Why, Ironically, Teaching Yoga Can be Stressful – If You Lack Insurance

As a yoga teacher, you will naturally want to instil peacefulness in your protégés. However, the yoga-teaching business is fraught with risks that can put your career on ice if you aren’t careful. There’s plenty of scope for things to go wrong, especially when teaching people unfamiliar with yoga. A good teacher of yoga should clearly explain to their students how to practice the discipline safely. However, a student could still misinterpret your instructions, over-extend themselves, or forget to let you know that they have medical conditions endangering their safety on the yoga mat. As a result of all of this, you could be sued – even if you weren’t negligent, Yoga Alliance warns. For that reason, you could be landed with legal fees to pay even if you ultimately fight off the need to pay compensation. Losing equipment vital for your classes could also financially hold you back. It’s clear, then, that the Zen-like state you encourage in your students probably shouldn’t extend to your own attitude to sourcing insurance for your yoga-teaching activities. Here, you need to be on the alert – and in this article, we will go through several important reasons why.

Don’t underestimate the risks of practising yoga

If you are thoroughly experienced in various matters of yoga, you probably think you don’t need reminding exactly what can go wrong when good practice is neglected in this area. Nonetheless, you might actually need to be reminded of those risks if you remain nonchalant about insurance. According to an estimate mentioned by the global yoga school YogaFit, over 5,000 people pick up yoga-related injuries yearly. That could still be a relatively conservative figure, too, with many people receiving chiropractic visits and massages to alleviate yoga-induced pain. As you endeavour to refine your methods in yoga-teaching, you could inadvertently run even greater risks of causing injury in your followers. Even if your students manage poses without injury, one of them could still have an accident through other means at your yoga studio, and subsequently decide to sue. All of this is beginning to sound like a concoction of seriously stress-spurring proportions – and that’s before considering the possibility of unscrupulous types stealing your studio’s equipment. Such equipment could be rendered unusable due to accidental damage, too. Worrying possibilities like these are signs that you ought to practice what you preach by instilling relaxation in yourself. You could more easily do that by getting in touch with us here at Fitness Gold for yoga teacher insurance, including various covers that you can receive automatically or optionally.

Public liability cover – the backbone of a yoga teacher insurance policy

If you have run many other businesses, you might already be familiar with public liability cover. You certainly shouldn’t assume it not to be an important inclusion of a yoga teacher insurance policy. This would be the case whether you teach privately or in a studio – your own or someone else’s. Of course, a student getting injured in your class is a worst-case scenario that you would ideally be sufficiently diligent to avoid. However, it’s impossible to wholly eliminate the risk of this arising. After all, many people might arrive at your classes with little or zero experience of yoga. It doesn’t help that particular yoga ‘asanas’ – ‘asana’ being a word for a body posture used in yoga – require the body to be moved in unorthodox ways. This leaves worryingly large potential for mistakes to be made – but if they are, public liability cover could help to ease any anguish. Many yoga teachers do not generate sufficient money to pay entirely for lawsuit costs – potentially including a compensation payout – out of their own pocket. For this reason, if public liability cover pays these costs instead, you could avert serious financial difficulty – possibly even bankruptcy.

Don’t assume that a studio will already cover you for public liability

Making this assumption could be a hugely costly mistake, as studios usually expect teachers to bring their own liability insurance with them. Even if a studio where you work does have liability insurance, you shouldn’t immediately believe it will protect you too, as this does not always apply. If you’re a teacher still looking for work at a yoga studio, holding your own liability cover can make it much easier for you to secure that work. With many yoga teachers working at multiple locations, liability cover that follows you wherever you teach can be hugely beneficial. For your convenience, we include public liability as an automatic cover with every insurance policy that we offer for yoga teachers. The other three automatic covers provided are products liability, malpractice cover and financial loss, but we also offer optional covers from which you can choose.

Take a cautious approach to make sure you get the right policy

Here at Fitness Gold, we don’t treat yoga teacher insurance as a standard, uniform product. As we know that insurance needs can differ between yoga teachers, we allow our customers to tailor their policies to especially effectively suit them. This leaves you with crucial decisions to make… It’s easy to apply for a quote for us; you just need to click through to our yoga teacher insurance page and then the red ‘Get a Quote’ button, before going through the provided online forms. However, we call on you to be thoroughly informative about the cover you seek and need. To that end, you should take careful account of the specific kind of yoga you teach, as yoga equipment seller Gaiam advocates. You shouldn’t deem it a foregone conclusion that any yoga teacher insurance policy will cover all styles of yoga, as new styles are regularly introduced and are sometimes difficult to categorise as either yoga or medicine; think Acu-Yoga or Naam Yoga Therapy. Still, you can rest assured that if you are uncertain on any point, we can address your concerns. Don’t hesitate to give us a ring on 020 8655 0444 with any questions that you may have about this particular strand of insurance.