Sage Rountree's Blog, page 24

Teachers, Your Class Is Not Your Practice

Your yoga class is not your asana practice time.

Don’t overdemonstrate. Hold the demo just long enough to make your point. This can be really tough for new teachers.

Remember, you’re leading yoga, not doing your own practice. While some forms of group exercise—step aerobics, Spinning—and most video classes do better with the teacher participating with the student, in most forms of live or real-time yoga, the teacher simply leads and watches the students. Imagine going to a restorative yoga class and having the teacher take each pose!

Differentiate between your own practice and your teaching in service of the students.

—The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook, available now in paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats from your favorite bookseller

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Meet Steve Shelton of Brummel Academy

Meet Steve Shelton of Chicagoland’s Brummel Academy, the most recently certified graduate of Teaching Yoga to Athletes.

A former high school and college football player, Steve has the bona fides to be a major force in the field of yoga for athletes. I loved working with him and can’t wait to see where he goes from here!

Steve has a great mix of personal experience being in an athletic body deep in training and top-notch people skills that inspires his athletes, clients, and students. He walks the walk!

In addition to teaching yoga and coaching high school football, Steve practices tai chi and engages in a variety of meditation and introspective practices. He’s a great model of mixing the hard and the soft, yang and yin, effort and ease, to find dynamic balance and peak performance. And he also has a background as a popular kids’ entertainer! He is wonderful in front of a classroom of any age, immediately putting his listeners at ease.

He’ll be a great coach to guide you to better inner and outer awareness. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, lucky you: you can take classes with Steve in person. Read all about his background and work—and book a private session—at his business website, Brummell Academy.

To follow in Steve’s footsteps and up your game as a teacher of yoga for athletes, register for Teaching Yoga to Athletes here, then add the optional upgrade to certification.

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Early Bird through June 1: 200-Hour Summer Intensive YTT

If your relationship to your yoga practice has shifted over the last few years, it may be time for you to embark on yoga teacher training!

At Carolina Yoga Company, we offer three formats of our 200-hour YTT, held at Carrboro Yoga. All of them are coming up in the next calendar year:

Three-week summer intensive, July 16–August 7, 2022Eight-month weekend program, September 9, 2022–April 16, 2023 (we meet the second weekend of each month)Nine-week weekday hybrid program, January 17–March 23, 2023 (Tuesdays through Thursdays, 9 a.m.–2 p.m.)

The early bird rate for the summer intensive is good through June 1, so this is the perfect time to apply.

Next steps:

Read about the program and the formats hereBook a free call with me to discuss your goals and whether we’re the right fitSign up for our free guide: Essential Questions to Ask About Yoga Teacher TrainingRead The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook for all my advice to get you through yoga teacher training and far, far beyond

I look forward to connecting!

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Scheduled: Continuing Education at Carrboro Yoga

I’ve just scheduled six workshops as part of Carolina Yoga Company’s 500-hour yoga teacher training. These are all open to any movement teacher, as well! They will meet at our Carrboro Yoga Co. location in Carrboro/Chapel Hill, NC. Each has some work for you to do before and after our in-person meetings, which are designed to be travel-friendly while using the power of the group to give you a chance to practice and refine your teaching skills. You’ll earn 18 Yoga Alliance CEUs in each one.

These workshops will expand your ability to help more students, whether you lead sweet or spicy classes. I hope you’ll join me for one or more of these:

Designing and Teaching Gentle Yoga Sequences and Classes, September 24–25, 2022Designing and Teaching Core Strength Sequences and Classes, October 29–30, 2022Fundamentals of Teaching Yin Yoga, January 28–29, 2023Fundamentals of Teaching Restorative Yoga, February 25–26, 2023Designing and Teaching Balance-Focused Sequences and Classes, September 23–24, 2023Fundamentals of Teaching Yoga Nidra, October 28–29, 2023

You can read full details and register here. Use “view all” by the date filter at top to see all the workshops.

