Sage Rountree's Blog, page 27

Gift Ideas for Athletes, Yogis, and Teachers

Now’s the time to be thinking about gifts that require shipping. I’ll be quick to personalize and drop any of my books in the mail when you order from my online store! Need some guidance?

For Athletes Interested in Yoga



The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga The Athlete’s Pocket Guide to Yoga The Runner’s Guide to Yoga Everyday Yoga Lifelong Yoga



For Athletes NOT Interested in Yoga (They Exist!)



The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery Racing Wisely



For Yoga Teachers



Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses Everyday Yoga



For Those Contemplating Yoga Teacher Training, or Looking to Level Up in Their Yoga Career



The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook

Most of these are also available in ebook format, and several are available as audiobooks.

When you order a paper copy, add a note to your order or reply to your email receipt and I’ll happily write a personalized note to your recipient. I’ll even throw in free gift wrapping if you ask for it!

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New Videos: Hip Strength Trio

There’s a new set of videos with me now available on Yoga Vibes. This trio of sequences will help you strengthen and stabilize through the hips. You can do each video on its own, or string two or three of them together for a hip extravaganza.

These go nicely with the shoulder and core videos led by Jenni Tarma and Alexandra DeSiato—try putting one of each together for a well-rounded movement diet!

View my videosSee Jenni’s videosSee Alexandra’s videos

As always, the code SAGEVIBES will save you $50 on an annual subscription.

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Now Available: All-New Sequence Library

Are you looking for ways to freshen up your yoga classes or your home practice? Or have you read Everyday Yoga or The Athlete’s Pocket Guide to Yoga and wished the pages could come to life? If so, I have the perfect resource for you: my all-new freshly recorded Sequence Library!

This is a completely updated version of the old Sequence Library that lived at Sage Yoga Teacher Training. In this new edition, you’ll find over 60 demonstration videos as well as several full class plans. It’s a companion to my full-featured course, Sequencing Yoga Classes from Welcome to Namaste.

Read all about it and enjoy the sample unit on warmups.

Sequence Library

Click through to see the full course outline and sample unit!

I’ll also be posting these warmup videos to my You Tube page, so subscribe there and you’ll get one per week.

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Available Today: Adaptive Yoga by Ingrid Yang and Kyle Fahey

Welcome to the world a wonderful, much-needed, beautifully produced book: Adaptive Yoga by Dr. Ingrid Yang and Dr. Kyle Fahey. I give this book my absolute highest recommendation! Designed for yoga practitioners and teachers at every level, it offers clear instructions and realistic illustrations of how to adapt a yoga practice to a range of conditions, from amputation to multiple sclerosis.

I had the honor of writing the foreword for this book, which meant I spent some time with an advance copy over the summer. My husband can attest that I exclaimed multiple times while reading the book! It is so good and so useful that I can’t overstate its importance, even for experienced teachers. I learned a ton as I read through the book, both in very specific details about how to adapt yoga to any body, and in general ways that point to the major universal truths of yoga.

This book belongs on every teacher’s bookshelf and every yoga teacher training syllabus. And if you are a student and not a teacher, you need to know this book is in the world to help you adapt yoga to your unique body as it changes through the years.

Adaptive Yoga is so useful because of the expertise of its authors, a medical doctor, Ingrid Yang, and a physical therapist, Kyle Fahey. But Ingrid isn’t just an MD, she is also a highly experienced yoga teacher and former studio founder and owner. (She has a JD, too, which illustrates her commitment to learning and curiosity about the world and everyone in it.) Ingrid is a brilliant person and a wonderful friend. She is also beautiful, fierce when she needs to be, and tender and kind at every opportunity. I am so pleased for her and grateful to her and Kyle that they have produced such a very wonderful offering. I know you will love it, too.

Order your copy today—here are some links you can use (they are affiliate links, which means I get a small commission if you use these to buy). Trust me, the book is well worth the price.

BookshopAmazon

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Last Call: Daytime Online Yoga Teacher Training

Here’s your last call to sign up for the Carolina Yoga Company 200-hour daytime online yoga teacher training that starts in January. I lead this training along with the wonderful Jenni Tarma, my business partner Lies Sapp, and a host of wonderful guest teachers.

We meet online in real time for nine weeks on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, January 12 to March 18, 2021, with a spring break in the middle (no classes February 16–18).

Each day starts at 9 a.m. Eastern and runs till 2 p.m. We take frequent short breaks, and a half-hour break at noon each day. Plus there’s lots of movement every day, interspersed with periods of listening, discussion, and practice teaching.

Now is the time to apply: to ensure the best experience for everyone, we have a minimum and a maximum number of students. We need to reach our minimum by Sunday, November 15, for the program to run.

While it meets online, this is still a Yoga Alliance–approved program, and you’ll be able to register with them after completion, if you choose.

Read all about it and apply here.

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November In-Person Classes

Starting Monday, November 2, I’ll be leading weekly small, physically distant, fully masked classes at Carolina Yoga Company in Carrboro. To accommodate the masked experience, class is shorter (sixty minutes, not seventy-five) and mellower (Yoga for Daily Life, not Yoga for Athletic Balance) than it was before the shutdown. But we still start at 6 p.m., like we have since March 1, 2004, the day the studio opened.

