Hi, I’m Sage Rountree, PhD, E-RYT 500, a yoga teacher mentor and the author of thirteen books.

Reporters and podcast hosts are welcome to take any of these, or to send me your own.

1. Most people assume a good yoga class is a creative one. Why do you argue the opposite?
2. What is the 6–4–2 Framework, and what problem does it solve?
3. You tell yoga teachers to repeat their classes. That sounds like laziness. Make the case.
4. You wrote the first book on yoga for athletes in 2008. What has changed since?
5. What does yoga actually do for an athlete, and what does it not do?
6. Why is rest the hardest thing to sell an athlete?
7. What should someone look for in a 200-hour yoga teacher training, and what should scare them off?
8. What is the single most useful thing a person over fifty can do for their balance?
9. Someone has ten minutes and a stiff back. What do you tell them to do?
10. Experienced teachers still lie awake certain they will be found out as imposters. Why does that feeling outlast achieving competence?

• Name and credentials: Sage Rountree, PhD, E-RYT 500, YACEP. Rountree, with no d.
• Based in: Hillsborough, North Carolina.
• Teaching yoga since 2003; training yoga teachers since 2011.
• Books: thirteen, beginning with The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga (2008) and most recently Yoga Off the Mat (North Atlantic Books, July 2026), with Alexandra DeSiato. More than 150,000 copies sold.
• Founder of Comfort Zone Yoga, a virtual studio for yoga teacher development, with a free community of more than 3,300 yoga teachers.
• Host of Yoga Teacher Confidential, weekly since October 2024.
• Faculty at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health since 2008. Directs the yoga teacher trainings at Carrboro Yoga.
• Athletics: teaches yoga to University of North Carolina football and men’s basketball; coaching certifications from USA Triathlon, USA Cycling, and the Road Runners Club of America; raced for Team USA at the 2008 Short-Course Age Group World Triathlon Championships.
• Before yoga: PhD in English literature, UNC Chapel Hill, 2001; six years as a public radio announcer at WFDD and WUNC; twelve years in academic publishing at Duke, Cambridge, and Oxford University Presses.
• Frameworks: the S.E.R.V.E. Method and the 6–4–2 Framework.