The Yoga Teacher’s Cheat Sheet

As a yoga teacher, you provide your students with inspired support and informed guidance. When you can create a safe environment where your students can explore new things within their minds and bodies, amazing things can happen. No matter what style of yoga you teach, you can follow certain parameters to create an effective and inspiring class for you and your students. By incorporating some of the following teaching strategies, you can improve the overall experience for your students and yourself.

• Develop your own personal practice. Only through your own personal practice can you find your unique voice as a teacher and gain a better understanding of how specific experiences will affect your students. Set aside time to maintain your own personal practice, along with attending classes from other instructors.
• Explain the benefits of specific yoga postures and breathing exercises. Studies have shown that educating students about their bodies and the effects of the exercises they are doing increases motivation and consistency of exercise.
• Remind students to breathe and to focus on their breath throughout their practice. When holding a difficult pose, students often begin to hold their breath. Remind them to breathe fully and deeply. It’s not good for students to hold their breath when working hard to hold a posture. Encourage students to breathe in through their nose, if possible. This helps keep their bodies warm, helps filter the air they inhale, and helps keep breathing more smooth and the breath rate slower. Focusing on their breath also brings their attention inward and can deepen their practice by stilling their mind and putting them more in touch with the present moment. Connect breath and movement. Breath plays an important role in yoga by keeping the mind focused on the body and by making movements more efficient by connecting breath with movement. Explain to students when to inhale and exhale. In yoga, it is usually best to inhale in expansion types of movements (i.e. bringing arms back or overhead, spinal extension, hip extension, etc) and exhale in “closing” types of movements (i.e. folding forward, hip flexion, rounding the back, etc)
• Encourage student to maintain a sense of ease – even during challenging postures. Remind students to breathe deeply and slowly and to relax the muscles in their face throughout the practice. A key aspect of yoga is the ability to relax and have a sense of ease, even during the most challenging times (both on and off the mat). While its beneficial for students to give their full effort as they practice challenging positions, their breath should remain slow and deep, and their face should remain relaxed, regardless of what they are doing.
• Practice effective presentation skills. Make eye contact with individual students throughout the class. Be sure to make eye contact with all parts of the classroom. Stand tall with your arms relaxed at your sides to convey confidence, yet openness.
• Focus on your students and walk the room. By focusing on your students and their needs, rather than on how you are doing as a teacher, makes you less self-conscience and more confident and helpful. Try not to stay up front too much. This only keeps you removed from your students. Walk the room so you can get up close with your students and see what they need. By being with your students, you can be more aware of how they are doing. Notice when someone needs help and offer an appropriate adjustment.
• Know your material and never stop learning. The only way to truly feel confident teaching yoga is to know your material. This means understanding the effects of the yoga poses and breathing exercises you teach and understanding how they can benefit your students, as well as understanding the philosophy and history behind yoga.  Be a good communicator. Teaching a yoga class is different than speaking with a friend or teaching an individual. It’s important to be clear and concise – using too many words can break the flow of the class and cause more confusion than help for your students. A good rule of thumb when offering instruction is to think of the body part and the way you want it to move. For example, if you want students to move from down dog into a lunge, you could say, “right foot steps forward between your hands,” or “stepping your right foot forward between your hands.” It’s a bit of a shorthand version of the way we tend to normally speak, but is more precise in getting the point across, allowing for less words and more time for students to focus within.
• Be in the moment. When you’re teaching or during your own personal practice, it is important to give your full attention to what you are doing. In your own practice, focus on each movement and on your breath. In your teaching, focus on the words you are saying as you say them and focus on the movements of each students and how you may be of help.
• Help students develop their inner awareness Remind students to focus on the feel of a movement, rather than how it looks or how they compare to other students. Encourage students to focus inward on the feeling of a pose and on their breath. This helps students stay present in the moment and connect movement and breath. Reinforce the idea that the goal of yoga is not to get into certain positions, it’s to become more aware of the present moment and more comfortable with our bodies and our movements, as well as to keep our bodies and minds healthy through movement and focus. We all have different anatomy. What’s hard for me may be easy for someone else, that doesn’t make them a better yogi. Being a great yogi means understanding and accepting your mind and body, and taking time to care for both properly.
• Remind students to not overdo and offer modifications. Many new students are excited about starting a yoga practice and may push themselves too far when using muscles that they may not have used much for years. Encourage students to use the modifications you show them for different postures and to listen to their body. If they are having a hard time maintaining a smooth breathing pattern through their nose, they may want to back off a little bit. Students who push themselves too much during their first few lessons often end up sore the next day and are less likely to continue their yoga practice. It is important for students to never force themselves into a pose. The postures are a process of gradual discovery of the body’s potential. Each person’s body is different, so encourage your student’s to honor their own body and find their own edge in each posture – that point where they are challenged, but not forcibly straining their body or their breath. Encourage students to move slowly into each posture, so they can notice when their body is telling them to stop and not overdo it.
• Help students become their own teachers Each student has two teachers: the outside teacher who guides them and their own inner guidance. Help your students develop their inner guidance, by helping them learn to connect with their bodies and make decisions about what works best for themselves. This way they can develop their own personal practice, and they can become more confident in their practice.
• Demonstrate postures effectively. Demonstrate the posture while you talk your class through it the first time. Though there are times when it is necessary to demonstrate a posture before students begin (having them watch only first), it is best to demonstrate while they are also encouraged to begin trying the posture when they are ready. When teachers take a long time to demonstrate without keeping their students involved, students begin to get distracted and out of the flow of the class. You want to keep your students actively engaged.
• Take it step by step and repeat Postures. Talk students through a pose step by step, emphasizing that they can stop at any step along the way. Encourage students to only go to their edge – challenging themselves, but not overdoing it. Encourage students to go to their “edge” that point where they feel challenged, yet their breath can remain smooth and steady. After that, repeat postures at least once or twice. This gives students a chance to maybe mostly watch the first time, but still have enough opportunity to practice the posture on their own.
• Mirror the postures. When facing the class, mirror the movements you demonstrate and do with the class. For example, when you say “reach your right arm overhead,” actually raise your left arm, so it mirrors the arm used by your class. When mirroring postures, it is usually best to use directional language rather than rights and lefts. For example, you might say “reaching your arm towards the wall with the windows” to let your students know which direction to move, as you mirror the movement in front of them.
• Use positive reinforcement. When you see someone doing something correctly, mention it to them and let them know you’ve noticed their progress.
• Make appropriate adjustments. By learning how to make simple and appropriate adjustments, you can help your students gain correct alignment in a posture or go more deeply into a posture.
• Review what you covered in class. Along with reviewing what you did in class, you can give students one or two specific postures or exercises to practice at home to encourage their home practice. Check back with students during the next class to discuss how the home practice went and if they have any questions.

By Nancy Wile
Yoga Teacher & Founder of Yoga Education Institute

Hii! I’m Nancy Wile, an advanced yoga teacher and the founder of Yoga Education Institute California. I do my best to help all my students find a sense of ease and mindfulness in each posture that they can then incorporate into other aspects of their lives.  I want you to come and join yoga workshops as you are and have some fun, and know that everything you need is right there inside of you