The first time I wrote about becoming a registered yoga school with Yoga Alliance, it was me writing the content and creating the curriculum, but I was not in charge of filling out the online application with Yoga Alliance. I am now going through the process of becoming my own registered yoga school and as a result, I have new information on how the process works and how I can make the process easier for you in your journey towards becoming a registered yoga school.

The first step is to ensure that your total number of hours is 200. The Yoga Alliance outline omits 15 hours from its calculations (as you can see below from its guidelines). I assume they're leaving this block of time for you to put toward your Elective subject? I can't say for sure.

Yoga Alliance Core Curriculum Competencies

TECHNIQUES, TRAINING, PRACTICE – 75 HOURS  

• Asana: Historical context
• Asana: Poses specific to RYS's lineage—must include sukhasana and savasana
• Asana: Complete sequencing (asana, pranayama, meditation) to achieve particular effect safely
• Asana: Shared anatomical and alignment principles plus contraindications
• Pranayama & Subtle Body: Historical Context
• Pranayama & Subtle Body: Effects of pranayama on anatomy and subtle body
• Pranayama & Subtle Body: Complete sequencing of pranayama safely, including alternatives and adaptations
• Pranayama & Subtle Body: Ujjayi, Nadi Shodhana, Kapalabhati, among others
• Pranayama & Subtle Body: Koshas, kleshas, chakras, nadis and prana vayus
• Meditation: Key Meditation terms
• Meditation: Meditation methods by lineage
• Meditation: Ability to practice school's chosen meditation practice
• Meditation: Chanting, mantras, and mudras
• Elective

ANATOMY & PHYSIOLOGY – 30 HOURS (20 of which can be online)

• Anatomy: Major Bones
• Anatomy: Types of Joints
• Anatomy: Major muscles involved in asana
• Anatomy: Types of contraction
• Physiology: Nervous system, incl. ‘fight, flight, freeze’ stress response, vagal theory, overall mind-body connection
• Physiology: Cardiovascular/circulatory, endocrine, digestive systems as they relate to yoga practice
• Physiology: Respiratory system, incl. muscles that affect breathing, involuntary vs voluntary breath, how air enters and leaves body
• Biomechanics: Types of joint movement
• Biomechanics: Joint stabilization
• Biomechanics: Safe movement as it pertains to balancing, stretching, awareness, and physical limitations
• Biomechanics: Contraindications, misalignment, adaptations
• Elective

YOGA HUMANITIES – 30 HOURS (20 of which can be online)

• History: Term 'yoga'
• History: School's lineage, style and methodology
• History: Dates and key ideas such as the Vedas, Vedanta, Hatha, Colonial, Modern
• Philosophy: Definition of yoga and key terms
• Philosophy: Relationship between asana, pranayama, meditation per school’s approach
• Philosophy: Familiarity w/ major yogic texts (i.e., Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Hatha Yoga Pradipika)
• Philosophy: Self-reflection on how philosophy relates to practice
• Ethics: Awareness of Yoga Sutras or similar yogic ethical precepts
• Ethics: Relationship to Yoga Alliance’s Ethical Commitment
• Ethics: Comprehension of and responsibility to increase equity in yoga
• Ethics: Accountability measures
• Ethics: Self-reflection on how yoga ethics relate to practice and teaching
• Elective

PROFESSIONAL ESSENTIALS – 50 HOURS

• Professional Essentials
• Teaching Methodology: Sequencing
• Teaching Methodology: Pace
• Teaching Methodology: Environment
• Teaching Methodology: Cueing (verbal, visual, physical)
• Teaching Methodology: Class management
• Professional Development: Yoga-related professional organizations, including the Yoga Alliance Credentialing Process
• Professional Development: Ethical Commitment, including Scope of Practice, Code of Conduct, and Equity Position Statement
• Professional Development: Lifetime of learning and continuing education
• Professional Development: General professionalism, including timeliness, consistency, cleanliness
• Professional Development: Marketing and promotion
• Professional Development: Liability insurance, waivers, invoicing
• Practicum (Practice Teaching): Knowledge, skills, experience across 12 key competencies
• Practicum (Practice Teaching): Mentorship component, incl. apprenticeship, feedback
• Elective

TECHNIQUES, TRAINING, PRACTICE – 85 HOURS  

ANATOMY & PHYSIOLOGY – 30 HOURS (20 of which can be online)

YOGA HUMANITIES – 30 HOURS (20 of which can be online)

PROFESSIONAL ESSENTIALS – 55 HOURS 

Then I took the content Yoga Alliance indicates can be done online (remotely) and used that block of time to create a video conferencing schedule during the week, totaling 40 hours over the course of the YTT, and then worked out the Saturday & Sunday start/end times to get to a total of 200 hours of training.

