A yoga therapy intake form is the first clinical document in your client relationship. Done well, it gives you everything you need to build a personalized protocol before the first session even starts. Done poorly, it's either so generic it tells you nothing, or so invasive it drives clients away before they've met you.
Most yoga therapists inherit their intake form from whoever came before them — a Word doc someone shared in a Facebook group in 2017. That template was never designed for your practice, your clinical model, or your clients. Time to fix that.
What a yoga therapy intake form needs to do
A yoga therapy intake form is different from a medical history form or a fitness questionnaire. Its job is to give you the clinical context to design a safe, effective practice — without requiring a medical degree to interpret it.
That means three things:
- Safety information — injuries, conditions, medications, and contraindications that affect your sequencing decisions
- Context for the whole person — stress patterns, lifestyle, goals, and what's brought them to yoga therapy specifically
- Enough for protocol design — the postural patterns, breath patterns, and capacity indicators that shape your recommendations
The form shouldn't be exhaustive. It should be sufficient. You'll gather more through conversation and observation — the intake exists to make that conversation more targeted, not to replace it.
The essential fields (and why each one matters)
Section 1: Contact and basic demographics
Name, email, phone, date of birth, and referral source. Keep it minimal. Age and referral source are the only ones that shape your clinical thinking — a 65-year-old referred by an oncologist has a different profile than a 28-year-old who found you on Google.
Section 2: Health history and safety
This is the most important section. The goal is to surface contraindications that affect your sequencing — not to diagnose or treat.
Fields to include:
- Current injuries or pain (location, mechanism if known, severity)
- Chronic conditions (cardiovascular, neurological, musculoskeletal, autoimmune)
- Surgeries or procedures (within the last 2 years)
- Current medications (especially anticoagulants, benzodiazepines, pain medications)
- Orthopedic hardware or implants
- Pregnancy or recent postpartum
- Dizziness, fainting, or balance issues
- Current physical therapy or other bodywork
Why ask about medications specifically?
Medications affect proprioception, blood pressure response, bone density, and nervous system regulation — all of which change how a client should move through a practice. Anticoagulants, benzodiazepines, and beta-blockers are particularly relevant for yoga therapists to know about.
Section 3: Physical assessment — self-reported
Don't try to replicate a full clinical assessment in a form. Instead, ask clients to self-report the relevant indicators:
- General activity level (sedentary to very active)
- Any activities or movements that are currently uncomfortable or limited
- Comfort with lying on the floor, sitting on the floor, standing without support
- Any positions they cannot safely access right now
This tells you their starting point without requiring an in-person movement screen before the session. You can do the full assessment live.
Section 4: Breath and nervous system
Yoga therapy is respiratory medicine as much as movement medicine. Include at minimum:
- Self-reported breathing difficulty (at rest, with mild activity)
- Known respiratory conditions (asthma, COPD, etc.)
- Sleep quality (this is a strong proxy for autonomic regulation)
- Stress level self-rating (1–10)
Section 5: Goals and context
What brought them to yoga therapy specifically? What do they hope to work on? What does "success" look like to them? This is where the form stops being purely clinical and starts being therapeutic — because it signals that you're interested in them as a person, not just a list of contraindications.
Include an open-ended "What would you like your therapist to know?" field. Clients often put something important there that you wouldn't have thought to ask.
HIPAA and data privacy for yoga therapists
Yoga therapists are not covered entities under HIPAA — but they're increasingly treated as such by clients, employer-sponsored wellness programs, and referring healthcare providers who have HIPAA obligations themselves.
HIPAA bottom line: Yoga therapists in private practice are generally not required to be HIPAA compliant. But if you work with hospitals, insurance companies, or corporate wellness programs that send you client data, those partners often contractually require it. Check your agreements.
Either way, best practices for client health data apply regardless of legal requirement:
- Use a practice management tool with encrypted data storage, not a Google Form or email thread
- Don't store intake data in plain-text notes, voice memos, or unencrypted spreadsheets
- Add a privacy statement to your intake form explaining how data is used and stored
- If you share client data with referring providers, use secure channels (encrypted email, password-protected documents)
- Have a policy for how long you retain intake records after the client relationship ends
Common intake form mistakes to avoid
Too long, too early. A 50-field intake form sent before the first session will create anxiety and contribute to no-shows. Ask for what's essential to start safely; gather details in the session.
Medical language without context. "Do you have any spinal conditions?" is ambiguous — most clients don't know if their mild scoliosis counts. Better: "Have you ever been diagnosed with scoliosis, spinal stenosis, herniated discs, or any other spinal condition?"
No breathing or nervous system assessment. Yoga therapy is fundamentally about the nervous system. If your intake form only asks about injuries and doesn't explore stress patterns, sleep, and breath, you're missing the most important part of the clinical picture.
Paper forms that never get digitized. If you're still printing intake forms and storing them in a folder, you're not using the data efficiently. Searchability, longitudinal tracking, and protocol-history all require a digital system.
Automating intake with SadhanaFlow
SadhanaFlow's intake form is built for yoga therapy specifically — not adapted from a massage therapy template or a fitness assessment. It covers all the sections above, stores responses in a HIPAA-conscious manner, and automatically uses intake responses to seed the AI protocol generation process.
When a client completes their intake before a first session, you receive their safety profile, goals, and context already organized — before you've said a word to them. The protocol conversation starts from that baseline, not from scratch.
When you automate intake, you also reduce the time you spend in the first session on data collection — which means more time on observation, dialogue, and actual therapeutic work.
Wrapping up
A good yoga therapy intake form is an investment in the quality of every protocol that follows it. It doesn't need to be exhaustive — it needs to be intentional. Every field should have a clinical purpose. Every question should move you closer to knowing this person well enough to design for them.
If you're still using a generic template, this is a high-leverage upgrade. Your protocols will be better, your sessions will start faster, and your clients will feel more understood before they even walk through the door.