How Can I Become A RYT500?

At Yoga Alliance Professionals, the membership levels celebrate your hours of experience as well as your training hours.

While we do not have an 'RYT500' designation, we have membership levels such as Experienced Yoga Teacher and Senior Yoga Teacher. You can learn more about our designation requirements and career path here.

We are automatically informed when you are eligible to upgrade your level based on your graduation date and hours. When this happens, we'll email you with upgrade instructions. Make sure to keep your hours updated.

It's also worth noting that we include all of your additional training hours when you move up our career path. So whether you completed a 40-hour or 300-hour course, you can put this towards your upgrade. You can find all the details about CPD and training hours here.

300 hour and 500 hour courses are what we would categorise as ‘Further Training’ courses. They are designed for yoga teachers to help them develop their skills and knowledge. The concept is from Yoga Alliance USA, with the idea that someone who has completed a 200 hour teacher training course can go on to do a 300 hour advanced training and then the school can give them a 500 hour certificate (accumulating the 200 and 300 hours). Yoga Alliance then provide them a designation of RYT 500 (Registered Yoga Teacher).

We (YAP) do not operate under this framework. A RYT500 is categorised as an ‘intermediate teacher’ by YA, however they could have done no teaching whatsoever, and only 500 hours of training.

Under our system, members can be either a Yoga Teacher, Experienced Yoga Teacher or a Senior Yoga Teacher. They can move along this career path based on both their teaching experience and further training they have completed.

We encourage shorter, more niche Further Training courses.We encourage this because it is cheaper and more accessible (shorter time) for the students, but more importantly it encourages teachers to do training in specific areas (rather than generic further training), which ultimately allows them to teach classes in more specific areas or teach certain audiences and become known as a specialist in these areas.

We recommend that you offer shorter Further Training courses in subjects that can help your students gain specific knowledge in an area so that they can they say they are trained in x,y,z (for example Yin or Sports, arm balances)