For the coursework to be done online via video conferencing, Yoga Alliance requires this content to be led by the trainer. This means giving your students a YouTube video playlist does not meet this requirement. I plan to use the time as an open discussion to cover these topics:

ANATOMY & PHYSIOLOGY – 20 hours online

• Physiology: Nervous system, incl. ‘fight, flight, freeze’ stress response, vagal theory, overall mind-body connection
• Physiology: Cardiovascular/circulatory, endocrine, digestive systems as they relate to yoga practice
• Physiology: Respiratory system, incl. muscles that affect breathing, involuntary vs voluntary breath, how air enters and leaves body
• Biomechanics: Types of joint movement
• Biomechanics: Joint stabilization
• Biomechanics: Safe movement as it pertains to balancing, stretching, awareness, and physical limitations
• Biomechanics: Contraindications, misalignment, adaptations

YOGA HUMANITIES – 20 hours online

• History: Term 'yoga'
• History: School's lineage, style and methodology
• History: Dates and key ideas such as the Vedas, Vedanta, Hatha, Colonial, Modern
• Philosophy: Definition of yoga and key terms
• Philosophy: Relationship between asana, pranayama, meditation per school’s approach
• Philosophy: Familiarity w/ major yogic texts (i.e., Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Hatha Yoga Pradipika)
• Philosophy: Self-reflection on how philosophy relates to practice

We will cover the following poses by practicing the shape of the poses, discussing the anatomical alignment of the poses and training the students on how to offer hands-on assists during the yoga practice. List of poses: Child’s Pose, Ragdoll, Extended Mountain, Forward fold, Half Lift, High Plank, Low Plank, Upward Facing Dog, Downward Facing Dog, Chair, Warrior 1, Flip Dog/Side Plank, Eagle, Standing Leg Raise, Airplane, Standing Splits, Half moon, Dancer, Tree, Triangle, Side Facing Wide Leg Forward Fold, Goddess Squat, Skandasana, Tripod Headstand, Pyramid, Twisting Triangle, Revolved Half Moon, Locust, Floor Bow, Half Bow, Upward Facing Dog, Camel, Half Camel, Bridge, Wheel, Reclined Butterfly, Happy Baby, Scissor Legs, 60/30 Lift, Abdominal Twists, Boat, Half Pigeon, Lizard, King Pigeon, Mermaid, Double Pigeon, Easy Seat, Seated Figure Four, Frog, Half Frog, Seated Single Leg Extension, Seated Forward Fold, Reverse Table Top, Reverse Plank, Fish, Waterfall, Headstand, Shoulder Stand, Plow, Ear Pinning Pose, Supine Twist, Reclined Butterfly, Savasana.

Anti-Harassment Policy.pdf

Anti Retaliation Policy.pdf

Attendance Policy.pdf

Code of Conduct.pdf

Grievance Policy.pdf

Sample YTT CERTIFICATE.png

Required Reading List YTT.pdf

Tuition and Refunds.pdf

Yoga Alliance Letter of Intent.pdf

Please select the assessment method(s) used to test trainees’ competency in this Educational Category. Check all that apply. 

Written Assessment

Oral Assessment

Final Project

Other (Please Explain Below)

Describe how you assess trainees' competency in this Educational Category.

Over the past few weeks, I've been comparing and contrasting the features and pricing of the plethora of yoga scheduling software solutions. I have an opportunity to take the time to pick the best yoga scheduling software for Heights Yoga Collective. 

My list of things I need from a scheduling app is: 

1. low monthly price
2. Five admin users/teachers
3. Class calendar for student self-registration
4. Email notifications for class registrations and cancellations. 

A lot of yoga studios are using Mindbody because it's the scheduling app they used at a previous yoga studio. Mindbody is expensive, IMO, starting at $169 a month. It is often buggy, down for hours at a time, and studio owners have to spend lots of time on the phone with tech support to get problems solved. There is no way I'm going with Mind-Body just because I've used it before at other studios.

I started out using Square to take payments for pop-up classes because that feature is free, and I've used Square to sell things at night markets. Square also integrates with ClassPass which may be deemed a positive thing, but that's debatable. ClassPass pays a yoga studio $6 per student, regardless of the studio pricing. Nobody knows how ClassPass sets the point value for a studio's classes either. 

