5 Steps to Becoming an Acro Yoga Instructor
cro yoga is a yoga style slowly growing in popularity throughout the United States. As a specialized yoga style that combines traditional yoga poses with gymnastics, it requires a lot of strength training, flexibility, and a willingness to become deeply connected to one or more partners.
There are five steps to becoming an Acro yoga instructor, including finding an instructor and studio to learn the basics and completing a 200-hr training, in addition to a few other steps. The time it takes to finish all these requirements depends on your experience and dedication.
Because Acro yoga is steadily growing in popularity, there is a greater need for new instructors. If you’ve been practicing Acro yoga for some time and would like to challenge yourself or help others learn the practice, learning how to become an instructor could be a life-changing choice for you on your personal yoga journey. Read on for five steps to becoming an Acro yoga instructor.
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How Do I Become an Acro Yoga Instructor?
Steps to becoming an Acro yoga instructor are few but require a great deal of time and dedication. Because Acro yoga is such a specialized practice, anyone wanting to become an instructor has to be ready to fully commit.
Becoming an Acro yoga instructor has the obvious benefit of being able to teach Acro yoga classes, but it comes with the added benefit of being part of a smaller community of yoga instructors. As you develop as a teacher, you also grow in your practice through making meaningful connections with professional trainers and fellow practitioners, who you’ll come to know on an intimate level.
Up next, we’ll details the five steps required to become an Acro yoga instructor, including:
- Finding an instructor and studio to learn Acro yoga basics
- In-person or Online 200-Hour Equivalent Training
- Complete a 500-hour Teacher Training or Equivalent
- Fulfill All Required Teaching Prerequisites
- Create Meaningful Connections
5 Steps to Becoming an Acro Yoga Instructor
There are many trainings and programs available to you as you prepare to dive head-in into the joyful and eye-opening practice of Acro yoga. These trainings and hours of personal practice will become stepping stones in your physical and professional journey. Just like any teaching position, you will need a lot of experience to be able to become a properly qualified instructor.
1. Find an Instructor and Studio to Learn the Basics of Acro Yoga
1. Find an Instructor and Studio to Learn the Basics of Acro YogaTo consider becoming an Acro yoga instructor, you’ll need a solid foundation in yoga practices and techniques. Many Acro yoga trainings require students to have a minimum number of hours or years of yoga instruction from qualified teachers. This is so anyone coming into an Acro yoga training can effectively endure the intensive physical and mental exercises designed for future teachers.
This isn’t to say you need to be a master gymnast, acrobat, or a well-seasoned yogi with incredible flexibility or strength. Waiting to take a teacher training comes down to minimizing injury and learning in a balanced setting. Most experienced yoga teachers, Acro or otherwise, built their knowledge through years of practice.
By creating a balanced personal practice, you will build skills that will make harder sequences and intense daily practices a reality. Whatever physical or emotional state you find yourself in, practicing under an experienced teacher will give you the yoga knowledge necessary for maximizing your future plans and ambitions in Acro yoga. Your physical fitness will increase as well as how much you can offer potential clients.
2. Find an In-person or Online 200-Hour Equivalent Training
Once you’ve become confident in your physical ability and beginner yoga knowledge, it’s important to receive a 200-hour teacher yoga teacher training from an accredited studio and instructor. Though it isn’t the same everywhere, many yoga studios and businesses look for teachers who earned a 200-hour level training under a studio registered with the Yoga Alliance.
The Yoga Alliance is an organization dedicated to ensuring yoga studios provide safe, high quality, and accessibility for people across the United States. Although not every studio requires you to complete a teacher training backed by the Yoga Alliance, it helps ensure you have credibility throughout most potential employers.
If possible, try to find a teacher training you can go to in person. Yoga teacher training requires a lot of hands-on experience and personal adjustments from your instructor. There are many online teacher trainings. However, choose those only if an accredited studio isn’t available in your area.
Another thing to keep in mind is there may be some 200-hour teacher trainings that focus specifically on techniques and sequences you’ll need as an Acro yoga instructor. A great website to check out is Acroyoga INTL, where there is a large community of Acro yoga practitioners around the world you can pull from for different retreats, trainings, and resources.
3. Complete a 500-hour Teacher Training or Equivalent
Hand in hand with a 200-hour teacher training is the 500-hour teacher training where you will get more hands-on experience with students as an instructor. Since the beginning training won’t be enough to teach you to everything you’ll need as a specialized Acro yoga fulfill teaching instructor, it’s important to seek out further training.
