This research was conducted in 2016 as part of the Experience Design MFA program at Miami University. Click here to view the full research report.
There is no legal training requirement in the United States in order to teach a yoga class, but most teachers complete a standard 200-hour training before they begin teaching. Basic trainings must cover a tremendous amount of information and have little time to spend on each subject. This is especially problematic for teaching anatomy, which most trainings spend less than 20 hours on. In order for yoga teachers to safely accommodate students with injuries in their classes, they must have a solid foundational understanding of anatomy and how to apply it to the alignment of yoga postures. Given the short amount of time spent on anatomy in teacher trainings, the teaching methods must be highly effective, incorporate application of knowledge learned and consider multiple learning styles.
Using Kolb’s learning styles as a model, I identified teaching methods and tools that would accommodate each of the four stages of the learning cycle: watching (reflective observation), feeling (concrete experience), thinking (abstract conceptualization) and doing (active experimentation). My process also involved exploring other theories of learning, as well as a wide variety of interactive teaching platforms, including videos, apps, digital textbooks and live workshops.
Yoganatomy is an app that uses augmented reality to enable real-time visualization while learning of anatomy. On a tablet device, teacher trainees use the app to augment their perception of the body of a person (such as another trainee) in front of them in real life. The app uses the camera function of the tablet to read the person’s body and create a 3D model of the form. It then overlays information such as muscle and skeletal systems on top of the form. Trainees can tap any area of the overlay to view the name of the body part or to read more about its purpose and function. The overlays move with the body in view, allowing the trainee to see anatomy in motion.
The advantage of this tool is that it uses real bodies, not sketches on a page, as models. Trainees interact with anatomy by watching parts of the body move in and out of a yoga posture in real time. This can significantly improve teacher trainings by bringing anatomy off the page of a book and making it applicable to real bodies of all shapes and sizes. Trainees are able to observe and engage with abstract concepts, like alignment, in tangible ways and in real time, giving them an entirely new way of reading and understanding bodies in yoga postures. With a deeper understanding of anatomy as it relates to real bodies, teachers will be able to read the bodies of their students and safely lead yoga classes for all body types.