Becoming a Registered Yoga School

I'm the kind of person who has to actually see the 'big picture' before I can break things down into a logical arrangement according to a calendar based time line. This is a long way of saying I have to write down all the things that are required before I can figure out how to convey the requirements.

Starting in August of 2020, All Y'All Yoga started on the path to becoming a Registered Yoga School. This starts with becoming familiar with the Yoga Alliance Requirements, the Lead Trainer requirements, and the documentation required when applying to become an RYS.

I achieved the Yoga Alliance YAECP® credential in August 2022 after completing Fit To Lead with the Baptiste Institute and clocking 1000 hours teaching, after becoming registered with Yoga Alliance in November of 2015. Having this step completed, I embarked on digesting all the content Yoga Alliance requires as part of a 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training program. I wrote it all down on my home office whiteboard so I could look at it every day and slowly begin to formulate a process for turning these topics into a daily schedule, training manual, curriculum & hours allocation and assessment methods.

After many months of attempting to transform topics into a timeline, I came upon a formula for slicing the buckets of hours YA assigns to each major topic. I took the hours tied to each major topic and divided them into what I felt might be an appropriate distribution of time for each topic, weighting the topics and sub topics according to my perceived importance and complexity.

Our yoga studio will include training in Yin and Yoga Nidra as well as Baptiste Power Yoga, therefore the YA major topic of "Techniques, Training, Practice" got further divided into sub topics: Asana (Baptiste Power Yoga), Pranayama & Subtle Body, Meditation, Yin/Restorative and Yoga Nidra. 

Color coding the major topics and sub topics helped me see how the topics link to one another while I was working out how to distribute these major topics and sub topics over the course of the 200 RYT program.

 

Working within the constraints of when the studio has classes already on the schedule, and when we could have the studio space available to lead the RYT curriculum within an agreeable frame of time, we reached this scheduling conclusion. This schedule would allow us to deliver the YA content over the course of 7 weekends in 2023. Creating a YTT schedule where the days of training are long but not egregious was the goal.

Working with graph paper, I arbitrarily picked a small "bucket of time" to be represented by a single square in the graph paper notebook I was working in. This single bucket of time ended up being a 15 minute block of time, since 15 minutes is easy to work with in the context of hours of training and breaking up training vs teaching vs assessing over the course of a day.

Working through the major topics and required sub topics with colored pencils and graph paper allowed me to see how many "buckets" of time each day of training would have available through the 7 weeks. Once I had the major topics laid out in color, I began to lay out the sub-topics such as Skeletal System, Physiology, Bio-mechanics, History, Philosophy, Ethics and so on. Using Friday Evenings for the sub-topics that lend themselves well to lecture-based teaching seemed an ideal path. Once I'd set the Friday night schedules, the Saturday & Sunday schedules began to become clearer. 

I'd created a bulleted list of topics, sorted by importance, which I want to impart to our trainees regarding how to lead Baptiste Power Yoga. Using this bulleted list, I began to divvy up the large time buckets of Teaching Methodology and Practicum into smaller slots of time. Doing this will allow me to teach a concept, have the students practice the concept and then we can discuss how the practice went and receive feedback. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Looking at the bulleted list of prioritized topics in a spreadsheet format allowed me to build the Leader's Daily Agenda documents which we will use to keep us on time while delivering the training. Topic documentation, prioritization, and daily scheduling was also used to define the portions of the YTT dedicated to Yin/Restorative and Yoga Nidra.

 

I bought a copy of a YTT manual from a fellow Baptiste Power Yoga Studio owner to use as a template for the All Y'All Yoga YTT manual. I've edited, rearranged, removed and adding content to it since August and I have learned a lot about working with Adobe InDesign to create CharacterStyles, ParagraphStyles, Color Swatches, edit Anchor Options to keep images anchored to text fields. Working from an actual YTT manual gave me a foundation to start from, the confidence to strip away and add in content currently required by Yoga Alliance, as well as the content specific to All Y'All Yoga.

If you are also on the path to becoming a Registered Yoga School, perhaps this post will be helpful for you to organize your YTT weekends to meet the content requirements of Yoga Alliance. I know it is unlikely that your weekend start/stop times will be the same as those at All Y'All, but the concepts I've laid out for a way to organize the major topics, sub-topics and then divvy them up into a timeline will possibly be of use to you.

This Google Sheet will help you formulate your responses to the Yoga Alliance Application. Once you've completed the "Explanation for your RYS" for each of the core competencies, you'll be ready to copy and paste this content into the Yoga Alliance website when you are completing your Yoga School Registration application.

 

YA RYS Application Template 2023

I created an offline template which can be used to pre-fill out your Daily Scheduler data. The Yoga Alliance website for creating the Daily Schedule doesn't allow for submitting this data and saving your progress. It's entered all at once. The spreadsheet I made will help you organize your data in such a way that you can enter your data into the YA website and know that you will be uploading your complete schedule content. This document is an Excel spreadsheet and not a Google spreadsheet, as I couldn't figure out how to create dependent drop down lists in a Google spreadsheet.

 

If you found any of this useful and you feel called to contribute, here is my PayPal account information. (click below)