MAHPERD "Voices From The field"

We’re Not Just Pressing Play On A Yoga Video

• MAHPERD • Season 1 • Episode 26

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Tired of  PD that doesn’t fit your teaching space? We sit back down with educator  Kristen Santos to unpack a practical, standards-aligned approach to yoga in PE that strengthens bodies, focuses minds, and gives teachers a clear roadmap. From a high school curriculum built on 54 foundational poses and nine targeted breaths to teacher-friendly guides and visual cue cards, Kristen shows how to move beyond videos to student-driven learning that’s easy to assess and adapt.

We explore how to scaffold yoga from K–8 to high school without jargon or religious language, focusing on physical literacy, mobility, balance, and self-regulation. Kristen walks through the nuts and bolts: teaching bilateral vs. unilateral movement, identifying strength and flexibility demands, creating goal-based sequences, and using trauma-informed cues. Breathwork becomes a daily tool—longer exhales to calm, stronger inhales to energize, equal breathing to reset—so students can regulate emotions during competition, tests, and everyday stress.

You’ll also hear what changed a skeptic’s mind, what a successful district pilot revealed, and how to navigate funding with grants, PTO support, and PD planning. For future teachers and seasoned pros alike, we offer pathways to learn more: college trainings, online options, and direct access to Kristen’s materials. If you’ve wondered how to make wellness truly part of PE—without losing rigor or fun—this conversation delivers tactics you can use tomorrow and a vision you can build toward all year.

Subscribe for more conversations with educators pushing the field forward, share this episode with a colleague who needs fresh PD ideas, and leave a review to help others find the show.


 🗣️Connect with Kristen:

  • Insta @yogainphysed
  • Website www.yogainphysed.com
  • Email yogainphysed@gmail.com
  • Find the book on Amazon

 Resources: 

Child light Education Company



Thanks for listening! 🙏🏼

If you picked up a new idea or felt inspired by today’s episode, I’d love to hear from you and if your interested in being a potential guest on the show; email mahperdpodcast@gmail.com

Please take a second to follow the show and share it with another educator who’s passionate about health, movement, and making a difference.

Let’s keep the conversation going!” 🗣️

Check out our advocacy video about quality health & physical education



Jake:

Hello and welcome to Voices from the Field, a MAHPERD podcast where we talk with educators in the field to hear about their perspectives and experiences. My name is Jake Bersin, Advocacy Chair for MAHPERD, and today I have the pleasure of having Kristen Sanchos back on the show to discuss what she has been working on around quality PD and wellness. In addition to her elementary and middle school books, she has also now published a high school yoga curriculum. Welcome back to the show, Kristen.

Kristen:

Thank you, Jake. Nice to see you again.

Jake:

Likewise. Okay, Kristen, let's dive in. Tell our listeners about the work you have been doing lately around quality PD and staff wellness.

Kristen:

Well, we as teachers are always going to professional development. And it's so important to just becoming a seasoned teacher, a veteran teacher, and the day-to-day things that come up. Unfortunately, sometimes professional development doesn't apply to physical education. So I think it's really important that department heads, administrators, coordinators look and find quality PD for your wellness staff because we are different.

Jake:

So definitely.

Kristen:

Great. So we can't have, I mean, some of it in dealing with kids and better teaching skills and classroom management and all that is great. But then when it comes to content and curriculum, we're different from the others.

Jake:

Absolutely. So when you work with districts or you work with folks, are they all ages, all levels, all you work with high schools, middle schools, elementary, all the above?

Kristen:

Yeah. So I've worked with several districts and it's usually K through 12. There was one where it was only K through eight. But the one of my K to 12 districts, the feedback that I got was this was last spring, there's no high school curriculum. So this summer, I that made it my job. That was my summer project. I wrote a curriculum for high school physical education. And I think back to when I was a sophomore in high school, and my PE teacher rolled out the big huge TV and popped in a video and said, okay, girls, you do yoga. All right, boys, you can go play basketball. And we were on the stage, we're like, yoga, this is stupid. Wait, why do the boys get to play basketball? It was a total joke. And then we didn't like some of the poses that we had to do with the boys down on the court. So we asked if we could pull the curtain. So she let us pull the curtain. And every time she walked away, we sat and we talked. We didn't do it. And then somebody would say, Hey, she's coming. And then we'd get back up and we would act like we were playing the video following along with the video. When my oncologist asked me years ago when I got diagnosed with breast cancer, have you ever tried yoga? That was really my only experience. And in my head, I was a 16-year-old kid at the time, sophomore gym class, because it didn't seem like PE back then. It didn't mean anything. I didn't understand it. Um, but in my PE teacher's defense back in the day, she wasn't given quality professional development. She didn't know how to implement yoga. She knew, yeah, this is good. There's some benefits, but this is all I can do is just pop in a video. So I think it's great to supplement what we teach with videos, but that can't be our whole curriculum. That would be like a history teacher turning on the history channel to just teach a class. If there's a segment or a piece, maybe on the Civil War or whatever, it's supplemental. There that has its value, but it can't be the whole curriculum. We won't have jobs if we're just pressing play and having kids do videos.

