Find Your Yoga Niche: 4 Specialized Teacher Training Programs

Considering teacher training? Hold on a second. Perhaps your yoga-related interests, needs, and desires land outside the scope of traditional programs that focus more generally on breath, philosophy, and posture basics. Thankfully, yoga teacher trainings are becoming more specialized and just as diverse as the yogis they intend to serve. Seek and yee shall find a program that works for you.

Perhaps your yoga-related interests, needs, and desires land outside the scope of traditional programs that focus more generally on breath, philosophy, and posture basics.

Below are four TT programs that can help you find your yoga niche.

1. Yoga for Athletes Teacher Training and Certification

Are you a yogi-athlete? Would you like to explore in depth the connections between these two fields, and then share what you learn with your fellow athletes (or fellow yogis!)? Sage Rountree—author, columnist, yoga teacher, and teacher trainer—offers a Yoga for Athletes online certification program that may just suit your needs. This dynamic course—weaving online classes, lectures, reading material, discussion groups, and more—will help you enhance your own practice, build your business model, make yoga philosophy accessible for your clients, and prepare you to teach athletes of all levels and abilities.

As a bonus: If you aren’t satisfied with the training, Sage guarantees a full refund.

2. YogaQuest Teacher Training

Yoga geeks, nerds, and/or cosplayers: What if we told you that you could learn how to weave your most beloved fandoms into any classroom experience? Learn Yogiography™, the act of incorporating pop culture narratives into your yoga class, with YogaQuest’s 200-hour teacher training. YogaQuest introduces this unique approach as a means to reach your students through their stories rather than the prevalent yoga-language (i.e., ending class on a Star Wars note: “May the force be with you,” instead of the traditional “namaste”; and re-imagining sequences by theming them to Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and beyond!). This course also teaches trauma-sensitive yoga, along with variations for all bodies, making yoga accessible for all.

If you’re unapologetically nerdy, this teacher training is for you!

3. Little Flower Yoga Teacher Training

If teaching yoga to kids is a dream of yours, check out Little Flower Yoga! Little Flower Yoga teacher training will prepare you to work with youth, ages 3 to 18, offering three levels of training that you can either take individually or collectively for full certification (level one being “Foundations of Children’s Yoga,” level 2 being “Teaching the Whole Child: Compassion, Creativity, and Mindfulness,” and level 3 being “Advancing Your Teaching and Expanding Your Reach”).

This course in its entirety will teach you compassionate classroom management skills; how to address your students’ needs holistically; making each class welcoming and safe; ways of making poses engaging for children; the ethics of teaching yoga to kids; and much more. If you want to take yoga into your community to positively affect youth, this training is for you.

4. Curvy Yoga Teacher Training

Ever met anyone who said “I would practice yoga, but I’m not thin or flexible like everyone else”? Who is this “everyone else”? Especially when, truthfully, the majority of yogis don’t look like stereotypical yoga-magazine models. Maybe you’re a larger-bodied yogi (and aspiring teacher!), and you realize this already and would like to make the sharing of this powerful message your mission.

Curvy Yoga teacher training welcomes people of all shapes and sizes. It will prepare you not only to make asana accessible to curvy students, but also to encourage your students to find deeper body acceptance both on and off the mat. If you’re already a teacher, add a Curvy Yoga certification to your resume. And if you’re not a yoga teacher yet, get your training through Curvy Yoga—and the Curvy Yoga certificate to boot!

These four programs should give you a sense that no matter what your preferred way to practice may be, you can find your own teaching niche. Everyone and anyone can do and share yoga—it’s only a matter of finding what works best for you.

Explore on!