We have put great care into creating a safe-as-can-be experience for people who are ready to do in-studio yoga. Since space is extremely limited, preregistration is required. Sign up here.

If you’re not local to me or are instead looking for online yoga, I have dozens of offerings for you at YogaVibes (use the code sagevibes to save $50 on an annual subscription) and at Core Strength for Real People.

I hope to see you on a Monday in November!

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Evaluation for Existing Teachers

In my last post, I discussed how we evaluate our teacher trainees in Carolina Yoga Company’s 200-hour yoga teacher training. (Our next round starts in January, but we need you to sign up now! Read all about it here.)

If you’re already teaching, think about how you are evaluated. Are you given annual performance reviews? If so, great—they aren’t fun but they can be really helpful for your growth. Are you doing regular self-assessments, especially now that much of teaching happens via video? Or are you letting your class sizes be a de facto form of student feedback?

Here are some ways you can actively seek evaluation for self-improvement:

Send your students a brief survey to completeInvite a colleague to take your class or watch you teaching on video and offer feedbackTake a deep breath and ask your supervisor for assessment, either by having them watch you teach or by sharing student comments you may not have heard.

These don’t have to be detailed assessments. Instead, consider asking three questions, in a roses/thorns/buds or keep/drop/add format:

Roses: What is going well in my teaching?Thorns: What is confusing, unclear, or unnecessary in my class?Buds: How can I help my students better? Where can I grow? And what is the first next step toward doing that?

For lots more on improving your yoga teaching, please read The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook. And if you’ve read it and want to recommend it, please rate and review it on Amazon, Goodreads,or wherever you like!

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Bonus Question to Ask About YTT

I recently had a conversation with a prospective yoga teacher trainee who had read The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook and who turned the tables on me by asking me all the questions I suggest aspiring teachers ask teacher training directors. We covered what the Carolina Yoga Company’s training offers, and how its shift to a live online format will work. (Join us starting in January!)

She added a great question of her own: “How are trainees assessed?”

Some programs have written tests and quizzes. The 200-hour program I took back in 2003 had book reports (I wrote mine on the existing books on yoga for athletes, which then became market research as I was pitching the proposal for The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga). Ours has a quiz to comply with Yoga Alliance standards, but otherwise, all our assessment and feedback are delivered verbally.

Think about the context in which working yoga teachers are assessed. If they work in a gym or a franchise studio, their supervisors might come to class to observe their teaching and deliver a performance evaluation. But in most class settings, there is very little management.

Instead, teachers are evaluated by their student retention. If they are doing well, students return. If they aren’t meeting students’ needs, class attendance falls. And it is very difficult to know why students don’t come back—they just fade away with no direct feedback to the teacher.

In our program, we deliver verbal feedback after each practice teaching session. This is done in front of the full group, as the instructions always apply to everyone. And they boil down to a very few points:

Speak loudlySpeak slowlyDo less: drop filler words, focus on one or to cues for each shape, move less quickly, don’t rush.

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Newly Certified: Vicky Tu

Meet Vicky Tu, the most recently certified Sage Yoga for Athletes teacher! Vicky worked through the course in short order during the pandemic shutdown. Her day job is in R&D at a major corporation in Kansas City.

Because she holds a PhD in neuroscience, Vicky is especially interested in the intersections between the body and mind. She uses this academic background to explore and teach how, in her words, the “human body works and how yoga can help prevent injuries, enhance physical/mental well-being, and make you feel good.” Her questions as she moved through the course showed her keen intellect and desire to understand the how and the why of yoga so she can help her students best.

Vicky’s sports background is interesting and varied, including ballroom dancing and horseback riding. Teaching athletes in these sports is a special interest of hers, as is badminton, a sport her boyfriend has played competitively for two decades. But Vicky serves all her students because she has a special understanding of what the corporate athlete needs, since she is one herself.

As she made the pivot to teaching online, Vicky developed a four-week series of lessons that build progressively and give students tools for balance. I especially like her title: “Yoga for After a Long Day.” I loved watching her teach a session of restorative yoga—her description of meditation, especially why we do what we do when we approach it in a yoga context, was really masterful. Read about the series and find Vicky at her lovely website, Sunrise Rose Yoga.

If you’d like to follow in Vicky’s footsteps, register for Teaching Yoga to Athletes here, then add the optional upgrade to certification.

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Questions to Ask about YTT

While The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook is for teachers of every level, part 1 of the book helps aspiring teachers chart a path through yoga teacher training. Specifically, I suggest that as you evaluate your YTT options, you ask the program director:

Can I take a class from the lead teacher(s)?What do students find the most challenging part of training?How long has this program and this particular format been offered?What does any given day in YTT look like?How do you handle physical limitations?What is a typical next step for your graduates?Can I talk to some recent graduates? Can I see them teach?What if I have to miss time?What is your refund policy?

You can access a workbook PDF or an editable Word file with these questions and all the book’s exercises at its resources page.

If you are interested in the answers to these questions vis-à-vis the Carolina Yoga Company weekday 200-hour yoga teacher training, which happens live in real time online starting in January 2021, start by reading the program description here, then reach out to me for more answers. I love having conversations about our program.

I enjoyed one of these conversations with a prospect last week. She had just read The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook and had a great question to add to this list, which I will address in an upcoming post!

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