Advanced Yoga Teacher Training: Teaching Adaptive Yoga

Advanced Yoga Teacher Training: Teaching Adaptive Yoga

Practicing yoga is a lifelong journey, as is the art of teaching yoga. As a yoga teacher, your students will have diverse backgrounds and may have faced trauma, injuries, or have age factors that make them feel excluded from a strictly exercise-based yoga program. As you advance in your training as a yoga teacher, you may train in adaptive yoga techniques to address this exclusion.

What is Adaptive Yoga?

Adaptive yoga modifies traditional yogic asana and pranayama. Everybody of every shape, size, and ability may participate. All levels of experience, fitness, mobility, and even energy level can join in. Students with disabilities, trauma, and chronic illness have a yoga practice perfectly suited to their individual needs with adaptive yoga.  

With an adaptive yoga practice, students are free to explore poses and breathing that suit their physical and mental states. Compare that to some yoga classes focused only on the exercise aspect of modern yoga, where the pose is the goal. Adaptive yoga concentrates on creating a unique bond between each person, their challenges, and the pose. Props bring the asana to the student instead of forming the student into a physical shape that may not suit them. 

Advanced YTT – Training to Teach Adaptive Yoga

A primary reason to pursue advanced yoga teacher training for adaptive yoga is to expand your knowledge and learn techniques to serve your community's needs.

Training programs that focus on adaptive yoga will allow you to become a more astute yoga teacher.

8 Skills You Will Learn with Adaptive Yoga Training: 

1.   To sharpen your observation skills for the specific needs of your students. You will be able to better assist with modifications and inclusive cues.

2.   Advanced anatomy and biomechanics studies provide a greater understanding of the uniqueness of the human form. Anatomy becomes about the individual, not the textbook version of the perfectly flexible and imaginary person. 

3.   To understand the physiology of the stress response and learn to incorporate healing guidance into your yoga teachings. Using trauma-aware language and understanding creates safety for your students.  

4.   Learn about the different populations, including older students, pregnant students, or pupils with physical limitations or illness. Adaptive yoga supports all levels of mobility.

5.   Learn and practice innovative ways to use props. Any manner of chairs, blocks, straps, walls, stairs, blankets, and pillows facilitate the pose reaching your student. These can be used in standing, seated, or supine asana.  

6.   Practice teaching accessible asana that supports flexibility, balance, and strength. Adaptive yoga is a powerful and inspirational tool for developing real-world functionality. 

7.   Learn how to empower your students by teaching them to integrate adaptive yoga skills into their lives. Yoga doesn't stop when you leave the class. 

8.   Learn pranayama and meditation techniques, along with adaptations to them, for all of your students. Attend to your community's spiritual needs by guiding clarity and peace.  

Teaching Adaptive Yoga 

Advancing your yoga teacher training by adding adaptive yoga widens the opportunities for everyone to experience the benefits of yoga. Once trained in adaptive yoga, a teacher can provide inclusivity for all, and students can find a supportive and like-minded group of friends to practice with.  

Your yoga students will strengthen their bodies, creating confidence, self-reliance, and increased freedom of movement. The positive energy developed from accessible pranayama and meditation provides calming peace and healing. 

Start your journey and build your skills with advanced yoga teacher training in adaptive yoga.

Increase your skills as a yoga teacher and better serve your pupils with advanced yoga teacher training in adaptive yoga.

If this article has piqued your interest, we’d love to invite you to learn more about Prema Yoga Institute’s Functional Anatomy Training.

The Functional Anatomy Training is now available online and teaches how to:

• Develop your confidence teaching to all different types of bodies

• Think critically about biases that often go overlooked in anatomy and movement science

• Gain support and education to skillfully move away from a "one size fits all" type of teaching

• Learn to better see and "Read" bodies in order to better meet your student's varying needs

• Interface more effectively with doctors and health care professionals

• Advance your teaching towards a Yoga Therapy Certification

• And more (click here for details)

Additionally, The Functional Anatomy Training counts as 50 CE Credits with Yoga Alliance OR towards your RYT500 at Prema Yoga Institute.

Visit Prema Yoga Institute to learn more about our training, which is now available online with interactive trainings through 2022!

PYI is 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!

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