Jake:

I agree. It could be used as a tool, but that's it. So that's exciting now that you're going around and giving PD to different districts and different folks. Have you ever gone into the college level and given it to future professionals? Or how does that work on your end?

Kristen:

Matt, yes. So I have worked with Bridgewater State, Springfield College, and Montana State University. In this age of social media, you can really connect with just about anybody. But Dr. Karen Richardson had me come out to Bridgewater last year. And I do all these trainings on my days off or use personal time or vacation time. So I worked with Springfield twice, once over February break and once over April break and Bridgewater State as well. And that is just, it's so great to work with the future professionals. They are so eager to learn and they're basically a blank slate. And some of them are athletes and they have done yoga as part of their treating, which makes me happy to hear that coaches are incorporating that because it's just such a great balance to what your bodies go through as a college athlete. But they said they didn't know how to teach it. So we would play my yoga games, we would talk about assessment, we would use things from my books, and then the students had the opportunity to buy my books at the end of the training. This year, when I go back, I will get to show them my high school curriculum, which it's totally interactive. And what I did was I took the 54 poses from the K to 8 curriculum and I broke it up into six lessons to start. So there's nine poses. Then nine times six is equals 54. So six six days of going through all the poses. And then the students have a little worksheet and they need to figure out is it bilateral? Does it work both your right and left side, or is it unilateral? Think of tree pose. You stand in tree pose, that's unilateral because you're only working one side. So then you need to switch into the other side. Whereas if you're doing chair pose, you're getting both sides. So that's a bilateral pose. So students learn the difference between bilateral and unilateral. And then they also learn is it flexibility, muscular strength, or both. So when we teach yoga in a physical education setting, it's to strengthen and lengthen muscles and to help focus the mind and body. Right? There's no religious content, there's no religious roots, and I don't use any Sanskrit language. And then the students need to identify where they feel it on their body in those poses. And then I made a teacher, teacher's guide. So you don't have to know these answers yourself. You can just have the kids self-assess or you can grade papers, however, you want to grade your students. Then they have to create sequences based on the poses that they learned. So it's really interactive, it's student-driven, teacher guided, student-driven. And again, there's basically an answer key, teacher's guide. And then there are additional lesson plans. For example, create a yoga sequence for tight hips. So then students would go through and they'd look at all the poses that they've learned and figure out which ones would be good to strengthen and lengthen those muscles. And then I also wrote sample sequences for those too. Um, and it's really comprehensive. And I pulled out all the Shape America indicators that were reflected in this curriculum. And Jake, I don't know if I mentioned this to you last time, but the only time the word yoga is mentioned in the shape indicators is standard four, and it's at the high school curriculum.

Jake:

Oh, okay. So we're not at the elementary middle.

Kristen:

Nope. So the one time the word yoga, but if you go through and look at it, different things like balance on one leg, that's yoga. Using breath to self-regulate, that's yoga. Creating positive affirmations, that's yoga. So all these things that it's I almost feel like people are afraid to say the word yoga sometimes. But we can't just throw yoga into a high school, high school standards and expect them to buy in and know what it is.

Jake:

Right.

Kristen:

Right.

Jake:

So when you give these PDs, you're outlining specifically what they can they're gonna do, but also the resource has or the book has everything they need in it. So there's no really, it's very clear, there's no confusion about what the poses are, how to do the poses, and then there you said there's games that go along with it and assessments. So really everything's included in the book.

