While most yoga teacher training happens in standard group batches, private and very small-group alternatives exist for students with specific needs or preferences — understanding the genuine trade-offs helps clarify which format actually suits your situation.
The typical batch format (covered throughout our discussion of school selection) offers the community and shared experience of training alongside fellow students, the energy and motivation of group practice, and generally more accessible pricing than private alternatives, given shared teaching costs across the group.
Fully private, one-on-one training provides maximum individual attention and pacing entirely customized to your specific needs, schedule flexibility unavailable in fixed-batch programs, and the ability to focus disproportionately on specific areas of personal interest or difficulty. The trade-off is typically substantially higher cost and the complete absence of the peer community and shared learning that group training provides.
Students with significant scheduling constraints unable to commit to a fixed group timeline, those recovering from injury requiring substantially modified practice, or those with very specific learning goals not well-served by a standard curriculum sometimes genuinely benefit from private arrangements despite the cost premium.
Beyond the financial premium, private training misses something genuinely valuable that many graduates cite as central to their experience: the community discussed in our piece on satsang, the shared challenge and encouragement of training alongside peers facing similar struggles, and the practice opportunities that come from teaching and being taught by fellow students rather than only a single instructor.
Some schools, including ours with batches capped at 15 students, offer something of a middle path — small enough for genuine individual attention and correction, while still preserving the community and peer-learning benefits that fully private training sacrifices entirely.
Some students genuinely learn better with intensive, undivided individual attention; others learn as much or more from observing how a teacher corrects fellow students' different challenges, gaining insight beyond their own specific issues. Understanding your own learning preference informs which format genuinely serves you better.
Unless you have a specific, compelling reason requiring fully private training — significant scheduling constraints, particular injury accommodation needs — a well-run small-group program, like the 15-student maximum batches we maintain, generally offers the strongest balance of individual attention and community benefit for most students.