Back to Square: creating a class calendar requires the $ 29-a-month Square Appointments feature. I enabled the free trial period to see how Square Appointments worked. It was obvious that Square Appointments is tailored to support hair salons, massage therapists, and tattoo parlors. The user interface was confusing and hard to navigate to the same place quickly. The interface was not intuitive. I called tech support during my trial period to figure out why I could not fully customize our site location and remove verbiage for Appointments when I only wanted to display Classes. I was on the phone with a very helpful person (Adriana) for an hour and a half. She helped me figure out where the Liability Wavier should be stored, among other things. When I had to cancel a class, I could not use the Square app or the Square Appointments app to cancel the class; I had to pull up a web browser on my phone and log in to access the ability to cancel a class. This was extremely frustrating given that Square has two different apps that should be able to handle this function. I was also unable to quickly see a list of students registered for a class or a list of people who had purchased tickets to a pop-up yoga event. I also had some confusion around the difference between classes and services with regard to how Square defines each of these terms. I cannot see our group using this interface and being happy with it and able to handle our own problem-solving.

I took part in a demonstration of Mariana Tek's software. They're a full-service, white-glove application partner who will design your website, input the verbiage for your yoga classes, and create the recurring class schedule—basically do everything for you. This comes at a high price. The additional setup fees are $1250 to set up your studio in the Mariana Tek platform, plus 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and a 3-year term is required. Mariana Tek Starter pricing in 2024 is $349 a month. For this price, you get their Biz App, Kiosk Check-in app, insights, waivers, and transactional email function. This does not include SMS messaging, landing pages, standard forms, or email marketing automation. That's another $200 a month.

Recess.tv also kept their pricing hidden until I participated in a demo of their platform. Similar to Mariana Tek, they want to do it all for you, again at a high price. The difference with Recess.tv is that they pass along the cost of their services to your customers. Sort of like how Ticketmaster has all those service fees that you don't quite know what they're for, and you can't opt out of them, and you have to pay if you want to see the show. Recess.tv has a sliding scale based on the dollar amount of the transaction that they use to charge your customer for their functionality. If your business transactions are low priced items, your customers will be paying 13.5% + $0.75 per transaction. That may not sound like a lot, but it will add up quick. I know I wouldn't be pleased with such a high percentage fee being blended into the price of a class pack.

Recess.tv Fee Scale (percentage + cost per transaction)
$1 - $49 13.5% + .75
$50 - $99 9.55% + .30
$100 - $199 7.75% + .30
$200 - $1000 4.25% + .30

Now, to my favorite yoga scheduling software. I found Zenamu mentioned when I was digging through Reddit threads looking for users who recommended their favorite group fitness scheduling apps. Zenamu has transparent pricing listed and if you only need one teacher's account? The application is free and will do 99% of what you would need a scheduling app to do for you. You just don't get tech support which should be obvious because it's free. I want five staff accounts, so that puts me in the Expert/Studio price bracket, which is only $39 a month if paid by the year or $42 a month if paid monthly. 

I exchanged several emails with Zenamu's co-founder before our demo and complimented her on the excellent documentation wiki, Zenamu's ease of use, and robust feature set for a reasonable price point. I had many questions about 'Can Zenamu do this' or 'Can Zenamu do that'. She answered each one and provided links to documentation and screen captures of where to click and what to look for. 

Features of Zenamu I got excited about:

• Recurring classes can be scheduled to repeat every week for X number of times or until a given date.
• Students are automatically emailed if a substitute teacher is assigned.
• Buddy passes can be allocated to a student's account manually.
• Emails are sent automatically at class registration, class cancellation, and waitlist changes.
• Zenamu integrates with MailChimp, SmartEmailing and Ecomail
• Students can easily book guest users, who can then be added to Zenamu when they show up for class.
• Promotional codes will be added to the platform this winter.
• For donation-based classes, if you want to indicate the suggested donation, put it in the class description.
• Liability waiver verbiage is currently blended into the Terms and Conditions that students accept when they register for class, but making the Liability Waiver more visible has been added to the Zenamu backlog of things to come.
  
• It is possible to create automatic discounts for cash payments.
• Payroll functionality allows exporting teachers' data to an Excel spreadsheet for use in third-party payroll applications.
• Payments supported: credit card, ApplePay, Google Payments, cash
• Email reminders to students integrate with Google Calendar, Apple iCal, and Outlook
• Unlimited monthly memberships can be created manually by adding an "impossible" amount of credit packs or entry passes to a client's profile.
• Recurring memberships are coming in Q2 of 2025

Following on the Hands On Assisting book I wrote, I have compiled all of the uses for props that I have learned into a single spiral bound book that you can purchase from Lulu.com or you can buy it from my Square shopping site. 

This book includes easy-to-understand drawings of over 70 different ways to use props in over 36 poses, accompanied by easy-to-understand explanations of how to use the props in the poses.

The front cover shows what you can expect to see inside the rest of the book. I will post more photos of the finished print on demand book when the copies I ordered arrive.

Print on demand from Lulu.com: https://bit.ly/PropsIntoPowerBook

Square shopping site: https://jentechyoga.square.site/