Where the hours actually go in my online training, from the day you’re accepted to six months after graduation
A 200-hour yoga teacher training is not two hundred hours of yoga class. If it were, it would be a very expensive gym membership. I’ve been training yoga teachers since 2011, and applications for the next cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training are open now, so this is a good moment to open the doors and show you where the hours go.
The day you’re accepted
The curriculum opens the day you enroll, on purpose. Enroll in November, and you have November, December, and January to work through the self-paced material on your own clock and arrive at the February calls already warmed up. The lectures come in three formats (video, written transcript, and a private podcast feed), the reading comes from five books I wrote or co-wrote, and a workbook carries prompts for every lesson.
Honest arithmetic: the program is two hundred hours, about thirty-five of them live and roughly 165 self-paced. Start about three months before the live calls and finish at graduation, and that’s about twenty-six weeks, or three to six hours a week. Wait until the live calls begin to start the self-paced work, and you’ll squeeze the same hours into twelve weeks—closer to six to twelve hours a week, on top of the calls. Both are possible. Both are doable. One is a lot more pleasant.
The first thing you do isn’t anatomy or sequencing. It’s Module 1, Intention Setting and Mission, where you write a deliberately imperfect mission statement that you’ll reread at the very end. Then the modules run: Finding Your Voice; Energy Management for Yoga Teachers; thirty hours of anatomy and physiology built for cueing rather than memorization; planning a class; the sequencing method, which is the biggest block of hours in the program; the craft of teaching; theming; thirty hours of philosophy, built so that by the end you can place your teaching in the tradition and talk about it without either apologizing for it or performing it at your students; and the profession itself. The body comes fourth. What ends most teaching careers early is running on empty by year two, so we put the fuel gauge in before the engine.
A normal week once the live calls start
This fall the cohort meets Tuesday evenings from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Eastern; the next cohort sets its own slot together once everyone’s enrolled. One live video call a week, never longer than ninety minutes, for twelve weeks. On the call we take a lesson and do the parts that best suit our live presence: the discussion prompts, partner exercises, and time for questions and answers.
The room is a grid of faces, and this fall three of my eight students have joined calls with their children in their laps. The kids are welcome exactly as they are, and it has been one of my favorite parts of the training. There’s a mute button for the moments a parent wants one, and nothing more is needed. I built this training for adults with full lives, and full lives come to the call.
Here’s a week a student with a job and a household could actually keep. Monday, forty minutes: the week’s lecture on the private podcast feed while you walk the dog, fold the laundry, or drive to work. You don’t even have to take notes; just let it wash over you once. Monday night, come to the live online yoga class (it runs every Monday during the live cohort, shared with my Prep Station and sequencing mentorship members) and be a student. Tuesday evening, ninety minutes: the live call, though that slot floats depending on what works for each cohort. Wednesday, forty-five minutes: one chapter, with a pencil in your hand, and the two or three workbook prompts that go with it. Thursday, forty-five minutes: your buddy session, thirty minutes on video and fifteen for keep, drop, add. Friday: nothing, and I mean that—downtime is critical for your integration. Saturday morning, an hour: twenty minutes of your own practice, following the sequence you’ll teach so you experience it in your body before you ask anyone else to, then forty minutes back in the workbook, rewatching a lecture, or reading the transcript. Sunday off. That’s about five and a half hours, which lands you at graduation with the hours done and your weekends mostly intact. Start in February or October instead, when the cohort begins, and you’ll double this, and maybe you take back Friday. It’s still possible.
And the off days are the ones people are tempted to skip. A training you can only survive by white-knuckling it teaches you to white-knuckle it, a horrible habit that you might then carry into your first year of teaching. A day off inside the training is practice for a day off inside your teaching career. I hope you’ll take it.
The piece that makes you a yoga teacher
Early in the cohort you’re paired with another trainee, and each week you meet on video and one of you teaches the other. You record it, at least four times over the training, and the sessions get longer and more real as you go. There is no faster education in cueing than watching another human try to follow your words.
Every session uses the same feedback protocol, Keep/Drop/Add: before anyone speaks, your partner writes one thing to keep, one to drop, one to add. Specific and kind, in that order, in writing. It prevents the two things that ruin feedback between new teachers, piling on and the vague “that was great!”
My second class ever was a sub I hadn’t planned on: I showed up to take the class, the teacher had car trouble, and I wound up saying, “I can teach this class.” I hadn’t been announced, so the students walked in expecting Bryan, their regular teacher, and got me, and I spent the entire hour apologizing for not being Bryan. The next day two of them, both schoolteachers, found me at the gym and told me gently, “We have a little feedback for you. We could see that you weren’t Bryan. You didn’t need to apologize for not being Bryan.” That is a keep, drop, add. Keep: you showed up and taught, and we had a class. Drop: the apologizing. Add: your own name, your own spin, out loud, at the start. Nobody had a protocol for telling me that back then. My students get it every week.
Alongside the buddy sessions there’s community teaching—real people, friends, family, a lunchtime group at work—with a log, at least five hours of it, plus five hours observing experienced yoga teachers, with notes: fifteen practicum hours against the ten Yoga Alliance requires, and the extra five are deliberate. This is where the Fraud Feeling gets its first real workout, and where you discover that you do know what you’re doing, in pieces, and the pieces are what you build from.
Week seven
Around the seventh week of a twelve-week cohort nearly everybody hits a dip: the novelty’s worn off, the reading has stacked up, graduation is still several weeks away. I tell every cohort about it in advance, because a wall you can see coming is a wall you can climb. Don’t binge the lectures to catch up. Work in thirty-to-sixty-minute sessions. Pick up where you left off rather than doubling up. Come to the call even if you’re behind, especially then, because the other faces in the grid are in it too.
How you’re assessed
There’s no written exam. In the last weeks you record a twenty-minute segment of class and write your own Keep/Drop/Add on it. The self-assessment matters more than the video, because a yoga teacher who can accurately see their own teaching is ready to keep growing without me. Before you write it, you reread the mission statement from week one. Twelve weeks later it reads differently, and that difference is the training, made visible.
After graduation
The first year of teaching is harder than the training; I say so in the training itself, in the module on managing your energy, because it’s better to hear it from me early than to discover it alone a month into your first teaching job. So graduation isn’t the end of the container. You’re a member of the Prep Station, my membership for working yoga teachers, from the day you enroll through October 31, 2027, so the six months after graduation are covered: a library of ready-to-teach sequences, a planning tool, a monthly live call, and a room full of working teachers to ask while you teach your first real classes. The training teaches you to cook. The Prep Station is a stocked kitchen for the first six months you’re cooking for other people.
If you want in
Applications for the February 2027 cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training are open through Sunday, January 31. Early-bird tuition is $2,997, paid in full, through Sunday, December 13; after that it’s $3,500 or four payments of $875. The application asks real questions, and I read every one myself.
If you’d like to see the training first, come to the live open house on Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. You can also take Unit 2 of the curriculum for free: it’s a mini-course called Find Your Teaching Voice. If you’d rather talk it through one to one, book a free thirty-minute call with me. And if you’re still deciding whether teaching is your path, start with how much experience you need before teacher training, how to choose an online yoga teacher training, or what happens inside my 200-hour.
Which part sounds hardest to you: the live calls, the buddy sessions, or the final teaching video? Tell me in the comments. The answer is usually the part that turns out best.
