Sage Rountree's Blog, page 13

Affirmation: I Am in Conversation with My Students

Teaching yoga is a conversation, though it can sound like a monologue to you. Your students are providing nonverbal answers to your questions and prompts. They do this both with their bodies and also in their minds.

Be a good conversation partner. Give your students time to respond. And listen more than you speak.

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How to Get Better at Teaching Yoga: Welcome Other Teachers

When other teachers join your class, celebrate it! They’re there to practice, not judge. Introduce them, create a friendly vibe, and learn from their presence. Teachers supporting teachers—this is how we grow together.

Yoga teachers: If you have the pleasure of having other teachers in class, don’t flinch: rejoice!

While your first reaction might be to recoil in horror, thinking you are going to be judged, please reframe your reaction. Unless another teacher is explicitly sent to offer feedback, they are not in your class to evaluate you nor to steal from you—they want to be led through a practice and not have to make decisions. As I often put it, they want someone else to drive the bus. Celebrate having teachers as students!

When I have colleagues in class, I make a point of introducing them. This serves a few purposes. 

First, it cross-promotes their classes. I’ll say something like, “This is Alexandra, who teaches the Pilates class before this class. Her class and mine are wonderful back-to-back! And Alexandra is my regular sub—you’ll see her in two weeks when I’m teaching out of town.”

Second, it creates a friendly vibe. Students love to know that teachers are students, too, and that the studio community is a supportive one.

Third, it gives the teacher permission to practice in their own way without intimidating students. “Oh,” students will think, “that’s a teacher, so they’ve been doing this a while. I am not going to bend like they do.” Sometimes I’ll even say this out loud, so students don’t compare themselves!

Best of all, having teachers in class means you have a group of potential subs who know exactly how you run your classroom and what and how you teach. This is priceless for providing your students continuity when you are away, and thus for best supporting their practices. Your subs don’t have to teach exactly like you, but having subs who understand what your students expect is priceless.

And when you do have a colleague in class, ask them for feedback. Teachers are always better equipped than students to give you helpful advice. Students will say only, “I liked it!” or “Felt good!” or “That was hard!” Teachers can tell you straight about the clarity of your cueing, the fluidity of your sequences, and the filler words you rely on.

let me plan your next class

Feeling uninspired when it’s time to plan? I’m here to help!

Give me your email and I’ll send you my go-to class plan with ideas for every minute. This is the class I teach when my energy is low—but it’s the favorite of my students from 20 to 80 years old! I’ll even give you tips on how to adapt it for various class formats.

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What It’s Like to Teach Yoga to Football Players

Yoga for athletes is NOT athletic yoga! In fact, teaching yoga to athletes can feel a lot like leading a gentle yoga class—or even yoga for seniors.

In this video, I debrief my assistant Alexis Besosa after Alexis has joined me to work with a college football team deep into training camp.

You might be surprised to hear that yoga’s simple lessons are the most powerful for athletes, and that low-to-the-ground, easy sequences go down best.

If you’ve been interested in teaching yoga to athletes, this discussion on yoga for football players is a great starting point. You’ll hear that you might already have a lot of the tools you need, especially if you teach yoga for older people, gentle yoga, or yoga for beginners.

Next, enjoy my free on-demand workshop on how to teach yoga to athletes—and double your income while doing so! You can get it here:

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Affirmation: A Calm Voice Is Not Always a Quiet Voice

Yoga teacher affirmation: A calm voice is not always a quiet voice.

While you should speak in a way that is relaxing, don’t make your students work too hard to hear you. A calm voice is not always a quiet voice.

Ask students to raise a hand if they can’t make out your words. And keep eyes on your class so you can see whether and how your cues are landing.

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How Taking a Yin Yoga Teacher Training Makes You Better at Teaching Every Style of Yoga

Taking a yin yoga teacher training is smart not only for expanding your teaching repertoire, but also for honing your ability to teach balanced classes to students of all levels. Let’s look at what yin yoga is, how you can learn to teach yin yoga, and how adding a yin yoga teacher training to your résumé will make you a better teacher to all of your students.

Yin yoga has many differences from yang styles of yoga like hatha, vinyasa, and Kundalini. Yin yoga includes long—some might say very long—holds of poses low to the ground, with the idea of applying low-grade stress to the body to stimulate adaptation in the yin tissues of the body: bones, joint capsules, fascia. And yin gives extra agency to students to personalize their own practice. Depending on how the practitioner sets up any given shape and how they use props, yin yoga can feel like a deep, intense stretch, or it can feel like restorative yoga.

how does yin yoga work?

