Yoga Teaching Tip – When do I breathe?
6 strategies for maintaining your own breath as a yoga teacher while you teach a student-focused yoga class.
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Yoga Teaching Tip – When Do I Breathe?
Teaching yoga is a funny job because you spend the whole class guiding people to breathe and talking about the importance of the breath, but you are breathing poorly because you have to keep talking.
Today I wanted to talk briefly about how to maintain a student-focused class – that means providing all the guidance your students need – while also ensuring you, as a teacher, have space to breathe and move safely.
Remember, you don’t need to sacrifice your own body in order to teach a great yoga class.
Now, this is especially important when you teach a flow-style yoga, like Vinyasa Flow or Core Yoga, which are faster paced and require a lot of technical cues in a short amount of time. You are cuing poses, transitions, and breath, offering versions and props for accessibility, and hopefully adding some useful refining cues as well.
It’s a lot!
So, here are a few tips to ensure that your students get all the guidance they need, and you can have some breathing space.
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1) Name your poses.
It will reduce how much you have to cue familiar poses. Think of the difference in cuing “exhale, pull back to Down Dog” rather than “exhale, curl your toes under, lift your hips, send your hips back to the back of the mat, etc.” Which one gives you more space to breathe? Now, this of course requires that, at some point, you teach the pose with all the cues and instructions needed and then ensure that students can connect the name with the pose and all the guidance you’ve provided.
This leads to my next tip
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2) Take your time.
Take some extra time in your first flow to give students a bit more information about each pose and transition. For example, in Sun Salutations take 2-3 breaths in each pose and transition to provide some instructive cues, imagery cues, and accessibility guidance. This gives both you and your students some space to move, breathe, make choices, and understand each part of the flow. Then, you can add some pace in your next round and rely more on pose names and breath cues rather than detailed instructive cues.
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3) Tristhana cuing strategy.
The Tristhana is the three-fold focus on body, breath, and gaze. Especially in a flow-style yoga this is a useful strategy to ensure students get the basic information they need in a one-breath, one-movement, one-cue rhythm. An example is “Inhale, reach up, gaze up. Exhale, fold forward, gaze to knees”
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4) 3 essential cues.
Building on this, especially useful when you are taking a few breaths in a pose, is the 3 Essential Cues strategy. You can’t cue everything in every pose, so work on distilling your cues down to the essentials. What do they need to know, and when? Prioritize your cues and know that you’ll have other classes to keep adding layers, refinements, and pose options. If you are doing an asymmetrical pose – like Triangle, Side Angle, etc. – you have a 2nd side to add some refinements.
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5) Reduce your demos.
Demo as much as your students need, and then get out of the pose to view, cue, and breathe. Often a gesture is enough to indicate movement, direction, and alignment – you don’t need to demo the full pose every time.
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6) Keep practicing.
Your own practice will help you in developing better fitness and breath control so that you can better manage your breath and your voice.
Respect Your Needs
I hope that these are useful tips for you, especially as a new yoga teacher, in finding a balance of cuing, demoing, guiding, while maintaining your own breath.
While your focus is on your students, of course, it’s important you don’t forget about your own needs as well.
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