“This course has challenged and developed me.”

Whether it’s for a career change or to deepen your understanding of yoga practice, signing up to a 9 month hot yoga teacher training course is a big commitment of your time. Now that we’re reaching the halfway point of our first hot yoga teacher training course, I thought it worth checking in with Amy Harrowell to see how she’s found the hours of practice and study.

“Tell us how you first got into Hot Yoga”

I first got into Yoga when my boss invited me along to a Bikram class and having never tried any form of yoga, I was curious and went along.

“What made you decide to become a qualified hot yoga teacher?”

Initially I wanted to deepen my own Yoga practice and knowledge and the course seemed like a very good way of doing that. Of course there are exams at the end of it and I thought I may as well take them as I will have completed the course and it will be an amazing qualification to hold with a great sense of personal achievement at having done so.

It comes with the advantage of allowing me to better plan my future career options and comes with the fantastic flexibility (no pun intended!) of allowing me to teach anywhere in the World if I wanted too.

“How did you feel at the start of the teacher training course?”

Nervous. I knew the days were long and it was going to be physically tiring, so worried about how I would cope with that.

Are there any unexpected insights that you have learned on the course?

Yoga is a HUGE subject and not just physical exercise. Much more to it than I’d ever have imagined and this course to me, is just the beginning of a much bigger journey; like dipping ones little toe into a never-ending ocean of Yoga-related information!

Also that when learning the classics of yoga, there’s some incredibly unusual activities, classed as true yoga that many would find rather eye-opening!

“Now that you’re halfway through the course, how well resourced do you feel toward your future as a Hot Yoga teacher?”

There is so much that we have covered and only at the half way point. But I feel very confident that it’s giving us all the tools to be very well informed, knowledgeable teachers who really ‘know’ what we’re teaching (a real solid, confident foundation) and we’ll be able to explain why we’re teaching what we are (or we will know where to look for answers if we don’t on the spot!).

“Now that you’re on the course, do you have any words of advice for anyone looking to become a teacher?”

This course is not to be taken lightly. To do it well, I believe you need to be truly committed to it, and to a degree, it will take over your life once you have started on it (but in a totally positive way!). It’s hard but you will have so much fun doing it all, that it’s not like work at all.

And a degree of open-mindedness is certainly required too, but you will learn more and achieve more than you probably think you’re capable of.

This is just the beginning

Mastery of yoga is a lifetime’s work. That’s the great thing about yoga, there’s always something new to learn and a way to improve. This course gives you all of the tools to teach safe, engaging classes with your personal style.

That’s just the start though, because you’ll learn and develop your way of teaching over the years in a way that really works for you.

Have a read or chat to Ed

Our next course starts in January 2017. If you’d like to learn more, you can have a read of our hot yoga teacher training course info here. Better yet, have a chat with Ed next time you’re in class about the course.

Owen