Kristen:

Right. So the high school curriculum, I don't have games in it, but I do have the breaths, the sequences if they want. And then I have a little section of helpful hints and then some resources. When you say yoga and you say it to younger kids, sometimes they don't know what it means. And yoga to a 25-year-old is different than yoga for a five-year-old. Just like basketball for a 25-year-old who's been playing or maybe out of college or maybe in the NBA WNBA is going to be different from a five-year-old playing basketball for the first time at parks and rec or whatever, or if they do it in their PE class. So same thing with yoga, right? So it's you meet them where they're at, you give them what they can handle, you make it fun for them, and it's just really exploring and introducing at the younger levels. And then you you build on it, teaching it a progression, just scaffolding like you would any other subject.

Jake:

How would a PE teacher or anybody for that matter wanting to implement this work with kids with maybe some special needs or some diverse needs? It's flexible, right? We can it can be adaptable to students in wheelchairs or students who might have some other needs or accommodations.

Kristen:

Absolutely. The great thing about all of the curricula that I've written is the visual aids. And my sister did the artwork. She's an art teacher out in Denver, and she drew the characters and we made yoga pose cards. So there's a picture, and then there are three teaching cues that go along with each posture. So it's really simple for the kids.

Jake:

Visuals, cues you can't miss. That's awesome.

Kristen:

Also, the elementary and middle school books have yoga dice and yoga spinners. So that goes along with some of the games that they play too.

Jake:

So, what type of feedback, or have you gotten any feedback on the high school curriculum?

Kristen:

Yes. So Westwood Public Schools piloted this curriculum. One of their teachers reached out to me because she took my yoga for PE teachers training at Childlight Education, which is where I did all of my certification. And I'm also a teacher trainer for childlight. So she reached out to me and said, I loved your class. She knew that I did professional development. She said, Can you come work with Westwood? We're implementing yoga for our juniors and seniors this year. And I don't know how to teach it. So she took my course online and then I said, Well, it just so happens that I just finished a high school curriculum. So they piloted for me and they used it and they just finished it. And I actually was just emailing her the other day, and the feedback was just glowing, and she thanked me profusely. And I'm just so happy that it's true and tested and tried because the high school one, I collaborated with some of my high school teacher friends. I have high schoolers myself, so I kind of knew where they were at. And I was just trying to continue on from the middle school. And I'm just, I'm thrilled at the way it came together.

Jake:

But there's nothing like seeing a pilot and seeing that be successful, right?

Kristen:

Yeah. And any little typos that we found, she found I was able to clean up to. And the only way you can purchase that is through my website. And I'll give digital access to districts if they have me for a professional developed training, professional development training, because I want them to know before you get that digital access, I want you to know how to truly use it. But for the districts that just want to buy the binder, then I can just send it to them.

Jake:

So ideally you'd be in front of people live, but you mentioned some online training. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How does that work? Or is that all on your website? How some someone would go about that?

Kristen:

Oh, so childlike education uh is where, like I said, where I did all of my training. And who can get your 200 hour and become a certified yoga instructor?

unknown:

Okay.

Kristen:

You can also get your 95 hour, which is a children's certified yoga instructor. I did the children's first and then I did the 200 hour during COVID. But they also have other add-ons. So just like teaching, you need to keep your professional status or your PDPs. Right. So you don't have to have so many hours of training every couple of years. So they also offer restorative yoga, yin yoga. So it's childlighteducation.com. And there's also my training, yoga for PE teachers.

Jake:

So everything that somebody would need to know is on your website, right?

Kristen:

Yes. So my website is yogainphized.com.

Jake:

Okay.

Kristen:

My mission is to bring yoga to physical education one gym at a time.

Jake:

One gym at a time. So what's next for you as far as PD goes or as far as giving professional development for different districts? How how are you looking to expand, or how can listeners follow you?

Kristen:

Right now I'm tapping, trying to tap into something that I'm not very good at. I'm trying to be a salesperson, salesman. And it's difficult to promote yourself, but podcasts like this help. I've been emailing people, I've been calling people, I've been sending out letters. I have a few good leads that I'm working on for next year. The problem is I'm out of my personal time. So I'm gonna have to schedule any trainings for the next school year. It's so important, and I'm seeing the benefits. The feedback is great. And I just I hope that years from now, when I'm retired, that yoga is just woven into the fabric of physical education. Just like any other activity. I don't know if people really still do the PACER or Fitness Gram, but that was really a staple in a PE program. And I feel like yoga should be a staple in a PE program.

