The complaint I hear more than any other is some version of: there are too many yoga teachers round here.
And the question that usually follows is how to stand out. For me that’s the wrong one — standing out among a hundred people doing the same thing is a losing game however good you are. The better question is who you’re standing in front of.
And usually there are — we hear it from teachers in every part of the country, and the numbers back them up. If you teach restorative in a decent-sized town, there may be a hundred people offering something a prospective student would struggle to tell apart from yours. Same class descriptions, same photographs, same evenings.
For me the interesting thing is that the way out isn’t teaching anything different.
When to use this
- When your area feels saturated and your classes aren’t filling
- If you’re competing on price, or thinking about it
- Before launching a course, a workshop or a new slot
- If you’ve ever been told to “find your niche” and had no idea what that meant
The golfers
Here’s the example I’d always come back to.
Golfers wreck their backs. Their shoulders and necks too, because they rotate hard, repeatedly, usually without warming up and never stretching out afterwards. Tiger Woods, arguably the best there’s been, was very nearly finished by his back.
Yoga is close to a perfect answer to that. And almost no golfer has ever considered it, because yoga isn’t a thing golfers think about.
Now: if you offered yoga for golfers, how many other teachers within ten miles are doing that?
You’d be teaching more or less what you already teach. Same sequences, same principles, more attention to rotation and hips. You probably are teaching the same stuff you normally teach. It’s just the way it’s presented.
Speak to what they actually want
This is the bit that decides whether it works.
Golfers are competitive. Many of them are not remotely interested in wellbeing, and they’d wince at the word. What they want is to take a couple of shots off their score, play without seizing up on the twelfth, and beat the friend they’ve been losing to since 2019.
So the offer says that. Eight weeks. Move better, hurt less, play the back nine like the front nine. Nothing about chakras. Everything about golf.
Same teacher, same craft, presented in the language of the person you want.
Where to look for yours
Not a list to pick from. A test to run.
Who does yoga genuinely help, that would never think of yoga? Runners with tight hips. Cyclists with locked thoracic spines. Nurses on twelve-hour shifts. Hairdressers standing all day. Rugby clubs. Choirs, for breath. New dads nobody has ever offered anything to.
Is there a group near you that gathers already? A club, a team, a workplace, a society. They meet, they have a committee, they have somewhere to put a poster. That’s ten conversations instead of a thousand impressions.
Can you speak their language without faking it? If you’ve never held a golf club, golfers will know inside a minute. Pick a group you have some genuine thread to.
Does it survive the honesty test? You’re not inventing a specialism you don’t have. You’re pointing an existing one at people who need it and don’t know.
What this costs you
It narrows you, and that’s uncomfortable. It feels like turning people away.
In practice it does the opposite — a specific offer travels, because the golfer tells the other golfers, and a general one doesn’t, because there’s nothing to tell. You keep every class you already run. This sits alongside.
Action steps
- List three groups near you that yoga would genuinely help and who’d never consider it.
- Pick the one you have some real connection to.
- Write the offer in their words, not yours. No yoga vocabulary at all.
- Find where that group already gathers, and speak to one person there.
Related resources
- The words people actually search for
- Where students actually come from
You might run through all three and decide none of them are for you, and carry on exactly as you are. That’s a fair answer. But it’s worth deciding it, rather than assuming a crowded town is something that happens to you.