Budding yoga teachers who earn their credentials through increasingly popular online courses are putting students at risk, leading yoga practitioners say.
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Yoga teachers are demanding a national regulatory body to ensure all yoga studios offer standardised teacher training to students at a high level. Online yoga training courses - some with only a few face-to-face contact hours - are producing a wave of teachers lacking classroom experience.
Yoga Australia, one of the key national yoga bodies, said the 58 teacher training courses and five online courses registered with the organisation must contain a minimum of 65 per cent physical contact within the course hours.
''Trainees require face-to-face interaction with mentors or teacher trainers to supplement online training,'' Yoga Australia vice-president Suzanne Fletcher said. Without this, students could face ''health and physical risks''.
Poses most likely to cause injuries in yoga include balancing on your head supported by arms (headstands) and balancing on your shoulders (shoulder stand), an RMIT University report showed.
Yoga teacher Philip Goodwin, founder of BodyMindLife in Surry Hills, said he would not hire anyone who had trained only through an online course.
''Students are demanding more from their studios, and there needs to be higher standards set,'' Mr Goodwin said.
The yoga industry is unregulated, which could lead to more injuries and issues of liability, he said. Despite this, Mr Goodwin expects the growth of online yoga will continue.
One school offering online courses, Yoga Beautiful in Victoria, calls itself the ''premier Home Study Yoga Teacher Training Academy''. The founder, Jahne Hope-Williams, has taught her 18-month online course, priced at up to $2600, to nearly 500 students.
''It's certainly not a Mickey Mouse course,'' Ms Hope-Williams said.
A former student, now a yoga teacher, Katrina Dorward, said the 200-hour course allowed her to think ''very thoroughly'' about teaching.
Ms Dorward, from Mount Annan, met with Ms Hope-Williams three times during the course. She has since done an online yoga massage course with the school.
''Jahne sees inside our head. If we were face-to-face in a lesson, then there is only so much that comes across,'' Ms Dorward said. ''When we write on paper and online, it's my verbal cueing what I would say to the class.''
Ms Dorward also attended an additional weekly yoga class during the course which she paid for, and extra one-on-one lessons with another teacher to increase her contact hours.
Kieran O'Callaghan, who offers online theoretical components as part of his yoga teacher training courses, said safety came first.
''Unfortunately there are people teaching who have not had enough training in safety, and safety means you need to tune into the needs of others,'' said Mr O'Callaghan, the founder of the InSync Institute in Canberra.
According to figures from a report by the market research company IBIS World, there are 2709 yoga and Pilates businesses in Australia, which boasted a total of $967 million in revenue last year.
