Hands on Babies Accredited Baby Yoga Instructor Training Course

The baby yoga course is divided 23 distinct curriculum areas to ensure that you will possess all of the skills and knowledge required to teach baby yoga competently and confidently.  With over 100 tutorial videos, full session run-throughs and support materials for your parents, the Hands on Babies accredited course will provide you with everything you need to run really great parent facing sessions in baby yoga.

We have designed the course to be self-paced so you can start at any time you are ready and work through the curriculum at your pace.  If you're keen to get up and running it can be a very quick process from training to classes, or you can take your time and work through everything over a number of months - the choice is yours!

Once you have completed the training, received your Hands on Babies certification and obtained practice insurance (if you are intending to offer these sessions independently) you are the officially ready to start delivering your baby yoga sessions to parents.

Your Parent Facing Baby Yoga Sessions

Hands on Babies baby yoga is suitable for babies from 8 weeks old (babies need to have had their 6-8 week check) through to active walkers.  So the age ranging for babies in your sessions is wide – opening you up to a potentially larger market.

Yoga also makes a great addition to your baby massage provision, as you tend to find most people will participate in baby massage first with their younger babies and then graduate to baby yoga as their babies get a little older.  So offering baby yoga is a fantastic business opportunity as it does enable you to get lots of repeat business from your baby massage mums.

The training will enable you to run two different types of baby yoga sessions:

·       Younger Baby or Beginner Baby Yoga – for babies 8 weeks through to 20 weeks approximately

·       Older Baby or Advanced Baby Yoga – for babies who have completed the beginner course and are 20 + weeks old.

We will provide you with full session plans and parent facing hand-outs to deliver your classes over a 5-week course to parents for both the Beginner and Advanced sessions.  We will also show you have you can change the weekly structure if you wish to deliver as a 6 or even 7 week course if you prefer.

The training will also enable you to run group sessions, 1-2-1 sessions with more vulnerable families who do not want to participate in group sessions and targeted groups for people other than Mums (for example Dad only sessions or carer sessions).

Yoga offers some very positive additional benefits that we don’t see with just baby massage:

1) Extending contact with parents and babies - our baby yoga sessions work with babies a minimum of 8 weeks all the way up to 2 years. Unlike massage where the same routine is suitable for all ages, yoga is more age specific. Some of our poses are suitable for babies 8-20 weeks (our beginner moves), others are suitable for babies 20+ weeks onwards (our advanced moves). This enables instructors to offer much longer on-going points of contact with parents. For example the 5 week massage course could be offered in the very early months, followed by the 5 week beginner yoga course at 3 or 4 months followed by a 5 week advanced course for older babies. This is an excellent way of keeping mums and dads engaged with your services for an extended period of time.

2) Using the moro reflex - part of our yoga training teaches how we can work with our babies moro or startle reflex (in a very controlled way) to teach our babies about trust building, dealing with change and emotional self-reliance. All important factors in the development of our babies emotional bedrock capabilities.

3) Building core strength - our core focused moves (particularly our advanced baby yoga moves) work to build our babies core strength and improve head control. Without core strength and upper body strength our babies may experience delay in reaching many of the development milestones used to monitor our children’s development curve. By encouraging our babies to use core muscles and improve their head control we can begin to redress the balance of reduced tummy time (babies now spend very little time lying on their tummies) and the implications that this can have on babies development.

4) Diagonal co-ordination - our yoga moves teach our babies the important fundamental of diagonal co-ordination - how to move arms and legs in opposing directions. This skill can be very challenging for some babies to master particularly if they have any behavioural or development issues, but without this skill the basics of crawling and walking will be difficult to achieve.

5) Teaching our mums and dads to breathe - part of the yoga training focuses on helping our mums and dads to remain in control by using simple but very effective breathing techniques. Very often simply by focusing on our breathing and breath control we can maintain greater emotional balance and deal with the day to day challenges of parenthood in a calmer and more in control way. As part of the yoga training we also look at quick and simple techniques for dealing with stress at home and for remaining calm even in those difficult periods when stress and lack of sleep can impact on our parenting skills.