When I teach yin yoga, I follow the model I lay out in my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing. A well-rounded yin sequence will take the spine through the three planes of movement: forward and back in the sagittal plane (spinal flexion and extension), side to side in the frontal plane (lateral spinal flexion), and twisting in the transverse plane (spinal rotation). It will also apply intentional low-grade stress to the front, back, inner, and outer lines of the hips. You’ll find several sample yin yoga lesson plans in The Art of Yoga Sequencing.

In my approach and most approaches, there are three general principles we follow:

Find the appropriate degree of stress for the shapeSettle in: get still and quietStay a while—typically, 2–6 minutes per shape

But my approach is not the only one! For a general overview of yin yoga shapes and practices, any of these three books is a good starting point:

Bernie Clark,  The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga Gabrielle Harris,  The Language of Yin Kassandra Reinhardt,  Yin Yoga: Stretch the Mindful Way

Some approaches to yin yoga expressly target the meridians referenced in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Thus some sequences are designed to operate on the kidney meridian, or on the gall bladder meridian. If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, two good books to read:

Sarah Powers, Insight Yoga Sagel Urlacher, Yin Yoga and Meditation yin ≠ yang

In a vinyasa or hatha yoga class, you as a teacher might cue several dozen poses or variations—maybe even over 50 poses or variations—over the course of an hour or ninety minutes. But in yin yoga, a typical lesson plan has fewer than ten poses on it.

Because of this difference, learning to teach yin yoga can involve unlearning much of what you have learned in your yang-focused teacher trainings. And as a result, learning how to teach yin yoga is a very worthwhile experience, even if you don’t plan to lead yin yoga classes regularly. (For one thing, it will give you a useful skill to make you a clutch substitute teacher!)

That’s because learning to teach yin yoga classes will make you a better teacher of any style of yoga. Here’s why and how.

how yin yoga enhances your overall teaching approach

Incorporating yin yoga into your teaching toolkit not only diversifies your offerings but also deepens your understanding of the broader principles of yoga. By learning to teach yin yoga, you can refine your ability to guide students through more meditative and introspective practices, which can be integrated into your yang-style classes. This holistic approach makes you a more versatile and empathetic teacher, capable of meeting the diverse needs of your students. The more you can offer as a teacher, the more likely students are to return to your classes, strengthening your teaching practice and your connection to the yoga community.

yin yoga teaches quiet

When there are ten or fewer poses to cue in the course of a class, there’s a lot less that you need to say to get students into the shape. This gives you an opportunity to say nothing! When you learn to overcome the urge to fill time with the sound of your voice, you’ll be a far better teacher. You’ll be giving your students the space to move toward deep inner connection—toward yoga. And that’s all from doing less, which means you don’t have to think of wise, profound things to say. You’ll just say nothing.

yin yoga centers students

In yin yoga, the standard alignment cues you probably had drilled into you in yoga teacher training are irrelevant. (They may be irrelevant in a yang yoga class, too! But that’s a topic for a different essay.) Instead, you will guide your students into shapes that target regions of the body—like the outer lines of the hips, or spinal flexion, or rotation—without needing to make students’ shapes match each other.

When you look out on the class and see everyone in a different expression of a shape, that’s a good thing! It’s a sign that you’re making room for yoga to happen, not directing a dance performance. This is true both for yin yoga classes and for yang yoga classes.

This approach to teaching a yoga class centers student experience without micromanaging students’ bodies. Instead of trying to direct a uniform, synchronized room of bodies moving in lockstep, a yin yoga teacher makes a few suggestions and encourages students to trust their bodies’ own expressions of the shapes.

yin yoga values feeling over aesthetics

When you teach yin yoga poses, you’ve got to explain to students how a pose might feel, rather than valuing how it might look. This emphasis on inner rather than outer experience is a major shift in cueing that supports the approach that centers your students over the teacher’s urge to impose any aesthetic ideal on the bodies in the room. As you get comfortable explaining how and why a student would choose to come into a yin shape—what it could feel like, and what it’s doing as part of the complete practice—you’ll be honing your ability to do the same in your movement-focused yang yoga classes. 

yin yoga encourages you to apply critical thinking

Maybe you subscribe to meridian theory and use it as the context for your yin yoga class lesson plans. Or maybe, at the other end of the spectrum, you understand rationally that there’s no way to target any particular tissue of the body like fascia independently, but you still feel like practicing yin yoga is teaching you useful lessons.

