Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher

60. Teaching Yoga on Video—What I Learned the Hard Way

• Sage Rountree • Episode 60

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I've been creating yoga video content since the DVD era—and I've made just about every mistake you can make along the way. From losing the rights to my own videos to stress-recording live classes while trying to serve paying students, my journey with video has been full of hard-won lessons.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on 20+ years of creating yoga videos. I'll share what worked, what didn't, and the one mistake I will never make again. Whether you're thinking about recording your first workshop video or building an entire online library, this episode will save you years of trial and error.

You'll learn my biggest regrets (hello, contract nightmares), the "two masters" problem of recording live classes, how to start with minimal equipment, and which platforms actually work for yoga teachers. I'll also share why I didn't pivot online during the pandemic—and why that decision was right for my studio.

Teaching yoga on video can be one of the most sustainable, scalable revenue streams for yoga teachers. But you need to know what you're getting into first. Let me help you avoid the mistakes that cost me time, money, and peace of mind.

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:

And come explore my mentorship program, my Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education workshops and 300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at ...

Can I tell you something? I've been creating yoga video content since the age of DVDs. Yes, DVDs. Those shiny discs that now live in the same nostalgic category as flip phones and dial up internet. And in all those years from recording my first athlete's guide to yoga DVD, to managing a library of over 140 videos in my yoga class prep station Today, I have made just about every mistake you can make when it comes to teaching yoga on camera. I have served two masters, the camera. And the paying students in the room and felt like I was failing both. I've lost the rights to my own work because I couldn't find a contract. I've been so stressed by livestream technology that I actively avoided pivoting online during the pandemic, even when everyone else was doing it. And yes, I've had to pull a Taylor Swift and rerecord my own sequences because I couldn't get my original videos back. But here's what else I've learned. Teaching yoga on video. Whether it's live online classes or prerecorded content can be one of the most scalable sustainable revenue streams for yoga teachers. It can reach students who would never walk into your physical studio. It can become passive income that works for you while you sleep, and you don't need thousands of. Dollars in equipment to get started, though, I'll tell you exactly what I wish I'd known before. I spent money in all the wrong places. So today I'm pulling back the curtain on my entire journey with video yoga, the disasters, the breakthroughs, the technology, the platforms, and the one thing I will never, ever do again. If you've been thinking about creating online yoga content, whether it's a single workshop video, or a full membership library, this episode is going to save you years of trial and error. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential, the secrets of becoming a great yoga teacher. In the last episode, we discussed how important it is to video record yourself for self-assessment, for your own evolution as a teacher. Today let's talk about recording video meant for others to watch. Let me take you back to where it all started for me. This is not my first podcast. My first podcast was called Sage Yoga Training, and it was a slideshow version of yoga for athletes sequences to practice after your workout, each lasted somewhere between five and 15 minutes. There was a still photograph and I recorded voiceover talking people through the poses. So that was even pre-video. My first yoga video was a DVD called The Athlete's Guide to Yoga, which accompanied my first book by the same name and I have to give credit where it's due. The DVD format was heavily influenced by Shiva Rea's DVD work. Shiva's d vds had a brilliant matrix menu system where you could choose different segments and play them in. Any order you wanted, that completely shaped how I think about yoga sequencing in chunks, which eventually became the foundation for my book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing. Here's what I did wisely from the very beginning recording that DVDI recorded the live action with no sound. We had an assistant offscreen calling out poses and actions so that my two models and I could demonstrate with some kind of synchronicity. Then I went back later and laid over the voice. This is something I would still recommend to this day as you build your comfort with video recording. Don't try to get the video and the audio perfect. At the same time, record your movement first, then add your audio later. It takes so much pressure off the Athlete's Guide to Yoga DVD had three main segments. One for base season focused on building strength, one for build season, focused on maintaining flexibility and one for peak