Jake:

They should do the fitness gram, at least in my district. So they do. So I think in order to make it a staple, they have to know about it. And giving PD, like you do, and the books you have and the resources that you've developed are great because it allows more folks and more teachers that maybe aren't comfortable teaching this content area, an avenue to teach it. And if folks have any questions, they could always reach out to you, right? You're on Instagram, you have a website. Is there any other way they can reach out to you? Email?

Kristen:

Email, yep. It's all yoga in phys ed.

Jake:

All yoga in phys. Okay.

Kristen:

I had a gentleman say to me after a training, I did not want to be here. I didn't want to do this. I was a total yoga skeptic, but you've changed my mind. I see the value, and now I think I can implement this. And that was really one of the greatest things that anybody has said to me at any of the trainings. And I understand being a skeptic as a teacher. This is year 28 for me. No, and sometimes you feel like, oh, something else is thrown at us. And I'm okay if people feel that way once they hear that it's a yoga training. But then I really truly believe that I can change that and I make it my mission to make them feel like, yeah, this is something I can do with the resources in the curriculum and just in a training where you're you're basically the students. The the teachers come in and they play the games, and then I'd show them how to use the book, and then we get on the mats and we talk about trauma-informed language. And it's really everything that you could think of that you would need to bring yoga to your curriculum.

Jake:

It's interesting. Changing somebody's viewers or perspective is not easy, and you were able to do that, it sounds like with this gentleman. So really cool. He saw the value in that, and now he's willing to do it.

Kristen:

He felt comfortable enough with me to be honest. Like, yeah, you know, in the beginning I didn't know how I felt about this, but then by the end, you changed my mind.

Jake:

So you've done so much in the past. Where do you see yourself in the next couple years in regards to your work with yoga in physed? More expansion, more PD.

Kristen:

So that's interesting. It's fun to daydream about the future. If you asked me this question four years ago when I got my LLC, I'd never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing. So who knows what the future brings. And that that makes exciting. I would like to continue doing what I'm doing, getting those PDs, using my personal time, using my February and April break. And now that I'm starting to meet people in different states, they have different school breaks and they have different summer vacations. Right. So that's a possibility too to work with somebody out in Colorado in mid-August, because that's when they go back to school, where we go back a little bit later here in Massachusetts. So I'm I'm open-minded. I'm enjoying it. It's still fun, but I still want to teach for the another five, six, seven years. I hate to say six, seven, but I think that's probably how many I have left.

Jake:

Six, seven. Sorry, I had to say it.

Kristen:

It's tempting, isn't it? We're here all day long.

Jake:

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I do too. Kristen, is there a message you want to leave our listeners with? I know you mentioned your mission before, but what would you really like them to take away from your message?

Kristen:

Um, some districts have told me that money is tight, we don't have the money for professional development. I think there's always way to a way to find money. You can write grants, you could ask your parent-teacher organization. If it's something that you believe in, then make it happen. Um know is the second best answer, but at least give it a try.

Jake:

Right. No, I I agree with you. I hear what you're saying. Grants, PTO. It doesn't hurt to ask, right? And if they do say no, maybe not yet, but at least keep going for it, keep asking.

Kristen:

And it doesn't have to be yes to this year. It could be maybe next year, and then yes, the following year. I understand how budgets work. I understand things take time. I ask people, don't forget about me when you're planning your professional development.

Jake:

When you work with different districts or different folks, are there any common questions besides money that they ask you? Or is that a top question? What are some common questions?

Kristen:

They'll they'll ask me about religion.

Jake:

Okay.

Kristen:

Yoga religion. Um, and I say, well, it has religious roots. It's over 5,000 years old. And if something is around for 5,000 years, then it's gotta be good. And we've been doing yoga that we don't even know about. When you ask somebody to get a mantra or a positive affirmation, the word mantra actually means message in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is a language of yoga, right? Karma. Right? That means what goes around comes around. Right? In Sanskrit. So it's it's been around us. We just didn't know it. A lot of things that you do in Pilates or physical therapy come from yoga. Very interesting. Bridge when you lie on your back, bend your knees, feet flat on the floor, and then push through your heels, raising your tailbone to the sky. So that's a yoga pose. And whenever we practice that one, students will say to me, Oh, I did this in physical therapy.

Jake:

So it's all around us. We just didn't know.

