Advanced YTT: Teaching Students with Diverse Needs
As a yoga teacher, you will come across students with a wide range of body types, backgrounds, abilities, and health backgrounds. Each student has a story and unique needs that yoga can help to address. By understanding how to work with students with diverse needs, you can serve your students’ needs more directly and help them to live happier and healthier lives.
Some of the most common diverse needs in the yoga field are clients with past injuries, aging clients, and clients with perceived limitations. While the foundational 200-hour yoga teacher training is a great place to start, more advanced yoga teacher training will likely be required to help you serve students with diverse needs like aging students or students with past injuries.
Teaching Students with Past Injuries
All varieties of past injuries transform a body. The muscles, soft tissues, and bone around an injury may lose tone and power during the healing process, and scar tissue can permanently change movement in that area if not addressed.
When pursuing an advanced yoga teacher training course, choose a course that can help you understand your client's injuries on a deeper level and help them find comfort in their yoga practice through tailored adjustments, alignment, and modifications.
For example, advanced courses like the Applied Anatomy course offered by Prema Yoga Institute are designed to help you approach yoga through the lens of anatomy to create personalized yoga sessions for your clients.
Learning how to best modify practice for your clients with past injuries is key.
Working with Aging Clients
Decreased mobility and balance may challenge aging yogis. This can lead to isolation and fear, as well as an increased risk of accidents and falls. Advanced yoga teacher training can teach you to how to focus on flexibility and strength to improve functional mobility in aging students.
For example, an aging yogi may benefit from specific poses focused on core muscle development from the pelvis to the crown. Learning these advanced teaching techniques will help clients safely increase their mobility.
Serving Students with Perceived Limitations
Often, a student's perceived limitations stem from the spirit, emotions, and memory. A person's restrictions may be long past, yet lingering, if not freshly developed.
Tailoring a yoga plan for your clients often involves stepping back for a holistic approach instead of working only on specific postures and sequences.
Learning to shift your focus to mindfulness and meditation may benefit your student’s relationship to perceived pain or lack. You can also explore pranayama, yoga nidra, and other mindfulness exercises to find clarity. In time, perceived limitations may melt away!
Continue to Deepen Your Knowledge Base to Work with Clients with Diverse Needs
Education for yoga instructors does not have an end date. Advanced yoga teacher training will allow you to serve more clients and provide tailored lessons for students with diverse needs. You can even take advantage of today's remote learning technology and pursue an advanced yoga teacher training program online.
In fact, we’d love to recommend the Applied Anatomy Program at the Prema Yoga Institute. At PYI, yoga mentors are now available for online courses to support you with interactive lessons and reviews. The curriculum includes education about the kosha system and yoga therapy related to the whole of an individual. Completion of the course can be applied to your RYT 300 education and 25 Yoga Alliance continuing education credits.
Whichever advanced yoga teacher training you choose, deepening your knowledge in the human body's complexities via anatomy will help you create inclusivity and foster community for students with diverse needs.
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Currently, Prema Yoga Institute is offering online study options for ALL of our yoga trainings in 2021.
We hope you’ll consider Prema Yoga Institute for your online advanced yoga training program. We’re an accredited program based in New York city, teaching students around the globe through online classes. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you advance your yoga practice and teaching!