season focused on recovery and restorative yoga. Each had subsegments like sun salutations, moon salutations, a legs up the wall series. And athletes could mix and match depending on where they were in their training cycle by using that DVD matrix menu. A few years later, a local company, and I'm not going to name them for reasons that will become clear in a moment, asked me to help them launch their online yoga channel as a founding partner. They would provide my studio carbo yoga company with video equipment, and I would provide them with a certain number of videos. Each month they would edit, upload, and sell them either on demand or by subscription. It seemed like a sweet deal and for a long while it was. I was sponsored by prAna Clothing at the time, and they provided the outfits for all my video shoots, both for the athletes DVD, and for these new online classes. They would outfit everyone with clothes and mats. It felt very professional. But here's where things got complicated. I was recording my live classes at the studio at least once a week and sometimes more. We would list on the studio schedule that the class would be filmed, put the word camera in parentheses so students knew what they were signing up for, and we blocked off part of the room so it was clear what was on camera and what was off limits. Still, I felt like I was serving two masters. I had the camera to think about the framing, the angles, making sure I was demonstrating clearly for the camera. And I also had these paying students in the room who deserved my full attention. It was incredibly stressful. I was always way happier when I staged my own class or workshop specifically for recording with no live students present or with people I had invited to model in exchange for giving them the clothing they wore. Because then I could just focus on creating good video content without worrying that I was short-changing the people in the room. Then came the live stream experiment. The company wanted to try live streaming classes, which meant even more things could go wrong. We needed the internet bandwidth to be strong in order to deliver a decent picture. We needed bright lights, which completely killed the relaxed yoga vibe and the remote microphone I was using picked up interference from some other equipment in the building. So I never knew if the audio would hold or if we'd lose the video mid class, and I would have to have all the students turn their phones off or put them in airplane mode. It was a lot of work. The upside of all of this is that the videos were pushed directly to my Facebook business page, where my students from around the world could watch them. And they are still available as part of my yoga class prep station membership. So these files live on, and I'm glad that I can share them. But the process of creating them incredibly stressful. I did it for maybe nine months and then I was done. Which brings me to the pandemic. When COVID hit in 2020, I was one of the few yoga studio owners who did not want to pivot online. I already had a whole library of recorded classes available. There were several from the other teachers at my studio. I had my online courses for yoga teachers. I had a separate video series called Core Strength for Real People that I had recorded using my phone by myself and uploaded to Vimeo on demand where it still sells today. I knew that pivoting an entire brick and mortar yoga studio online would be a nightmare of tech support, both for the teachers and for the students, and all of that tech support would fall on me. I knew the stress of seeing yourself on video, the stress of recording yourself, the entire production process. I didn't want to introduce that into the teacher student relationship during an already super stressful time. Also relevant. At the time the pandemic hit, we were still operating at the studio on a pay to play model. We sold class passes, single class five, 10, or 20 class packs, not memberships. My business partner lease and I had inherited the structure when we took over the studio in 2010 and it wasn't broke, so we didn't fix it. When the pandemic hit, we did not have a base of members who were auto-renewing monthly payments. We just paused everyone's class pass and waited for the world to reopen, which it eventually did slowly. Do you remember taping off spaces in the room for social distancing? We had room for nine students. We taught in masks, but for many of the students, that weekly yoga class was the only time they spent. Live around other people during those early pandemic months. And it was so meaningful to us as teachers that people would spend their chit, and I say chit, meaning both their social chip, um, uh, their poker chip as it were, but also their chit, CHIT, their energy, their life force on coming to take a live class with us. During this time, we did record a few more classes for that online platform. By this point, they were sending a wonderful videographer with a really nice camera, a fantastic microphone, a good lighting setup, and the knowledge to create high quality video. It was just the videographer, the teacher, and the recording. No live students in the room. That reduced so much of the pressure. But here's where the story takes another turn. Sometime after the pandemic, the