Teaching Yoga to Athletes Is Easier Than You Think

You could be teaching yoga to athletes and making great money with it—but you have to shift your thinking in this one area first:

Teaching yoga for athletes is not teaching athletic yoga.

yoga for athletes is not athletic yoga

Although your studio clients may be coming to yoga for a workout, when you teach yoga to athletes—either by bringing athletes to the studio or by taking yoga to athletes in their training facilities—the practice is different.

When you’re working with athletes, you’re not there to help them with conditioning. You’re there to help them build balance, focus, and presence, and to help them maintain mobility and flexibility. Most importantly, you’re there to help them recover and find center.

You probably already know how to teach yoga to athletes, because it’s simple: lead a gentle yoga class.

Now, if your background is in teaching a more athletic, vinyasa/flow-based practice, that might scare you. Don’t let it—it’s easy! Here’s the secret of teaching gentle yoga: take all the warmups you know and like to teach, and put them together into a full-length class.

a simple yoga sequence for athletes

Here’s an example. Start lying down with your favorite supine warmup. Move up to standing for a standing warmup sequence. Lower to sitting and do another warmup sequence. Come into table pose, or child’s pose, and do another. All told, you’ll be teaching a fantastic, well-balanced practice without adding too much work onto already-tired athletic bodies.

And your students will love you for it. It’s like having tapas for dinner (girl dinner!)—everything is presented in small portions and diners can enjoy sampling all of it until they are satisfied.

It’s the simplest movements, and the simplest messages, that matter the most to athletes. These distilled messages apply on the field and on the court as well as on the mat. For example:

Inhale, here; exhale, now
Notice where you’re carrying tension.
Find the right balance between effort and ease.
Is this in your control or out of your control?
If it’s out of your control, can you still control your attitude?
Set your gaze—eyes on the prize, eyes on the ball.
Use your breath.
Relax to perform at your best.

(For my teaching assistant’s take on how yoga for athletes is almost like yoga for seniors, watch this video.)

teaching yoga for athletes is simpler than you’re making it

If you’ve been struggling with imposter syndrome around something like teaching yoga—or teaching yoga to athletes, you might worry, “Who am I to act like I can say profound things, teach a millennia-old spiritual tradition, and also help students solve all their physical problems with yoga?”

And if you think about working with a special population like athletes, you might compound that already weighty set of worries with the fear that you need to help athletes build sport- or position-specific strength, mental fortitude based in sport psychology, and game-winning grace under pressure.

If you burden yourself with expectations that lofty, no wonder you feel like a fraud!

The problem here is thinking that as a yoga teacher, you need to be everything to everybody—a combination of clergyperson, therapist, and medical provider. In fact, none of those are your job as a yoga teacher.

Your job is simply to be a guide, and to remember your students are the heroes. Here’s what I mean.

Once you embrace this centering-the-student worldview, you’ll be ready to give athletes what they need to center, balance, and recover.

And you will find it easy to understand your role and see it clearly: you’re not there to train the athletes. It’s not your job to help them build strength or overcome injuries. Your job is to guide them toward yoga, union, connection—body, mind, and spirit.

This essay outlines your scope of practice when you teach yoga to athletes. Once you see your role clearly, you’ll feel confident in your ability to help athletes with yoga sequences, meditations, and breath exercises that will level up their game.

the money is good when you specialize in teaching yoga to athletes!

When you specialize in teaching yoga to athletes, you can get paid really well while earning a living outside the hustle culture of teaching studio classes. Collegiate revenue programs (i.e., football and basketball), professional teams—even single professional athletes—will spend handsomely in pursuit of better performance. And if you’re working directly with the athletes or teams, not only can you charge a premium rate, you won’t be locked in to renting space or being paid through a studio, which would take its own sizable cut of the earnings.

And specializing in yoga for athletes means you’re an expert in yoga for high performers—i.e., musicians, CEOs, and other achievers who are willing to pay a premium for your services in helping them succeed.

Given the way many yoga teachers undervalue their services, I feel quite confident that you can earn double what you’re currently charging for private lessons while having a really satisfying career turning athletes into champions.

I want to show you how to charge what you’re worth, how to guide athletes in simple yoga exercises, and how to teach powerful yoga philosophy without pronouncing a syllable of Sanskrit. So I recorded a free on-demand workshop where I talk you through exactly how you can get started building a niche or a career teaching yoga to athletes.