Kristen:

You know, it's it's really it's breathing and moving properly. And that the breathing is really important. I actually made that my professional practice school this year to teach our school how to breathe properly. And we had HCAM come to my class and film our students breathing. And they would go through snake breath, they would go through warrior breath, they would go through balloon breath, joy breath. And it was my unified PE class, and we were in groups, and they would hold up the cards and then they would practice. The breath and they would explain it. So every other Friday, these videos come out and I print out a copy of the breath and I put it in the teacher's room. And then the teachers practice the breathing with the students. So they know that when you exhale longer than your inhale, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is designed to calm you. So when you're feeling anxious, scared, nervous, practice, take breath, practice buzzing breath. And then on the flip side, when you're tired and you need to energize or wake up your body, okay, your inhale is going to be greater than your exhale. So when the kids come in and tell me that they're tired, I go, okay, let's do warrior breath or let's do joy breath. And then if you just need to do equal breaths to just focus the mind and body, it's volcano breath, it's balloon breath. So teaching them how to breathe to self-regulate.

Jake:

It's funny, today in PE class, I actually had students doing the triangle breathing where they breathe in up the triangle, then they hold it and then they go down. And they loved it. I mean, it was just a quick two-minute thing to kind of relax and calm them down, but it really did make a difference.

Kristen:

So that's happy to hear. And you know, we're I'm doing racket sports right now, and they're getting into tournaments. So when they argue about it's in or out or what the rules are, and they come over to me all amped up. I say, okay, pick a breath. You know, and they're doing snake and buzzing breath. You can't talk to me until you're calm.

Jake:

I think it's interesting too that they have a choice, it's not just deep breaths. They they know what it means, they can explain it, right?

unknown:

Yeah.

Jake:

So what do you how many are there? Four or five or more different types of breaths taking per grade level and the K to eight.

Kristen:

So there are nine breaths.

Jake:

Nine breaths, okay.

Kristen:

But so in the high school curriculum, it's all the breath work, the nine breaths and the 54 poses. And then I have sun salutation A and B. That's everything that's included in the high school curriculum. But the high school curriculum doesn't have any games. But if you're a high school teacher and you want to play some games, then you can certainly use the games from the K to 8 curriculum. Just depends on your space. Some districts, when they teach yoga, it's just in the classroom. So it would be difficult to play some of those games.

Jake:

Right. I wonder how that would work in the classroom. Like how do they separate the desks? How do they do they use match? Do they use PowerPoint?

Kristen:

Well, uh the in Westwood, they had it was just there weren't desks as well, just a classroom. It was a dedicated yoga room.

Jake:

Okay. So they had a good space for that.

Kristen:

They did, yes.

Jake:

So you mentioned earlier professional practice goal. For those who may not know what that is, it's a goal that all educators who teach in Massachusetts have to have. We have to have a student learning goal, professional practice goal. So, how would this goal relate to data collection? What type of data are you looking for? How many students, how long they do it for, if they can explain it?

Kristen:

So I did this one for my professional practice goal. So I didn't have to collect data for it. But if I were to do this as a student-oriented goal, just to give people ideas out there, then I would do a pre and a post-test.

Jake:

Okay.

Kristen:

Google forum, ask them just a couple questions about breathing. What's a calming breath? What's an energizing breath? And then what's a breath that you could use to balance the body and focus the mind?

Jake:

Keep it simple. Right. Simple but effective.

Kristen:

Especially the Google forums. Those are easy for data collection.

Jake:

Yeah, for sure. And it's great because they have the graphs you can utilize too as well. Awesome. So anything else you want to share with us, Kristen?

Kristen:

I think I'm all set.

Jake:

So we have your website, we have your Instagram. We'll make sure to link everything. Listeners, if you have questions, I'll put Kristen's email in the show notes so you can email her directly. I have both books. I'm looking to get the third book. So everything's on the website. So it's very easy to get.

Kristen:

Thank you. Yes. And have your district pay for it, right? I mean, they buy curriculum for other disciplines. Why not buy curricula for physical education? Every student takes fit physical education. This yoga is something that everybody can do, everybody can benefit from it. And it's so adaptable.

Jake:

And if you ask your PTO or ask you know, write a grant, those are some other options too, as well, right? Awesome. Well, Kristen, thank you so much for being back on the show with us. It's been great. Listeners, if you have any questions, please email us mavordpodcast at gmail.com. We'll have this episode uploaded soon. Also, please share and like the podcast, as it does help other folks find it. Thank you all for listening. Have a great week, and we will be back soon.

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