company changed hands. It got bought by a new corporation. It was no longer the locally based outfit I knew and loved and had an existing relationship with, and I had some contract issues with them. Actually, let me be more specific. I couldn't find my original contract and they said they couldn't find it either on their end. I was pretty sure that contract gave me the rights to get my videos back at any point, but without the paperwork, I had no proof. My videos were essentially held hostage. If you know anything about the music industry, you know this story. Taylor Swift famously had to rerecord all of her original albums as Taylor's version because she didn't own the master recordings. That's exactly what I had to do. I took some of my best sequences and rerecorded them completely on my own so I could sell those recordings without any legal issues. This is the thing I will never do again: give away all the rights to my videos to another entity, and I will absolutely, definitely never lose copies of a contract again. So what happened next? I started recording everything myself. Here's why I'm telling you all of this. If you are a yoga teacher, thinking about creating video content, whether it's for a membership library or an online course, or a single workshop, or even just live streaming classes on Zoom, Google Meet, or a similar platform, you need to understand what you're getting into, not to scare you away, but to help you avoid the mistakes I made. First, let's talk about ownership. When you create content, you need to know who owns it. If you're partnering with a platform, read the contract, keep a copy. Better yet, have a lawyer read it. Understand what rights you're giving away and what rights you're keeping. Can you get your videos back? Can you sell them elsewhere? What happens if the company gets sold? These aren't hypothetical questions. This is exactly what happened to me. Second, let's talk about the two masters problem. If you're recording live classes with paying students in the room, you need to be honest with yourself about whether you can serve both audiences well, some teachers can do it. I couldn't. I was too stressed about the camera and the production quality to be fully present with the students in front of me, if that resonates with you. Consider staging your recordings separately, either with models or by yourself, demonstrating. Third, the technology learning curve is real. Setting up cameras, managing lighting, dealing with audio, editing the footage. These are all skills that take time to learn, and if you're trying to teach live while also managing a live stream on your own without support, the cognitive load is enormous. Be realistic about what you can handle, and don't be afraid to start simpler than you think you need to. But here's the thing. Despite all these challenges, I am so glad I stuck with video. Right now I have over 140 videos in my yoga class prep station. They range from super short, quick transitions under a minute to full two hour classes from my yoga teacher trainings, some of those original live stream recordings. Some come from my live teacher trainings over the years, and most of them are just me and the camera. I set them up myself. I record them myself. I edit them myself. I upload them myself, and I sell them myself. That last part is key. I sell them myself. I use Vimeo to host the video files, then embed them into my membership platform in the software called Circle. That means I keep the lion's share of the money. I don't have a corporate middleman taking a cut or holding my content hostage. And these videos work for me and serve my students while I sleep. They reach students I would never meet in person. They provide value to teachers who are learning how to sequence classes. They demonstrate every sequence in my book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing. They're a resource for my Mastering The Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship students, the proof of concept for teachers who take my Teaching Yoga to Athletes Training or my fundamentals of Teaching yin or fundamentals of Teaching restorative or fundamentals of teaching balance courses, and they are the bulk of the yoga class Prep Station membership. In other words, yoga isn't just a nice to have for my business anymore. It is foundational. And here's what I've learned about what makes teaching Yoga on video sustainable. It's not about having the fanciest equipment or the most polished production. It's about solving a specific problem for a specific person, which brings me to probably the most important piece of advice I can give you. If you are thinking about creating video content, here's how I'd recommend you start. Based on everything I learned the hard way. Tip one, start with a workshop, not a class library. Don't try to build a 100 video membership library on day one. Instead, create one workshop that solves one specific problem for one specific person. Here's what I mean. Instead of gentle yoga or flow class or chair yoga, which are generic and hard to find through search, create something like yoga for A DHD focus, yoga after spring gardening, yoga for tourist season service workers, or even yoga for surface pattern designers. The more specific, the better, because when