Are you a yoga teacher contemplating the next step in your professional journey? Whether you’re considering additional yoga teacher training, such as a 300-hour or 150-hour program, or you’re curious about yoga therapy training, it’s crucial to understand the distinct benefits each path offers. This article will help you choose the next step in your yoga career.
Understanding Advanced Yoga Teacher Training (300-Hour and 150-Hour Programs)
Additional yoga teacher training, such as 300-hour or 150-hour programs, is designed to deepen your understanding of yoga and refine your teaching skills. These programs are typically pursued after completing a foundational 200-hour or 350-hour teacher training and are often referred to as advanced yoga teacher training.
Key Learning Areas covered in Advanced Yoga Teacher Training:
- Advanced Asana Practice: During the training, you might explore more complex poses and sequences.
- Specialised Topics: These programs often cover specific areas like yoga philosophy, anatomy, breathwork or teaching special populations.
- Teaching Methodology: You may learn how improve your teaching skills and strategies.
Exploring Accredited Yoga Therapy Training
Accredited Yoga therapy training courses are a minimum of 650 hours. They offer in depth training that significantly improves your capacity to teach yoga in any setting. Yoga therapy is its own profession that is different and separate to yoga teaching.
Yoga Therapy Training Key Learning Areas:
- Presence: Develop professional therapeutic relationships
- Pair: Integrate Yogic wisdom and clinical knowledge
- Profile: Assess the client holistically
- Personalise: Tailor practices for individual needs
- Practice: Refine skills alongside an expert mentor
- Partner: Collaborate with healthcare professionals
- Promote: Market your yoga therapy service
Which Path is Right for You?
Choosing between advanced yoga teacher training and yoga therapy training depends on your career goals and interests. If you’re passionate about teaching group classes and focused on becoming a more skilled yoga teacher, a 300-hour or 150-hour teacher training might be the best fit. On the other hand, if you’re interested in going deeper with your clients, diversifying your offerings and working therapeutically, yoga therapy training could be your calling.
Yoga teachers who complete our yoga therapy training, have total confidence in their teaching regardless of the illnesses or injuries that their yoga students present with. They can diversify their offerings. They gain the skills to run therapeutic groups, conduct 1 to 1 yoga therapy consultations and work in clinical and complementary health care environments.
Career Pathways for Yoga Therapists
Take one of our yoga therapy graduates, Margie Hellman. Since completing our training in 2012 Margie has worked in a number of different settings as a Yoga therapist. As well as having her own private practice, Margie has worked at a clinical psychology practice. She was the lead yoga therapist on a PhD for yoga for mental health. She was involved in research into Yoga and lymphedema. Margie worked at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Cancer hospital in Camperdown, Sydney for over 10 years. She is currently working at the National Institute of Complementary Medicine, where she works with clients with chronic pain and cancer.
Margie says, “I’m in my sixties now and a lot of my friends are retiring and I can see myself going on and on and on working as a yoga therapist and I don’t feel bored or like I need to stop at any time in the future.”
Both yoga therapy training and advanced yoga teacher training offer unique opportunities for professional growth and personal transformation. Whether you choose to enhance your teaching skills or specialise in yoga therapy, each path has the potential to elevate your practice and broaden your impact as a yoga professional.
Are you interested in finding out more about becoming a Yoga therapist? Explore our Yoga Therapy Training HERE.
Author:
Trina Bawden-Smith is the founder and director of the Yoga Therapy Institute, which has trained over 420 Yoga therapists. She has been overseeing the development of the Yoga Therapy Institute’s Accredited Yoga Therapy Certification since 2012, has conducted 8 Yoga therapy conferences and directed numerous professional development programs for Yoga therapists and Yoga teachers since 2003.