Either way, great! Your reaction to your yin practice should encourage you to explore the theory and research behind what is happening. The more you understand what is happening physiologically, psychologically, and even philosophically in yin yoga, the more you’ll be sharpening your critical thinking skills. This will make you a better yoga teacher in every class you lead.

teaching yin yoga is like teaching meditation

For students who find straight-up seated meditation discouragingly difficult to practice, yin yoga can be a path in to meditation techniques. With the feeling of being in a yin yoga pose as an anchor, these students are then able to work on the techniques of focus (dharana) and presence (diyana) that we build in meditation. 

Likewise, when you give your yin yoga students reminders to come back to their breath, mention tools for keeping equanimity in the face of increasing intensity, and hold space for thoughts and feelings to arise and subside, you’re building your own skill at teaching mindfulness. This can then apply to movement and meditation classes beyond the yin yoga classroom.

yin goes with yang

Maybe you aren’t going to teach a fully yin yoga class, but you would like to add yin yoga at the end of your more yang classes, in the form of longer holds of floor poses with more quiet. Fantastic! Adding this complement right in your movement-based classes will give your students much-needed quiet, deep stretching, and mindfulness tools that will make their final relaxation deeper and generally add value to your class.

why yin yoga is essential for modern yoga teachers

Your yoga students come to yoga seeking not just movement or physical exercise but also a way to manage stress and reconnect with themselves. Yin yoga meets these needs by offering a slow, more meditative practice that complements the dynamic nature of yang styles like vinyasa.

As a yoga teacher, understanding and being able to teach yin yoga equips you with the tools to offer a complete and balanced practice that appeals to a wider range of students. This can increase your class attendance and attract new students who are looking for a more quiet, mellow practice.

And again: it makes you an appealing addition to a sub list! 

take a trial class in yin yoga

Not sure if yin yoga is right for you or your students? Try out several practices available in my virtual studio with a free trial for seven days. This is a great way to experience the benefits of yin yoga firsthand and see how it can complement your practice and expand your teaching skillset.

visit the virtual studiofor more

If you’re ready to deepen your teaching skills and offer your students a more balanced and holistic yoga experience, join me for the Fundamentals of Teaching Yin Yoga teacher training.

Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or new to teaching, this yin yoga teacher training will give you the confidence and skills to incorporate yin yoga into your classes. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of how to structure yin yoga sequences, guide students through the poses, and create a calming and introspective class environment.

I’m leading it in person at my studio, Carrboro Yoga Company, in central North Carolina September 28 and 29.

The entire program, with 18 CEUs, will also be available as a fully-online on-demand course with mentorship by the end of the year.

This training is not only an opportunity to earn 18 Yoga Alliance CEUs but also a chance to enhance your teaching portfolio and attract a broader student base. It will help you be a more clear and articulate teacher who centers your students’ experience while guiding them to inner connection. 

The early bird rate is good through August 28, so now is the time to sign up and save. Register today and take the next step in your teaching journey!

REGISTER: FUNDAMENTALS OF TEACHING YIN

If you can’t make it to the in-person training, sign up for my teachers’ newsletter to be the first to know when the online course is available:

let me plan your next class

Feeling uninspired when it’s time to plan? I’m here to help!

Give me your email and I’ll send you my go-to class plan with ideas for every minute. This is the class I teach when my energy is low—but it’s the favorite of my students from 20 to 80 years old! I’ll even give you tips on how to adapt it for various class formats.

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How to Get Better at Teaching Yoga: Ask Your Friends

Yoga teachers: Want to get better at teaching? Start by asking for feedback from your peers, not your students. Your fellow teachers can offer insights that will help you improve in ways your students can’t. Don’t be afraid to seek out constructive criticism—it’s key to your growth.

Yoga teachers: you have to ask for help so you can get better.

And your students aren’t the best ones to ask. Instead, ask other teachers.

Students can’t give you the best feedback; they don’t have the tools to describe what worked and what didn’t. It’s like a chef cooking for, say, a teenage soccer team—they won’t have the palate or vocabulary to critique the food, they’re just glad to eat. Your peers, especially your colleagues in teacher training and at the venue where you teach, will be better. To get useful feedback, a chef must serve other chefs and experienced eaters—not the hungry soccer team. And it’s probably best if these chefs are skilled in the same kind of cooking—that is, your best evaluators will come from a similar background as you do and they will work with a student population similar to yours.

Invite a friend to class expressly to offer you evaluation. This might be one of your studio colleagues, or one of your yoga teacher training buddies. If your friend can set up discreetly in the back, they may even make a few notes. If the venue allows observation and you are especially open and willing to succeed, you can have them sit and watch instead of participating, or record a whole class for them to review. But that’s not always feasible. At my studio, Carrboro Yoga, we don’t allow nonparticipating students to sit and observe class, as we think it creates a strange situation for the participating students. But at your class, it might make sense. Just let the students know what’s happening—or that you are recording yourself because you want to be the best teacher possible for your students!

