How To Choose A Yoga Teacher Training Format

I was on the phone with a client this morning, who was considering revamping her course format. “Everyone is running their 200 hour teacher trainings in two weeks,” she said. “I don’t know how they do it.”

“Oy. Thirteen hour days, and no days off,” I said. “Now, that thirteen hours of training, which means that students are in the classroom from 6:30 am-10:30 pm, because you need to take an hour for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can do it, but it may not be pretty.”

And you could.

But first you must consider: who is your ideal student?

When you set the format (days and times) for your teacher training, the first thing you must consider is your student and their lifestyle.

Your Ideal Student

Is your target audience full of adventurous travellers? If students are travelling (ie: a retreat or coming from out of town), then they may want to make the time as intensive as possible in order to reduce the amount of vacation time that they have to take off (and likely the cost of the retreat itself). However, if you are running your training for your local 9-5er’s, then they are clearly going to prefer a format that will integrate well into their current lifestyle.

Popular Formats

Some popular training formats:

• Weekends (great for for local trainings that need to appeal to working folks)
• Intensives (cram it all into a shorter amount of time, great for retreats and destination trainings)
• Bursts (5 day training x 4; great for folks who can travel every couple months to train)

or a combination of the above. For example, maybe you start your training with a five day burst, then run it on weekends.

To figure out which training format is best for you, consider:

• what does the day to day of my ideal student look like?
• what worries my ideal student (family obligations, evening obligations, early mornings, money, time)
• are students travelling to come to the training?
• are these students morning people/night owls?
• when during the year can they take the time to train?
• is there a financial incentive tied into a shorter or longer training?
• how much homework or outside work does my course require?
• how much integration time does my course require?

Get Information

To create your training format, it’s helpful to investigate the training structure of your direct competition. Usually, they’ve figured something out! Do some online research and make a chart of what everyone else is doing; this will give you some context. While it may mean that your competitors have stumbled upon the best training format for your area, it’s also possible that offering something different from your competitors would actually position you to appeal to a different segment of yogis.

Remember: don’t just investigate studio schedules. Check out what individual teachers who are popular in your area are doing as well.

Get information from your own students. Do a Facebook poll, send them a survey. Your own students are coming to you for a reason, and there may be something unique about their needs.

For more information on creating an awesome course format and choosing a training space, check out our online course!