaching. My training tends to focus a lot on aspects of teaching: how to master sequencing, how to be really good at teaching a class, how to be a phenomenal teacher, how to market yourself, how to get yourself out there, how to gain clients, um, how to know what the traditional aspects of yoga are. Like, some trainings won't even teach you Sanskrit, and in my training you can only teach in Sanskrit. So All the trainings are going to be different. You're going to want to ask a lot of questions and not assume that they're going to be the same because they won't be. Next is if you're expecting to learn a lot of fancy poses, you're going to want to pick a training that focuses on that. So if your main purpose of going to yoga teacher training is so you can learn how to do difficult poses, you're going to want to ask ahead of time if that's what they focus on because A lot of trainings won't focus on that. For instance, in my training, the focus is going to be on you learning how to teach poses, and I'm going to go over about 96 to 100 of the most common poses that you'll use in a yoga class. And I'm going to focus specifically on how you teach it, not on how you do it. Of course we'll go over how you do the pose, but the primary focus is going to be on how you teach it. So if you're expecting to come in and do scorpion handstand, that might happen, But it might not happen. It might not be what the focus of that training is. So that's another question that you're going to want to ask, because certainly there are trainings that that is the focus, is your personal practice. So if you want that, look for it. It's out there. A lot of people ask me if they can fail yoga teacher training. You can. You can fail, and no one is required to give you a certificate at the end. It depends on the training, how much time they're going to spend on you graduating. Now for me and my training, by the time you get to the end and you go to do your final practicum, the reality is, is that you are gonna know what to do and no one fails. I haven't had anyone ever fail my course unless they quit. The only way you can fail my yoga teacher training is to give up because I never give up on you. But that's not true for all trainings. Like, definitely you can fail a yoga teacher training. So you're going to want to ask that ahead of time. Is this a training where they'll work with you until you pass Or is it possible to fail? Because you can fail college, so you can fail yoga teacher training. It's as serious and as important. Be patient with yourself. The things that you're going to learn are really going to overwhelm you. You will spend your entire life studying the philosophy of yoga. You will spend a lot of your life studying the anatomy of yoga. Most people that come into my training, they don't know these things ahead of time. And to be honest, like, I've read the Yoga Sutras literally like 27 times, and every time I read them, I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. That's something totally new. Be patient with yourself. It's going to take you a lifetime to learn it. That's how it's meant to be. Yoga is meant to be a lifetime practice. The actual techniques of teaching is probably more difficult than you think. Some people come to it really easy. But that's rare. Most of the time, people have to spend a lot of time learning how to teach. Teaching and demoing are two different things. The key is that you want a training that's gonna teach you how to stand in another room and people will still be able to do your entire practice. I like to think of it as a dance. It's a dance with breath. So you're telling everyone how to move the whole time, how to breathe in and how to breathe out, when to breathe in, and when to expand and when to reach up to the sky and when to touch their toes. You're giving them the whole dance of a yoga practice. And it's incredible and it's amazing. And it will take time for you to figure out how to do it. So be patient with yourself. I seen a lot of trainings that do not spend very much time on teaching. So ask them ahead of time. You will literally spend hours and hours and hours and hours teaching before you graduate from my class. And I'll go over those with you and we'll work on it together and I'll make sure that you feel really confident as a teacher before you graduate. But not every training is like that, and in fact most of them aren't. So make sure that you check out how much you will be teaching before you actually graduate. And finally, the main thing to remember about a 200-hour yoga teacher training is that it's just the beginning of a lifelong learning process. I have literally spent over 10 thousand hours training with some of the top teachers in the world. I was blessed enough to actually take Pattabhi Jois' class before he passed away. I got my 300-hour with Doug Swenson. I have learned Ashtanga from the top people in the country. I've been to the Dharma Mitra Studio. I have been to the Jivamukti Studio in New York and worked with David and Sharon. I have worked years and years and years and years with Sean Corn, Shiva Ray, Baron Baptiste, all kinds of incredible people. And I have learned so much about yoga over the years. Now, I took my 200-hour with just a regular person that owned a regular yoga studio in Miami. That studio is not open anymore, and it was actually the first teacher training that she'd ever taught, and it was incredible. It was better than my 300-hour training from a celebrity teacher. So, you know, it doesn't really matter who you get your training from, it matters what you're getting from that training. But you have to remember that this is the beginning of your journey. The 200-hour isn't going to teach you everything. I've had people come in and think that they're going to know everything about yoga if they take a 200-hour training, and that's just not the reality. So I don't want you to have that expectation before you go out there and sign up. I would love to have you in my training. I would love you to consider my training as an option. You can go to the description below. I do teach people privately online, one-on-one, and depending on when you're watching this video, I will be teaching an in-person yoga teacher training just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada in March of 2023. You can get all the details to that below. That is also a 10-week program. My online program is 10 weeks. What you get in the online program is the same. Actually, it's a little bit more than what you get in person, because in person people got to take bathroom breaks and lunch breaks and all that stuff. So there's a little bit less time, but online I can overdeliver because I can just take over your life for 10 weeks. Anyhow, I would love to meet with you. I do meet with everybody before they sign up for the training, so I'd love to meet with you. You can find all of that and schedule a time below. Thank you so much for watching this. I appreciate you. Do hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, and definitely leave a comment because I would love to answer your questions. I appreciate you so much. And whatever training you choose to take, know that what you're doing is going to enhance people's lives and make them feel incredible, and I'm excited about that. Thank you, friends. I'll see you in the next video.