If you already teach in video format, share a recording with a peer to get feedback.

Then listen carefully to their input and make the tweaks you need so that you can help your students better.

And let me say: I know that growth is hard. Growth requires being uncomfortable. But without opening yourself up to constructive criticism, there will be no growth at all, and your career will wither on the vine. All your good intentions about helping your students through yoga will come to nothing if you don’t challenge yourself to improve.

Want regular Sage advice on how you can become (almost) everyone’s favorite yoga teacher? Sign up for my newsletter!

let me plan your next class

Feeling uninspired when it’s time to plan? I’m here to help!

Give me your email and I’ll send you my go-to class plan with ideas for every minute. This is the class I teach when my energy is low—but it’s the favorite of my students from 20 to 80 years old! I’ll even give you tips on how to adapt it for various class formats.

The post How to Get Better at Teaching Yoga: Ask Your Friends appeared first on Sage Rountree.

Affirmation: I Don’t Make the Decisions

Yoga teacher affirmation: I don’t make the decisions, my students do.

Recognize that everything you offer in class is a suggestion—not a command, and not a challenge. Allow students to make their own executive decisions about what to do with their bodies and how to embody their practice.

Decenter yourself. Uplift your students’ agency.

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How to Be Consistent in Your Yoga Lesson Plans

Consistency is key for growth in yoga classes and in life. But how do we balance consistency with the need for variety to keep our practice fresh and engaging? Let’s explore the importance of both through the lens of Patanjali’s wisdom and practical approaches to structuring your yoga classes.

As Patanjali explains in Yoga Sutra 1.14, your practice becomes well rooted when it is attended to diligently for a long time, without ceasing. This level of consistency is critical for your practice, because you need to develop the good habits that form a broad-based pyramid. Later, you can build in some variety on top of that, but your consistent practice must come first.

You may already recognize this as a yoga practitioner. I bet you saw your practice advance when you committed to getting on your mat regularly most days of the week.

What does the importance of consistency mean for you as a yoga teacher?

The Consistency–Variety Continuum in Yoga

Think of a sliding scale ranging on one end from too much discipline, too much sthira (that is, strength, effort), not enough ease, to on the other too much freedom, too much sukha (ease), not enough stability.

At one end of the consistency–variety continuum is doing the same thing every time. Some styles of yoga—Ashtanga and Bikram Yoga, most notably—repeat the very same sequence over and over. This allows practitioners the consistent familiarity of shapes even as their bodies adapt and grow. The upside of this approach is the comfort of regularity and seeing yourself progress week to week. The downside is that eventually bodies plateau when they are faced with the very same stimulus over and over.

At the other end of the consistency–variety continuum is a practice that constantly changes. This could look like different poses, different flows, different breath exercises, different meditation cues, even different teachers week in and week out. That also isn’t great for long-term growth, as there is no specificity and thus can be no progressive overload. If everything is always different, there’s no through-line and no consistency.

Find the Right Balance in Your Yoga Lesson Plans

The middle path is to find a good balance between consistency and variety. When you use the 6–4–2 model I present in The Art of Yoga Sequencing, you’ll already have the metastructures in place.

In The Art of Yoga Sequencing and in my mental map of how to structure classes, one model I use is building an outfit. Think of your wardrobe basics: jeans and a white shirt, for example. They work in a broad variety of situations—especially if you accessorize them well! There’s no need to change out the core pieces every day.

In fact, if you think of planning your next few weeks of classes, it’s almost like packing for a trip or building a capsule wardrobe. You’ll focus on choosing a few pieces you can rewear (or easily wash in a hotel sink) and combine in different ways depending on the weather and the context. Then you can layer on accessories to add a little variety and interest—without needing to make big changes to the core pieces that are keeping you covered, decent, and warm.

The middle path is having a recognizable uniform that’s well accessorized. 

Exactly How Consistent Should Your Yoga Lesson Plans Be?

What proportion of class should you be changing week to week? Probably no more than a quarter. Otherwise, you’re increasing the mental load for your students. This steeper learning curve makes it harder for them to feel present and relaxed in a sequence.

If you look out in the room and see students moving into postures before you even call them out, that means you’ve built a firm base of consistency for your pyramid. Great! Now you might want to introduce some more variety, so that students have to pay attention and stay focused and present. They can’t just zone out. And this doesn’t need to be a wholesale change. Instead, think of it as adding a new accessory—a scarf, a hat, a piece of jewelry—to a familiar outfit.

