I taught Buti for 6.5 months, I’ve been certified for over two years. I haven’t been able to teach post pregnancy because it’s been impossible for me to find a time to teach it. I enjoy the practice but I’ve never been sold out to it. I haven’t bled Buti. When I was a Zumba teacher, I bled Zumba. I wore the clothes, I drank the kool-aid. I went to trainings, conventions, and jam sessions. I was certified in Aqua, Toning, Gold, and Sentao. I taught Zumba in the circuit at Curves. Then I found yoga. Zumba already wasn’t really fun anymore and I was stuck teaching it longer than I wanted. By the time the gym hired a replacement, I was done. I didn’t officially deactivate my membership for another year but I never got the itch to teach again. Why do I mention Zumba? Well Buti has become like Zumba. There are several different certifications. Buti is still the most popular certification and class but one could also get certified in Deep, Buti Sculpt & Bands, or Hotcore. Apparently there’s yet another specialty coming, Primal Flow. I have my Buti cert, that’s it. I haven’t bought any Buti apparel. I don’t do Buti workouts. So the question is: why am I still certified?

Because I’ve been out of the loop, I was unaware until yesterday that there’s been an exodus of several master trainers, including the trainer who did my initial training. Two of them have gone on to start their own formats. This certainly happened in Zumba, I remember Janet Roberts and Pepper Von starting their formats. Granted they were entirely different whereas these look like carbon copies. But still, that isn’t the problem. But there have been lawsuits, Instagram accounts dedicated to slander, and lots of unnecessary drama. It is sign of poor leadership on behalf of the founder and frankly, I’m not surprised. I’ve had a lot of issues with Buti in just the two years I’ve been certified. I don’t care for people teaching with prior yoga training. The training is two days but one day is entirely demos leaving only one day dedicated to actual instruction. I feel like the 200 hour teacher trainings were the bare minimum and Bizzie addressed yesterday there were quite a few complaints about the teacher training.

Bizzie’s personal life, while ordinarily shouldn’t be relevant, has been the source of turmoil with the company as well. In 2017, Bizzie announced a Keto plan coming out. Pictures of her then boyfriend were displayed all over the Golden Ratio (Bizzie’s protein powder line) website. Then overnight, the pictures were removed and Bizzie had reconciled with her husband. The keto plan never happened. A couple of weeks ago she posted picture of her and a new guy. Apparently now she’s going through a divorce. She talked about her husband and marriage during advanced training in January as having almost failed before but that they had weathered the storm. A few months ago she posted Buti was starting a 300 hour program. Strange since neither Bizzie nor any of the lead trainers were 500 teachers but some guy was supposed to be leading it with Bizzie. I haven’t heard a peep more about it and the original post has been taken down.

I’ve got a lot of things going on with my yoga life these days and I’m not sure Buti really fits in anyway. I liked the sisterhood it had before and I don’t love the direction it’s going including men. A lot of the master trainers who’ve left have had issues with Break, some weird emotional thing that Bizzie charges a lot if money for people to sign up and she certainly doesn’t seem like someone who has it together enough to be leading it. I think Bizzie is a nice person. She’s built an incredible tribe and inspired a lot of people. But I don’t think she’s great at running a business. I think it may be time to exit stage right. Buti may have jumped the shark.