Teacher toolkit: class planner and YTT study

Who it is for

The toolkit is for yoga teacher trainees and teachers in their first years of teaching: people writing practice classes for a 200-hour training, preparing for a first community class, or planning a weekly class at a studio. It also suits experienced home practitioners who like to plan their own sessions. If you are still deciding on a training, start with our list of yoga teacher trainings in the Philippines and set up to three side by side in the teacher training comparer.

How to plan a class

1. Name the class and pick a length. Choose 45, 60, 75 or 90 minutes. The bar at the bottom shows the running total against your target and whether you are under, on time or over.
2. Pick a peak pose if the class builds to one. The planner lists what must come first (the pose’s prerequisites), gentler poses for the same areas, and the counter-poses to use straight after. Tap any of them to add it in the right place, or press Build a class around it for a complete draft you can then edit.
3. Arrange the poses in six sections: centering, warm-up, standing, peak, floor and closing. Drag a pose with a mouse, or use the up and down arrows on a phone or keyboard. A pose moved past the end of a section joins the next one.
4. Set each hold in seconds or in breaths. Sided poses are timed on both sides automatically, and the planner allows a few seconds to move between poses. Fit holds stretches or trims the holds so the class lands on your target.
5. Open a pose to see its drawing and our cue library: an entry, an alignment, a breath and an exit cue for every pose. Insert into notes copies a cue into that pose’s notes, where you can rewrite it in your own voice.
6. Write your theme notes, then print class cards, print a one-page plan, save it to My classes, copy a share link, or press Practise this class to move through it yourself in the practice app before you teach it.

How the planner checks your sequence

Under the plan, a sequence check runs as you edit, using the published rules behind our random yoga flow generator. It flags a peak pose that comes before its prerequisites, a deep backbend, twist or inversion without a counter-pose straight after it, and the same pose twice in a row. It also gives tips: a big position change, such as standing straight down to lying on your back, gets a suggestion for a pose in between, and the check reminds you to warm up before the peak and to close with a final rest. These are teaching conventions, not medical rules. Your students, your training and your own judgement come first.

YTT study mode

Switch to YTT study for four short practice tools:

• Sanskrit flashcards for pose names, practice terms and philosophy, drawn from our Sanskrit yoga glossary. Cards use five Leitner boxes: a card you know comes back less often, a card you miss comes back next round.
• Anatomy-lite cards that name the areas each pose works, such as the hips, the back of the thighs or the upper back, and whether it is mostly stretching, strength or balance work. They use plain names and make no health claims.
• A sequencing quiz: put four to six poses in a safe order, building to a peak. The answer is checked against the same rules as the planner, so any safe order passes.
• An alignment quiz: look at a pose drawing and pick its alignment cue from four.

How it compares with planning on paper

A notebook is quick and many teachers still plan that way. The toolkit keeps what works about paper (one page, your own words, something to print) and adds the parts that are slow by hand: adding up hold times on both sides, remembering which poses prepare for a peak and which counter it, and copying cues. A paper plan cannot tell you that the class runs eight minutes over, and it cannot be shared with a co-teacher by sending a link. If you want a ready-made home practice instead of a class to teach, the sequence builder and the flow generator are faster.

Privacy and offline use

Everything runs in your browser. Plans are saved on this device only, the share link carries the class inside the link itself, and nothing you plan or study is sent to a server or tracked. Once the page has loaded, planning, printing and studying keep working without a connection.

For the wider path into teaching, read how to become a yoga teacher in the Philippines, which covers trainings, costs and first classes.

Peak poses and how to build to them

The same data the planner uses: what to teach before each common peak pose, gentler poses for the same areas, and the counter-pose to use straight after.