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Update or Create Your Yoga Résumé

Do you have a yoga résumé? If so, have you brushed it up lately? If not, you’ll find a template to download and use at yogateacherhandbook.com, the page here keyed to my latest book. All the prompts are right in that document, so you can pop in your personal details and stand head-and-shoulders above other applicants when you apply for your next teaching job.

Not a yoga teacher? Spring clean your own professional résumé this week. It’ll remove some stress for when you next need to brush it off!

In The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook, you’ll find all my advice for every stage of your career, from choosing a teacher training to creating at teacher training of your own. This book has up-to-date information on how to help your students best, whether it’s online or in person. If you’ve read it and enjoyed it, please give it a rating and review at Amazon and Goodreads! And please tell your own teacher trainers that it would make a great companion to any YTT program. Thanks!

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Continuing Education: Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses

Why are Alexandra and I smiling so widely? Because we are absolutely delighted to be back to co-teaching an IN-PERSON workshop on theming movement classes keyed to our book Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses!

Join us at Carolina Yoga Company’s Carrboro location March 26 and 27 for an advanced studies workshop that will have you seamlessly integrating themes, ideas, and inspiration into your class in ways that feel authentic to you.

This in-person workshop includes our online workbook course on the subject, as well as support from us before, during, and after the hours we spend together in Carrboro. It’s set up as a reverse classroom: content is done on your own at home, with collaboration in the studio. It’s always useful to workshop your teaching with colleagues, and especially sweet to do now while we are just starting to reconnect.

And you’ll earn 18 CEUs!

Masks are optional. Proof of vaccination is currently required to enter the studio.

Sign up here!

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Watch: Three Yoga Snacks at Yoga Vibes

Need a movement break? Try one or all three of my latest yoga routines at Yoga Vibes:

Modified Sun Salutation Hands-Free Flow (8 minutes)Side Bending Tree Two Ways (5 minutes)Floor Hips and Hamstrings (11 minutes)

Got even more time? Start with the Reclining Shoulders, Spine, and Hips Release and after side bending tree, slot in the Tree Frog Flow for more unwinding.

Click here to preview them all!

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Support Your Local Studios

January is typically the biggest month for­­ gyms and fitness studios, as New Year’s resolutioners vow to make this their year to get in shape. But this January, instead of preparing to welcome a slew of new students, gym and studio owners are facing another year of the pandemic. Wellness and fitness businesses offer an antidote to the disconnection, stress, and inactivity of the pandemic. But we haven’t gotten the targeted government relief we need to secure a stable future.

The yoga studio I co-own, Carolina Yoga Company, was thriving in January 2020. Our three locations in Carrboro, Durham, and Hillsborough, NC, offered over seventy classes a week, as well as a robust series and workshop schedule. Now, in January 2022, we are hoping to break even—though the current wave of infections is making that unlikely.

We are lucky to be around to stay hopeful. According to IHRSA, a fitness-industry association, more than one in five gyms had closed by August 2021 due to Covid losses. In response to a survey by the Community Gyms Coalition at the start of 2021, over a third of gym and studio owners expected to be out of business by year’s end. That’s been the case in my area: half of the locally owned movement studios have closed their doors since the start of the pandemic.

As our goal is creating space for connection, we chose to focus on preserving our physical locations, where we knew connection would best thrive. While we were lucky enough to have understanding landlords, our landlords have their own obligations, and for months we paid rent on spaces we could not use.

Late in 2020 we reopened with indoor masked, distanced classes. These felt like a community service and a mental-health lifeline, but they never justified the price of keeping our doors open. Numbers have grown since we pulled up the tape that marked out distanced mats. But every time we feel like things are looking up, a new variant emerges and our class enrollment falls again.

All the while, regardless of student attendance numbers, our fixed operations costs continue unabated: rent, common-area maintenance, utilities, scheduling software, credit card processing, insurance, and on and on. If not for my husband’s income, I’d have had to cut my losses on the business (including five years left on a lease!) and move on to a new job.

