Yoga is widely associated with healing, mindfulness, and well-being. Millions practice it to improve mobility, manage stress, and cultivate greater awareness of the body. Yet Stephanie Adams, founder of SAYF (Sustainable Asana Yoga Foundation), believes the industry needs to confront an uncomfortable question: Are yoga teachers receiving enough education to understand how bodies actually move and how injuries occur?
For Adams, the concern is rooted in experience. After 25 years of training yoga teachers and more than two decades as a studio owner, she repeatedly encountered students who had been injured practicing yoga. She recalls traveling throughout North America with her yoga mat and frequently hearing the same story from strangers who discovered she was a yoga teacher. Someone had tried yoga and hurt a knee. Someone else developed shoulder or wrist pain.
Adams believes these experiences point toward a broader educational issue. “People often get injured because they are doing too much too soon,” she says. “The movement itself may not be inherently wrong. The body may simply not have had the opportunity to progressively adapt to the load and range of motion required.”
That principle sits at the center of Adams’ approach to teacher education. She argues that understanding anatomy by memorizing muscles and bones is insufficient. Teachers need to understand biomechanics, movement mechanics, functional assessment, progression, and the ways tissues respond to changing demands.
SAYF was created around that philosophy. Its online education focuses on anatomy, human movement mechanics, and reducing the risk of yoga-related injury, with the broader goal of helping students sustain their practice long enough to experience yoga’s psychological and personal benefits.
Adams is particularly concerned about how yoga teacher education has evolved. She believes the expansion of online training following COVID-19 has raised important questions about consistency, mentorship, and whether graduates are genuinely prepared to teach bodies in motion. She argues that traditional teacher development involved a sustained relationship with an experienced teacher who could determine when a student was ready to teach.
“If I could change one thing about the yoga teacher training industry, I would strengthen the mentoring aspect,” Adams says. “Traditionally, a teacher worked closely with a student and eventually recognized when that person was ready to teach. That relationship creates accountability and helps ensure that someone is genuinely prepared before stepping in front of a class.”
For Adams, preparation also requires teachers to reconsider how they communicate. Her concept of progressive cueing allows students with different abilities, ages, and ranges of motion to participate simultaneously. Rather than demonstrating an advanced posture and identifying an alternative for those unable to perform it, teachers can progressively introduce movement and give students permission to remain at the level that appropriately challenges them.
“A high-quality teacher is looking around the room, noticing what is needed and teaching in a way that allows everybody to feel successful,” she says. “Everyone should feel that they have a place to be and that they are being challenged at the appropriate level.”
This approach reflects Adams’ deeper understanding of yoga itself. She argues that Western culture has often emphasized intensity, immediate results, and increasingly demanding physical practices, while yoga’s philosophical traditions emphasize presence and awareness.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about yoga is that yoga is exercise,” Adams says. “Yoga philosophy asks us to become present enough to see more clearly, trust ourselves and broaden our perspective. The physical practice can support that process, but yoga is ultimately concerned with how we experience our body, mind, and life.”
Her work also extends beyond the yoga class through myofascial education. Adams incorporates postural assessment, functional movement patterning, breathwork, and gentle foam-roller techniques to help practitioners develop a more comprehensive understanding of movement. SAYF’s broader educational offerings include a myofascial education pathway designed to deepen practitioners’ understanding of the body and movement.
Adams sees this advanced education as both a professional development opportunity and a response to a longstanding economic challenge. Highly educated yoga professionals can struggle to translate their expertise into sustainable careers. She believes greater skills in assessment, movement, and individualized instruction can create opportunities for more specialized one-on-one services.
Her philosophy begins with the whole person. Adams frequently starts with the feet and considers how movement patterns travel through the kinetic chain. She encourages practitioners to examine relationships among the feet, ankles, knees, hips, pelvis, spine, and shoulders while also considering the nervous system and individual movement history.
“That is what I want an instructor to learn above everything else,” Adams says. “How to work with a whole person. We can become so focused on whether an alignment is right or wrong that we lose sight of the individual in front of us. The real question is how that person is functioning through movement.”
For Adams, biomechanics and yoga philosophy belong in the same conversation. Greater physical understanding can create the conditions for a more attentive practice, while yoga’s philosophical principles can shape how that knowledge is applied.
If yoga is going to continue being positioned as a practice capable of supporting health, resilience and longevity, Adams believes teacher education must evolve accordingly. Demonstrating poses is only one part of teaching. Understanding bodies, communicating effectively, progressing movement responsibly and recognizing individual differences are equally important.
Her challenge to the industry is ultimately straightforward: better education can produce better teachers, and better teachers can help more people experience yoga as a sustainable lifelong practice.
“Yoga should give people a deeper relationship with themselves,” Adams says. “If we want people to stay with the practice long enough to discover everything yoga can offer, then we have a responsibility to teach them in a way that respects the body, respects the individual and makes lasting practice possible.”