500-hour trainings specifically target harder sequences, poses, and techniques that build on your beginner teacher training. Since Acro Yoga requires a series of stylized sequences and postures, it’s important to receive further knowledge concerning human anatomy and sequencing. Under an inexperienced instructor, it’s very easy for students practicing Acro yoga to be injured or feel overwhelmed by partnering with other people.
Some Acro yoga teacher trainings have very particular prerequisites you’ll need to finish. These include having experience in yoga, acrobatics, massage, teaching in a classroom setting, harder poses, and basic Acro yoga sequences.
Through this training, your yoga knowledge and experience will be further refined, and you will receive far more connections with other teachers. Above all, you’ll gain more confidence in your ability to safely and lovingly conduct an Acro Yoga class for students with multiple levels of experience.
4. Fulfill All Required Teaching Prerequisites
After your 200-hour and 500-hour teacher trainings, you’ll need to successfully teach a required amount of hours. Once you’ve fulfilled these hours, you can register with the Yoga Alliance as a full-fledged certified instructor. (Now, taking classes is easier than ever with online yoga instructor training available!)
This is not entirely necessary to really be accepted as an instructor in all studios. However, it will be useful if you want to lead teacher trainings in the future once you’ve gained enough experience.
The Yoga Alliance aside, internships at studios as an assistant instructor or substitute teacher will give you a lot of experience before you establish yourself as an independent instructor. You can gain these hours during and after your teacher trainings. This will also give you access to knowledge more experienced teachers can give you.
5. Create Meaningful Connections
Finishing your teacher trainings and gaining experience in teaching also means finding and creating meaningful connections. Your success as an instructor comes in part from the people you come to know on your yoga journey. It’s much harder to find teaching jobs when you fail to create relationships with other teachers and studios.
Oftentimes, you can be hired on by the studios you train at or by people you meet. Since becoming an Acro yoga will take several years, you should have no trouble becoming part of a yoga community. Acro yoga is by nature a yoga practice built on developing a relationship with one or more other people who you will rely on.
How Hard is Acro Yoga?
Acro yoga is definitely a challenge, but it’s level of difficulty is depending on your experience, and skillset. Acro yoga is a specialized discipline that relies on two or more people working together through a series of yoga sequences that use acrobatics, yoga, and Thai Massage. It requires a lot of physical strength, especially in the core, as well as cohesion and trust between all involved.
For each Acro yoga practice, there is someone called the base, who is at the bottom for the pose. The base carries someone called the flyer, who’ll stretch and set themselves in tricky positions. For beginners especially, there are also Spotters who make sure the flyer and base can safely go in and out of each pose without falling or injuring themselves.
Generally, in an Acro Yoga practice, practitioners will warm up by doing a series of yoga poses meant to improve balance and increase flexibility. Some more advanced practitioners will do Acrobatic flying, poses that are more challenging because flyers move through multiple poses in a row.
Though it is challenging, you don’t need to be an expert to practice Acro Yoga safely. Gaining the right strength and flexibility will come in time the more you practice under experienced teachers. In the beginning, it’s important to pay special attention to improving your physique, so you don’t injure yourself.
The harder part of Acro Yoga is learning to work with a partner. It requires a lot of trust and being able to read how the other is doing through each sequence. If anything, make sure you find a partner you know you can comfortably try harder poses with. You can learn all the difficult and easy poses and positions in some Acro Yoga courses online.
How Can I Practice Acro Yoga Alone?
Practicing Acro Yoga alone isn’t completely possible because, as stated, you need someone else to do the poses with. However, you can focus and train yourself, so you are more fit to do harder poses with your partner.
In particular, focus on strengthening your arms and core, increasing flexibility through stretching and practicing regular yoga sequences, increasing your balance, and refining your technique by watching yoga videos and consulting your instructors.
Make sure to find yoga sequences that specifically increase your balance. It is also useful to regularly practice a variety of inversions, so you get used to going into trickier upside-down postures. Backbends are also great because they target your flexibility, leg strength, and balance.
Also, find time to meditate and relieve anxiety and stress. If you hold on to unnecessary negative emotions, it will be harder for you and your partner to work together and develop a deeper bond of trust.
Outro
Though it may be challenging, becoming an Acro Yoga practitioner and an instructor can be a gratifying experience. You’ll make many rewarding connections with your teachers and partners, with whom you’ll need to learn and grow in the practice. Above anything else, if you take the proper steps, you’ll grow through all aspects of your life and benefit countless people who you will teach.