This problem is playing out at gyms and studios nationwide. Our high fixed costs and staffing structure mean the usual relief programs aren’t helping enough. We’ve hustled to apply for county and town grants, and we’ve been lucky to receive some. 

The emergency disaster loans are nice, especially the $10,000 grant they included, which helped cover some rent when we weren’t allowed to be open. But these well-intentioned grants have been Band-Aids on a deep wound. We don’t want a loan, especially with our future so unknowable. We need direct aid that doesn’t accumulate future debt.

How can you help your local yoga studio or gym? If you’re a member at a small fitness studio and your budget allows, please do not cancel your membership. Recurring revenue is the foundation of most studios’ and gyms’ business models. If you want a studio to return to when you feel comfortable going back to class, we need you to stick with us now.

If you aren’t a member, do the old-fashioned January thing and join a gym or studio. We would love to connect with you and teach you skills to feel strong, embodied, and centered. And now, when classes are small, you’ll get extra personalized attention as you develop healthy habits.

Finally, please encourage your elected representatives to support the GYMS Act and other targeted relief for gyms and fitness and wellness studios. Such support will keep those of us who work hard to keep you healthy in good financial shape.

We have been hit hard, like all small businesses. But we have been left behind as restaurants and live entertainment venues received relief. With our very mission being to improve people’s health, we should be top of the list for targeted aid during this public health crisis.

We fitness and wellness professionals know how to motivate ourselves and others. But we also know we can’t push forever without rest, and we know the power of teamwork. Be our teammate. Help us.

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Coming Up: Language Refinement Workshop in Carrboro

I bet you’re teaching yoga (or interested in what goes into it) because you want to share its benefits with your students. And I’ll also bet that you want to do that in the best way you can. Finally, I bet consciously improving your communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal, will make you a better teacher. I won’t lie: it takes work, and some productive discomfort.

Join me in that creative space to work as we explore Language Refinement: Clear Communication in Class, and I’m offering it at Carolina Yoga’s Carrboro, NC, location February 26 and 27, 2022.

We meet nine hours in person—Saturday 10–1 and 2–5, and again Sunday 10–1—because there’s only so much constructive critique we can process at once, and because I want to make this weekend easy for you to travel to! Before and after our meeting you’ll have self-assessment exercises to complete, to ensure you maximize your improvement while learning skills for continued growth.

Read about the workshop and our other continuing education programs and sign up here. Note that proof of vaccination is currently required to enter the studio and we are wearing masks per county order. We’d originally planned to wait till we were past such restrictions to offer our advanced studies trainings—but our program is designed to help you develop real-world skills, and this is the real world now.

You’ll earn 18 CEUs, and the workshop counts toward Carolina Yoga Company’s 500-hour yoga teacher training, too.

Whether you can make it or not, you can do our homework self-improvement exercise outlined in The Fastest, Cheapest, and Best Way to Improve Your Teaching. Sign up here and I’ll send it right over!

When you like what you see, please know there’s tons more advice for teachers of every level in The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook! It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook format.

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Watch: Yoga Snack: Reclining Shoulders, Spine, and Hips Release

My latest short yoga video to follow along with on Yoga Vibes is probably my all-time favorite routine. It works well as a standalone, as a wake-up routine, or as a wind-down practice. You can do it in bed!

Here’s a short sequence you can do in bed at the start or the end of your day—or at the start or the end of your yoga practice or your workout. We work gently around the world of the hips, spine, and shoulders.

This sequence goes well with the also-recent yoga snack called Tree Frog Flow.

Watch the full-length new video here. You can enjoy the free trial and, when you like what you see, subscribe to Yoga Vibes. The code sagevibes will save you money on an annual subscription! You’ll find a host of classes from me and my colleagues at the Carolina Yoga Company channel.

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