200-Hour Teacher Training?

I saw a sign in a yoga studio recently advertising teacher training: in just 200 hours, you could become certified to teach yoga.

I wondered whether this was typical, and it turns out that a lot of yoga studios offer a 200-hour certification.

This surprised me and actually left me appalled. That's five weeks of full-time study at 40 hours each week, or if you're studying 20 hours a week, ten weeks.

People who teach any kind of movement discipline, whether it's ballet, Feldenkreis, Pilates, yoga, or a martial art, are working very directly with people's bodies. We are all physically different; we have our own strengths and weaknesses, known and unknown. The amount of training you have and the amount of time you have spent as a student of a style are both important.

The people who teach these styles are in a position to do a lot of damage if they lack sufficient knowledge and experience. I dropped two Pilates teachers because they thought they knew what I could do better than I did. At that point, I was a second-degree black belt in Danzan Ryu jujitsu who had been practicing for 23 years. The instructor I worked with over a three-year period trusted my knowledge and was a brilliant teacher.

Here's a little about my training in jujitsu.

White to blue belt (20 months): around 300 hours of practice
Blue to green belt (13 months): around 350 hours of practice
Green to brown belt (18 months): around 350 hours of practice
Brown to black belt (this is three separate ranks): 1100 hours of practice

Not included in the above: time at seminars, conventions, camps, black belt classes. But I had more than 2,000 hours of practice before I could open my own dojo. That's ten times what you get in a 200 hour yoga teacher training.

My advice: if you're going to take yoga or any other movement discipline, talk to the instructor or instructors about the length of their training, who they trained with, how long they practiced before they started training, and how long they have been teaching.