someone is searching for that exact problem, they're way more likely to find you and buy your reasonably priced solution. And worst case scenario, you have this one video that you can share with your friends, your family, and students from your live classes. But the real beauty of starting with a workshop is that it has natural search optimization built in. People are actively looking for solutions to specific problems. If you can solve that problem with yoga, and you can teach them how in a 30, 45, 60, or 90 minute workshop you have got yourself a digital product. If you want help with this, and I mean step by step handholding help, I have a resource called the Workshop Workbook. It's a $57 offer that gives you literally everything you need to get your workshop out of your head and into the world. I'll help you figure out how to place it at a yoga studio or how to produce it for sale online. It's the exact process I use and it works whether you're teaching in person or on video. Here's tip two. Keep your tech costs low at first. One of the biggest barriers to getting started with video is the assumption that you need thousands of dollars in equipment. You don't. I have a YouTube video that walks you through both. Budget options for equipment and higher end options so that you can record and produce your yoga videos. I'll put that link in the show notes, but here's the short version. You can get started with a decent smartphone, a very basic tripod, good natural lighting, and a quiet space. That's it. If you try to set up studio lighting in your living room, when you've never used video lights before, you're going to get frustrated and you're going to give up if you try to use a fancy microphone system. When you don't know how audio works, same thing. Start simple. Get comfortable in front of the camera. Use the $20 microphone that plugs straight into your phone. Learn how to edit basic footage. Then once the videos are selling and you're making money, you can reinvest some of those proceeds into upgrading your equipment. When I was ready to create my first big online course teaching Yoga to Athletes, which has been my signature course since 2012, I hired a videographer. His name was Napoleon Wright III, which is genuinely one of the best names I've ever heard. He is a lovely guy, and Napoleon came in with his SLR camera and a modest lighting set up like one or two panels. He was really good at using natural light the way a skilled photographer can. He recorded the live version of that five day, 40 hour teacher training. He edited the videos for me and he uploaded them into Vimeo. It was a major project, and yes, it was a staggering amount of money to hire him, but it paid off. That course has been selling since 2012. I just rerecorded the videos. It's freshly updated for fall of 2025, and I'd love to see you in it. Okay. Later on when I recorded sequencing yoga classes from welcome to Closing, professionalism for Yoga Teachers, classroom Management and Safety for Yoga Teachers, I hired Napoleon again, and this time we also have brought in a sound technician. Joe. It felt very much like we were on a reality TV show. They had the light panels. Joe had the big boom mic, and we would run around the room with the camera as folks asked questions, but the teacher trainees said. They got used to it pretty quickly and they seem pretty, um, natural on camera. These courses actually exist as part of the pantry inside of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, my mentorship membership. So when you come through MMM, you can have a peek at them. There's actually a really sweet story from when we were recording. Professionalism for yoga teachers. A lot of what we cover in that course applies to freelancers in any field, setting your rates, knowing your value, accounting, that kind of thing. Napoleon and Joe were paying such close attention that at the end of the day when we were talking about pricing, they both said, wow, we learned so much. We need to go raise our rates right after this. So yeah, hiring professionals can be worth it when you're ready, but you don't have to start there. Here's tip three, understand your platform options. This is where things can get overwhelming fast. So let me simplify it for you. There are a lot of platforms out there for hosting and selling yoga videos. I'm not going to do a deep dive on each one. That's more of a YouTube style answer, but I will tell you the categories and some names to research. If you want to teach live classes and manage bookings, you can use Zoom paired with a scheduling tool like a Calendly Acuity, even Google Calendar. