Meet Jennifer Schell, a newly certified graduate of my online course, Teaching Yoga to Athletes! Jennifer started with the content side of the course and collected her homework as she went along, then submitted it all to me when she upgraded to certification. This is a smart way to move through the training if you want to do it one unit at a time or aren’t sure whether you want full certification, which involves lots of back-and-forth with me (and thus lots of prompts and listening to me!).
Jennifer and I have a lot in common. We both live in North Carolina, have degrees from UNC–Chapel Hill, and parent two teenage daughters. Both of us fell in love with yoga because of prenatal yoga classes. But unlike me, Jennifer has a really cool sports background—she fenced for Carolina!—and her first yoga teacher training was in hot yoga.
Since then, she’s been slowly ramping down the intensity of the yoga she teaches, moving from Bikram to Baptiste to gentle, restorative, and yin classes, and she has been studying mindfulness techniques. She brings this complementary approach—yin to the yang of training—to a competitive youth swim team and a football team in Greensboro, as well as to her regular weekly students. She’s been continuing to teach online during the shutdown, and I got to enjoy a lovely class with her from her beautiful home studio.
What made that class lovely, besides Jennifer’s sweet voice, perfect pacing, and calming demeanor? We never stood up! This sequence showed me that Jennifer really understands the needs of her athletic students, and she serves them by offering them practices for balance, not athletic yoga.
Wherever you are, you can take a class with Jennifer online. Write her to ask about her schedule.
If you’d like to join Jennifer as an expert in teaching yoga to athletes, start your work on the course at Sage Yoga Teacher Training. The lectures have all been freshly updated, so you’ll be getting the most recent content!