Before and After Yoga Teacher Training

August 13, 2015 1:27 PM

I'm starting Yoga Teacher Training in a month or so. My husband, who is a numbers guy, thinks that it would be fun to take do some comparisons of pre-YTT and post-YTT. Here's some ideas that we had, but we'd like more...

Before-and-after

1. weight
2. that awful presidential fitness test where you sit with your legs straight and lean forward as far as you can, trying to touch your toes and beyond
3. how long can I hold a plank
4. blood pressure
5. money in my wallet (up front cost of program minus all the classes I would have had to pay for, had I not been in YTT...I do expect it to be negative)
6. picture of me smiling beforehand and afterward
7. Rorschach tests

what else?
I know that there will be many intangibles: a sense of well-being, ability to meditate for more than a few minutes at a time, etc. I'm looking for tangible ways to compare pre-yoga training to post-yoga training.

I'm also open to tangibles that might require a bit of time to gather, such as "how many times do I wake up at night" before and post YTT. I don't start the classes until October so there's time to do some research.

posted by Elly Vortex to Grab Bag (15 answers total)

kinda obvious, but resting heartrate. another thing my gym does is something with a heart meter and a fitness cycle (i guess it measures aerobic capacity). is there some other way to measure that?

if you want to go full nerd you could try measuring your volume (perhaps by getting into a full bath and measuring the overflow in some way). that plus weight would give you density and so, vaguely, change in body fat.
posted by andrewcooke at 1:36 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Have you considered picking up some kind of heart rate monitor? The Fitbit Surge will measure your heart rate 24 hours a day, and you could see how it changes over the course of the month.

It might be a bit harder to get good numbers, but it might be fun to weigh yourself before and after each training session?

How about body fat?
posted by gregr at 1:38 PM on August 13, 2015

Body measurements (neck, bicep, forearm, chest, abdomen, hips, thigh, calf). Can be used as estimate of bodyfat%.
posted by disconnect at 1:43 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ability to make or hold certain poses, particularly those challenging to you (some warrior poses, trichonasana, child's pose, pigeon, dancer or tree, head stand and handstand come to mind).
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 1:45 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Could you take before and after pictures in some basic poses?
posted by moons in june at 1:48 PM on August 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

gregr's suggestion of the Fitbit with HRM is good, but if you don't care about the GPS/psuedo-smartwatch functions, the Fitbit Charge HR would save you $100.

I think if you film yourself going through a sequence you're comfortable with, then repeating it post-YTT might give you some really neat information about how your flow has changed, in addition to just seeing what you've learned about the poses.
posted by hollyholly at 1:49 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ability to do the splits, measuring the distance between your feet.
posted by HotToddy at 3:45 PM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Waist measurement is meant to be a pretty good proxy for heart health.
posted by kjs4 at 5:25 PM on August 13, 2015

Would you be willing to keep a daily journal recording a few things, rather than just before and after? If so, you might be able to measure the "well-being" stuff by doing a scale of 1-10 daily on metrics like anxiety, happiness, etc.

Also, the Fitbit watches will also measure the amount and restfulness of your sleep. So you could find out whether the training is helping you to sleep better.
posted by decathecting at 5:35 PM on August 13, 2015

blood pressure? even if it's low, it could drop a bit.
posted by dovesandstones at 7:51 PM on August 13, 2015

oops, sorry! you said that. resting and active pulse, before and after.
posted by dovesandstones at 7:53 PM on August 13, 2015

Response by poster: That's a great point, hal_c_on. I'm looking forward to the changes in mind-body-and-spirit, but particularly those in mind and spirit. That's why I was thinking of Rorschach tests. Other than that, I'm kind of stumped about how to tangibly show progress. Maybe it's impossible!

I do like the idea of taking pictures of myself in poses over the course of the year. My husband is on board with that, too!
posted by Elly Vortex at 7:11 AM on August 14, 2015

How long you can do a pose for is easy to measure, but how *well* you can do the pose is IMHO more important. It's harder to graph, but hopefully after a bunch of training, your alignment will be visibly improved.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 8:00 PM on August 14, 2015

I have fairly recently completed teacher training, and this question is kind of making my head explode.

I'm not quite sure how I would have performed on those indicators, but they were definitely not at all indicative of my teacher training experience.

For instance, I gained a bit of weight, because my "make and eat healthy food" time was now dedicated to hours and days of teacher training. My physical practice was already pretty strong, so the only changes I saw were ones where knowledge (rather than strength or flexibility) made a difference. My physical practice actually suffered during TT-- we were spending so much time reading, learning anatomy, sequencing, learning philosophy, and so on that the hours of physical practice/week went down from my average. And it was so intense that it took a while after TT was over to get my practice back in gear. In my TT (a 5 month course), physical practice was maybe 15-30% of the time, lower end at the beginning, higher at the end.

I'm not sure that Yoga is easily quantifiable. Health results of physical practice are, but if you're going into teacher training, you're probably at a point in your practice that you've already seen most of the changes you'd expect to see.

Let's see, if I try to put my brain into qualifying data mode, here's what changed:
- how many minutes can I meditate for (I didn't have a strong dedicated meditation practice before TT).
- how many hours can I sit on the floor before I get a serious backache
- how long of a vinyasa sequence can I do from memory, mirrored, without freaking out and looking at my notes
- how many muscles of the body can I name?
- how well can I physically and mentally perform without sleep, when injured, or ill? (Not sure how you'd measure that.) I got way better at just grinding through than I previously was-- I still have insomnia, but now I can teach/do yoga on little sleep.
- if someone gives you a peak pose, how many poses can you name to safely sequence a class to it?
- ooh, ooh, a good one: how is your time management? Have your husband give you a random topic and time you talking about it for 1, 3, 5, maybe 10 minutes. How close to the exact time can you get without looking at a clock? (The people in my class with teaching and public speaking experience wiped the floor with the rest of us.)

Good luck with your TT, and enjoy! And please, please come back and update after you are done. I am super interested in how you perceive this thread after TT.
posted by instamatic at 4:31 AM on August 15, 2015

Vocabulary (Sanskrit to English, Sanskrit to pose, English to pose, and reverse for all of those, plus probably anatomy depending on what your training is like).

And agree with instamatic, that your personal physical practice may suffer while you do training. All of my favorite yoga teachers aren't getting a great workout, they're too busy teaching.
posted by anaelith at 3:31 AM on August 17, 2015