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's effective. If you want to create structured online courses, look at platforms like Teachery, teachable, Kajabi, or think. These are built specifically for course creation and have features like quizzes, drip content, integrated payments. Kajabi is the most expensive and also the most all-in-one. Teachable is more affordable and user-friendly. Think if it is similar to Teachable, but with no transaction fees. Now if you want to build a video on demand library with a Netflix style feel, check out, use screen, or Marvelous. Marvelous, which used to be called nama Stream, is specifically designed for yoga teachers and wellness creators. It supports live classes, on demand libraries, courses, and one-on-one coaching all in one platform. One of the major platforms you could consider is also specific for yoga teachers. It's called Offering Tree. One of my mentees, Nyisha Rylander, who you heard on a previous episode of this podcast, loves Offering Tree. It's another yoga teacher specific platform, but it also handles websites, sales pages, memberships, video libraries. I have an affiliate link for Offering Tree that I'll put for you in the show notes. For hosting the actual video files, I use Vimeo. if you're using Vimeo's on demand, you can sell a video library right through them. They take 30% and give creators 70%, which is a pretty fair deal. Plus, people who want to cancel a Vimeo subscription go directly to Vimeo. They don't come through you. That saves you from having to do your own tech support, which can become incredibly onerous. I embed my Vimeo videos into Circle, which is my membership platform. If you're in the zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, that's where we are meeting for our live calls, for our chats, uh, for all the resources that I share with you there. And if you aren't in the zone, come on in, come to comfort zone yoga.com or the link in the show notes. Now, circle isn't specifically built for video libraries, but it. Works out just fine for my needs, and it has so many other wonderful features. It lets me combine the video library with community features, live calls and course content all in one place. My point is this, you have options. Don't get paralyzed trying to pick the perfect platform. Pick the one that fits your budget and your needs right now, and know that you can always migrate later if you need to. The most basic way you can do this is to put a video on YouTube as unlisted or private. Ask your students to pay you, and then share the link with them. Here's tip four. Protect your rights from day one. If you partner with any platform or company to distribute your videos, read the contract, keep a copy. Understand what you are agreeing to. Can you get your videos back? If you leave, can you sell them on other platforms? What happens if the company gets acquired? These are not paranoid questions. This is basic business protection. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me. Okay, and tip five, focus on serving one person at a time. Whether you are teaching live to a camera or recording prerecorded content. Remember, yoga is always about the student. It is not about you as the teacher. If you are recording a live class with paying students in the room and you're stressed about the camera, you are not serving the students well. If you're staging a workshop just for the camera and you're obsessing about your hair or your outfit, or whether you sound smart, you are not serving the future. Students who will watch that video, get clear on who you're serving and what problem you're solving for them, then make the video about that. Everything else is just logistics. Teaching yoga on video, whether it's livestream classes, prerecorded workshops, or full membership libraries can be one of the most powerful ways to scale your teaching, to reach more students and to create sustainable income streams. But it's not without its challenges. There is a learning curve with the technology. There's a cognitive load if you're trying to teach live while managing production. There are legal and financial considerations around who owns your content and how you're distributing it. I made a lot of mistakes over the years. I gave away rights I shouldn't have given away. I stressed myself out trying to serve two audiences at once. I invested in equipment before I knew what I actually needed, but I also created something that works for me now, a library of videos that serve my students, that support my courses and that generate income while I focus on other parts of my business. If you are ready to get started, my advice is this. Start small and start specific. Create one workshop that solves one problem for one type of person. Keep your text simple at first. Protect your rights and remember that the students watching your videos are the heroes of their own yoga journey. You are just there to guide them. If you want step-by-step help creating your first workshop, check out my workshop workbook. It's $57 and it walks you through the entire process from idea to delivery. Whether you're teaching in person or online for ongoing support with sequencing, pedagogy, and building your teaching confidence, join me in mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing my mentorship membership where we meet monthly work through real teaching challenges. And build sustainable yoga teaching careers. Together, we'll work together inside of, um, to get you the video library of your dreams and a concrete plan for making it happen. Finally, my entire movement library with 140 videos and counting lives in the yoga class Prep Station. Come check it out and plan your classes in under 20 minutes a month. For now, thank you for listening to Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time.

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Sage Rountree

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