How to Add Variety in Your Class

Here are some things you can change to sprinkle in variety without changing your core sequence:

Differ the presentation of the poses by stringing together more shapes on one side at a timeOr do the opposite: do each pose one side, then the other, and notice the difference from side to sideAdd new movements with the arms even as the legs hold a familiar shape. For example, in warrior II, add cow-face arms or eagle-pose arms.Change the surface on which you’re standing—try standing on a blanket, bolster, or block to add balance challengeMove to the wall and use the wall for feedback (e.g., in tree pose, stand with your back to the wall, one arm to the wall, your straight-leg outer hip to the wall, or your bent-leg knee to the wall)Take a familiar sequence and change its relationship to gravity. For example, do your usual table-posed-based warmup from your back, or take the standing poses you’ve been working recently and find ways to make them core work or hip stretches

Want to read more?

The Art of Yoga Sequencing How Thinking about Fashion Plates Helps You Plan Your Yoga ClassWhy Consistency Matters in Yoga Lesson Plans

Ready to practice planning in this way? Join me for Plan a Month in an Hour! This workshop will equip you with the tools to create engaging and effective yoga sequences that your students will love.

We meet live online the first Tuesday of next month at 2 p.m. Eastern. When you sign up, you’ll get instructions on how to prepare to plan an entire month’s worth of yoga classes in an hour! Then we’ll work together live—I’ll be there to answer questions, and also planning my next month of classes, which I’ll share with you after the workshop ends. See you there!

read more + register

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Affirmation: Feedback Is an Expression of Taste

Yoga teachers: recognize that each student will have their own likes, dislikes, and needs. Aim to appreciate feedback, take what is useful, and set down what is simply an expression of the giver’s taste. It’s not about you.

And no one gives feedback if they don’t care.

Seek to improve while also trusting in your innate ability.

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Why Consistency Matters in Yoga Lesson Plans

Yoga teachers: imagine heading in to teach your class with the syllabus totally planned out—and also adaptable for whomever happens to be in the room that day. And not only do you know what you’ll teach in this class. You already know what the next several weeks will include, and how they will build on today’s lesson plan.

When you arrive, the studio is full of students eager to revisit what they’ve been working on all month, as well as to see what new twist you have planned for them.

That would feel pretty good, right? Let me tell you: it does. I know because I used to screw up my class planning for years before realizing consistency was key.

Students Need Consistency

Teachers try to make class exciting every week. But students don’t need excitement.

They need consistency.

I used to make the horrible mistake of changing my class format wildly from week to week. It’s embarrassing thinking back on it now! 

For example, the day Pattabhi Jois died, I led the “warmup” for the Ashtanga Primary Series—damn the torpedoes, or whether it was appropriate for the students who were present.

A couple times a year, I’d decree it was yin/yang day, and teach Paul Grilley’s very beautiful dragon yang flows. They were cool, but students saw them once and, unless they came diligently over six more months, never again.

And none of these class plans built sequentially! They were like bottle episodes in a long-running series. They could stand alone—and they didn’t have much to do with the rest of the plot line in the week to week course. They didn’t advance the character arcs of students’ development in yoga. 

Once I realized that the inchoate, random way I’d been planning wasn’t serving my students, I tried thinking about planning differently. Instead of showing up in a totally different outfit week to week, or offering a totally different menu week to week (I see you, Carmy from The Bear, with your silly idea to serve a whole new menu every night!), I’d find a way to present a well-balanced class that changed less often.

And this was what changed my classes into a vehicle for students’ transformation.

Students don’t need variety. They need consistency.

Consistency > Variety in Lesson Plans

I’ve been practicing yoga for 25 years. I go to classes two to five times a week, at my own studio and others. Many are with the same teachers, and have been for years. I notice something new in every class, even though the sequences are generally the same week in and week out! I want the consistency! All experienced practitioners do. We know that practice takes root when it’s attended to diligently over time.

The same thing goes for beginners. They need consistency so they can start to understand how to express yoga shapes in their bodies. Without a broad base, their practice will be unstable.

I’m not quite sure that anyone wants to be surprised week in or week out, anyway! Maybe the intermediate folks do, but they know just enough to be invested in the external aspects of the practice. Those at the other ends of the experience bell curve want consistency! And it’s how their practice will grow and flourish.

If you want to learn and use a simple and easy method for creating balanced lesson plans that your students will love, please read my latest book, The Art of Yoga Sequencing.

Then join me for Plan a Month in an Hour! It’s a coworking session and a Q&A where you’ll be able to get all your planning for the month done at once, which means you’ll walk into your next class feeling confident, capable, and relaxed.

register for the next session here

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