Back to Basics: How Ki Yoga is Rethinking Teacher Training in Singapore

On audition days for yoga teachers at Ki Yoga in Singapore, the instructions are always the same. A prospective teacher steps into the studio, rolls out a mat and receives a precise brief from founder Jacqueline Soon:

Teach a 20-minute class.Begin with five minutes of grounding and pranayama.Include one set of sun salutations.End with two minutes of reclining poses.

“If you cannot ground me, you will not be able to ground my members,” she said. “I want to hear how you start a class, and I want to hear how you end one.”

Ki Yoga — a small, quietly beloved studio in Serangoon Gardens that just turned four recently — has built a reputation in the neighbourhood for being both beginner-friendly and grounded in thoughtful, attentive teaching. Now, after years of refining her hiring process and watching Singapore’s teacher-training market expand around her, Jacqueline — Jacq to her students — is launching something she has intentionally delayed since opening: the studio’s first yoga teacher training (YTT).

“I didn’t want to do a YTT just because every studio has one,” said Jacq, 40, who has been practising and teaching for over a decade. “I wanted to do it when I felt I had something meaningful to add.”

Why now? The timing, she said, came down to two shifts.

The first was happening inside the studio. Over the past year, long-time members began asking her questions that exceeded the boundaries of a 60-minute class: why certain poses preceded others, why a specific pranayama was chosen for that day, what a particular transition was meant to teach.

“They’re becoming curious about yoga outside of just poses,” she said. “And when these questions come, I get very excited. But class time is not enough to go into them.”

Six students — many of them regulars with no intention of becoming teachers — have already signed up.

“They want philosophy. They want context. They want to understand yoga as they age,” she said. “Not everyone is here for a career change. Some people just want more depth to their practice.”

Pique pose

The second shift Jacq noticed came from the other side of the room — the teachers.

As a studio owner, she regularly auditions new instructors. Over time, she began to see patterns that troubled her: an overemphasis on creative sequencing, a fixation on ending class with a peak pose, and a surprising disregard for time management.

“Almost every teacher tries to teach me an arm balance at the end during their auditions,” she said. “But they didn’t address the basic stuff.”

More concerning, she said, was the lack of connection with students. With few teachers working full-time and many juggling corporate jobs alongside teaching, relational skills often fall away.

“I like to know what my students do — whether they’re desk-bound, on their feet all day, or, like one student I remember clearly, a violinist,” she said. “Knowing these things tells you where their tightness or pain might be coming from.”

But many newer teachers, she said, come in, check their phones, teach, and leave.

“You can teach someone sequencing. But you cannot teach care if no one has ever told you it matters,” she said.

She believes this is partly a curriculum issue: a standard 200-hour YTT is so packed with philosophy, anatomy and sequencing theory that few programmes explicitly carve out time for relational skills.

“There’s no trainer who tells you, ‘You need to get to know your student,’” she said.

Mind the flow

When she described the “gaps” she saw in Singapore’s teacher-training landscape, two themes recur: alignment and modifications.

“Even though there are many YTTs in Singapore, there are very few that are truly alignment-based,” she said. “Most are vinyasa-focused. Even if they say they’re alignment-based, the sense I get is still very flow-driven.”

Her own first training was in traditional hatha yoga — the same daily two-and-a-half-hour practice, repeated for weeks, with meticulous alignment instruction.

“With that repetition, the poses were drilled into my head,” she said. “I don’t see that anymore. I want to bring some of that back.”

Ki Yoga’s three-month training, starting next month in February, won’t duplicate those hours, but it will apply the same philosophy. Trainees will meet on weekends. Once a month, they’ll be required to do a self-practice session: no teacher-led class, just an hour of moving alone.

“A lot of teachers cannot self-practise,” she said. “But traditionally, yoga is self-practice. I want to see how they explore their own bodies.”

Her manual includes extensive modifications, such as what to do when a student’s knee collapses in Warrior II, or how to adjust someone who cannot find the “ideal” stance.

“You must be able to guide your students to modify poses to suit their bodies,” she said. “I don’t see this addressed enough.”

For topics outside her expertise, she is bringing in specialists: her teacher Charat Singh, who will be broadcasting from the Himalayas to teach the trainees about the Yoga Sutras; Punam Rai, a kundalini kriya yoga teacher and yoga therapist, to teach koshas and chakras; and Ki Yoga instructor Catherine Tan to teach functional anatomy.

“I teach what I’m confident in,” she said. “For everything else, I get people who specialise.”

Shifting grounds

Part of Jacq’s motivation comes from observing how Singapore’s yoga landscape has changed.

“When I started practising, hot yoga was everywhere,” she said. “Then Ashtanga. Then flow. Then sound baths. Now it’s Pilates and HIIT.”

She said the industry has stabilised because the “sweat crowd” has migrated to other forms of fitness classes like spin and strength training. The people who remain in yoga tend to be those who appreciate its benefits beyond the physical.

This shift has given Ki Yoga a clear niche: welcoming true beginners.

“I need teachers who can teach someone who doesn’t know how to sit up straight or do cat-cow,” she said. “A lot of younger teachers don’t realise such beginners exist.”

She worries, too, about the rise of mass-market online YTTs offering international certificates over Zoom.

“You get a certificate, but what’s inside the certificate?” she asked. “How do you assess students if everything is online? Many graduates don’t teach because they’re not confident.”

Against this backdrop, her training emphasises something she thinks the industry risks losing: yoga’s essence.

“Yoga isn’t meant to defeat you. It’s meant to rejuvenate you,” she said.

Despite her concerns, Jacq remains optimistic about her work.

“I know yoga helps people,” she said. “Yoga is probably the only thing you can do no matter how old you are. Even if you’re 90 and cannot walk, you can sit down and breathe. You can do savasana. You can do something.”

And in a market saturated with quick certifications and trend-driven offerings, she believes there is still space — and need — for something slower, steadier and rooted.

“Good teaching starts the way every class at Ki Yoga does,” she said. “You ground yourself first. Everything else grows from there.”