The craft nobody taught you in your 200-hour
For over a decade, I taught private yoga to Hall of Fame coach Roy Williams. Somewhere along the way, I realized I’d been teaching privates wrong. Not because I didn’t know yoga. Because nobody had ever sat me down and said, A private is a different craft. Here’s how.
Most 200-hour trainings are built around teaching a room. A wide band of bodies, a collective energy, a sequence that serves the average. Privates are almost the inverse of that work, and most of us come out of training with zero hours of dedicated instruction in how to teach one body, one history, one hour.
Then we get a private-lesson inquiry. And we do what any reasonable person would do: we teach our group class, to one person, in their living room. It feels slightly off. The student is polite but not transformed. And we quietly decide we don’t love privates.
We don’t love that craft. The one we made up. We haven’t met the actual craft yet.
So let’s meet it.
Shift One: Sequence for one body, not a room
If you’ve read The Art of Yoga Sequencing or studied with me anywhere, you know the 6–4–2 framework: six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions. It’s a checklist for balanced movement, not a pose-counting formula, and it’s how I sequence group classes, workshops, trainings, all of it. If you want the group-class foundation first, you can master the S.E.R.V.E. method and 6-4-2 framework before you carry it into privates.
In a group class, you run the whole 6–4–2, because you don’t know which student needs which thing. You build the full nutrition into the meal, and each body takes what it needs.
In a private, you are not a line cook feeding a dining room. You are a private chef cooking a tasting menu for one.
You don’t have to hit every axis of the 6–4–2 in a sixty-minute private. You choose, based on intake and what the body is showing you today, which of the six spinal movements get deep attention, which of the four leg-lines you explore, which of the two core modes you build around. The rest can be touched briefly or held for next time.
That’s a completely different sequencing job. Slower. More targeted. More tactical. And more satisfying once you stop trying to feed the whole dining room.
Shift Two: Slow down about thirty percent
Group-class pace is set by the collective. There’s a rhythm. Students can hide in it. In a private, there is no collective. There is one person, with one nervous system, being held in your full attention. There is nowhere to hide.
So slow down. By about thirty percent. Hold each pose a little longer. Allow silences. Let the student breathe for several cycles before the next instruction.
The quiet is not empty. It’s where the practice lands.
The quiet will also feel terrifying the first time. You will be convinced your student thinks you’ve forgotten what you’re doing. They don’t. They think you are the most attentive teacher they have ever had, because you are. Learning how to prepare for a private lesson without feeling nervous or overwhelmed is a different kind of prep than group-class planning, and it changes what the silences feel like.
Shift Three: Consent is an ongoing conversation
In a group, assists are offered at a distance: consent cards, class-level opt-ins, a general announcement at the top. Workable, and appropriate for the scale.
In a private, consent is verbal, explicit, and ongoing. A yes in session one is not a yes in session four. A yes to a hip assist is not a yes to a shoulder assist. You ask each time.
- “I’d like to offer a hip assist in this pose. May I?”
- “Would you like me to demonstrate this on your body with my hands, or would it be easier if I demonstrated on mine while you watch?”
- “I’ll adjust one thing at a time. Let me know if anything doesn’t land.”
It is not clunky. It is professional. And it is the thing that makes a student feel safe enough to drop in all the way. For more in-the-room craft, here’s how to teach private yoga lessons with confidence.
Hold your scope
A student alone with you on their living room floor is going to tell you things they would never say in a group class. They will ask what you think about their back pain, their insomnia, their marriage, their grief.
You need one sentence, warm, professional, unapologetic. Mine is: That’s outside my scope of practice here.
You can add, Here’s a provider I’d trust with that, and hand them a name from your referral network. You are not being rude. You are being the kind of professional your student is paying for.
Which means: build your referral network before your first private, not during.
Price it fairly (for you, and for every other teacher)
Most yoga teachers underprice their privates. And every time we do it, we undercut every other teacher trying to price the craft fairly.
When a private lesson costs more than a drop-in group class, students take it more seriously. They turn up. They do the homework. They tell their friends. When you underprice, you’re training your student to treat the lesson as disposable.
My starting-line recommendation for a teacher fresh out of a 200-hour is seventy-five dollars an hour. Align with local massage-therapy rates. Scale up five to ten dollars per year of teaching experience. By year five, you’re at one hundred to one hundred twenty-five. By year ten, more.
The math is friendlier than studio-teaching math, too. Two privates a week at one-twenty replaces four studio classes at forty, for half the hours on your feet. When you’re ready to build the pipeline, here’s how to find private yoga clients who value your teaching.
If the holdup is mindset rather than logistics, start there. The two-question pitch — “why not me?” followed by “why me?” — is what moves teachers off the sidelines and into the work their training has earned them.
Want the complete kit?
I just finished building The Private Lesson Playbook: six lessons and seventeen templates (intake form, cancellation policy, consent scripts, session plan worksheet, partnership outreach email, rate raise announcement, and more), available as video, private podcast, or a beautifully formatted written document. You don’t pick one. You get all three.
Launch sale: $57 through May 31st at comfortzoneyoga.com/private. Regular price $77. If you want my ongoing eyes on your work, MMM (Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing) is where I mentor teachers month over month, and the Playbook is included.
