My name is Jeremy Debbins and welcome back to the Yoga Teacher
Training podcast where I talk about how to improve as a
teacher. Whether you're in a teacher
training or going to take one, these are things that you can
apply to helping others learn yoga.
But also along the way, of course, you learn yourself.
So even if you don't know if you want to be a teacher, the best
way to learn yoga and to learn any topic is to learn at the
level of a teacher. So in this podcast, I share ways
to improve your practice thinking like a teacher.
And in this episode, we'll talk about these 10 common things
that you'll often hear repeated in classes.
And why do you hear them so often?
Why do so many teachers say this?
And what do they really mean when they say these things?
Some of them I really agree with some of them I don't agree with.
And I'll share my opinion, my experience based on my years of
practice and experience myself since about 2008, I've been
practicing about 2011, I've been teaching and I've just seen a
lot of people and tried a lot of things myself.
And so this is what I think can be really helpful for your
practice in this episode. And if you want to go deeper
with these topics, check out Quiet Mind dot Yoga slash CWC.
That means Q with confidence. I'll be hosting this live
workshop coming up soon and it's called Q with Confidence and it
shows you how to cue the most common poses, step by step, word
by word, and what I find to be the most helpful.
But also how to find your own voice, your own authenticity of
how to cue poses, which I think is the most important skill of a
teacher, especially online, because your words are
influencing everything that happens on that person's mat.
So every word you say matters a lot.
And if you're just saying something because you heard it
around before or some other class or you've hear repeated a
lot, but you don't really know why you're saying it, then it's
not going to have the effect and the benefit to the students.
And also for yourself of like, if you're just repeating stuff
that you've heard from other people, are you really doing
your practice? Are you really going deeper into
understanding yourself, which is really the practice of yoga, is
better understanding yourself, being more authentic, being more
true to yourself? So when we start to examine
these things, we start to find that we might not actually want
to say the things that we're saying just because we've heard
them before. So that's the first thing I
really want to share today before we get into these 10
phrases. Is that anything you learn in
yoga? Question it.
Why do they say it this way? Why do we do it that way?
Is this actually the most beneficial way?
What's the intended effect? And is there maybe a better way
to get that intended effect? Or is there something
anatomically we're doing by saying this that is helpful or
not helpful? So question everything, question
me, question your teachers and try things out.
Keep what works. Leave the rest.
So if you want to see what I found through my own research
and studies, go to Quiet mind dot yoga slash CWC.
Sign up for the Queue with Confidence workshop and I'll
guide you through the best things that I've learned about
queuing and how to queue the most common poses and avoid the
common mistakes a lot of people make.
So what are the 10 phrases? Well, the first one I want to
address is that often in a yoga class, you'll hear teachers
start to get into this certain way of talking.
So let's see if you can hear it. I'm just going to do it right
now and I'll see if you can notice it.
Inhale, step your right foot forward.
Exhale forward, fold, Inhale, raise your arms overhead.
Exhale, fold forward, inhale, step back.
Exhale chaturanga. Inhale up dog.
Exhale down dog. So that is a sort of sing song
pattern you might have noticed, right?
And there's a way you can do that that is actually kind of
hypnotic and soothing and helpful, which I like,
especially in the Vinyasa flow class where every word is just
fluid and intentional. And there's a way you can do it
where it's very distracting. And the teacher is just kind of
saying this pattern throughout the whole class, coming into the
standing forward fold and now coming U to standing and now
reaching to your right and now reaching to your left, and now
folding forward and now stepping back and now into Chaturanga and
now into U dog, right? So you've probably heard this
before. It starts to really take away
from the presence of the moment. And it's really the teacher has
lost their presence in the moment because they are just
saying this pattern that's actually not really helpful or
necessary. But the first way I did it,
hopefully you noticed there's a sort of soothing energy to it.
Inhale, step forward, exhale forward, fold, inhale, rise up
to standing, exhale, hands to heart, right?
So it's not just this locked in rhythm and cadence that can be
kind of distracting, but it breaks it up and it's more
present of just what is necessary to say with each word,
right? So hopefully you can hear the
difference of those ways of using this sort of rhythm to
your teaching. And the second example I gave,
what I would say I don't recommend is more like a
question at the end of every sentence.
Or maybe it's a sort of uncertainty of how they're
teaching because they don't fully feel confident in the pose
yet or for whatever reason. All right, and just change the
key to change the pitch, change your inflection, and it will
totally change the experience of the students who are now being
guided present moment to present moment, rather than you just
kind of repeating this singsong pattern.
I hear it so often, and if you haven't heard it yet, you're
probably going to start to notice it now.
Happens a lot for a lot of teachers.
And it can be done well, and it can be done not so well #2 Why
do people repeat this phrase of squaring your hips?
What does that mean? Square your hips?
Can your hips be a triangle? Can your hips be in a rectangle?
Can they be anything but square? Well, obviously when you're in
certain poses like Warrior two, you can have your hips start
turning out and your front leg pointing forward.
Says little external rotation of the front leg and maybe some
internal rotation of the back leg depending on how you
emphasize Warrior 2. Or you go into like a high
lunge, right? You can have your hips slightly
tilted to the side off center. So squaring your hips I think is
a very helpful cue to give and very helpful thing to notice in
the practice of if you're tilting your pelvis a little
forward or back or to the side and finding your center.
I think so much about squaring your hips is about finding your
center. And it's very helpful to find
those those Bony points that stick out at the front of the
hip in your pelvis, and to put your fingers there, one on each
hand, but one hand on each hip. And notice where your hands are
pointing. And if they're on a body,
they're going to be generally pointing pretty much the same
direction. You can't go too far off from
squaring your hips, but it's more of an alignment cue of like
where to point to your pelvis so you can point a little more to
the left, to the right, or tilting forward, tilting back,
arching the back, tucking the pelvis so you become aware of
the pelvis. So I think it's a very helpful
cue and one that every teacher will use at some point and can
be very useful #3 is keep a micro bend in your joints.
Why do we say that? Why is that important?
Well, if you lock your joints, as they say in the Bikram
dialogue, they say lock your knee, lock your knee, lock your
knee. What they're really meaning to
say anatomically is engage your quads in like a standing balance
pose. That helps with the balance
there. But if you really lock your
joints, like in down dog, you try to lock out your elbows,
lock your knees, you're putting a lot of stress on the joints
which are not meant to hold up your whole body, just with the
joints. And some people are hypermobile,
which means that when they lock their elbows, their joints point
forward a little bit rather than just being a straight line of
bones the joint is pointing out and it's putting extra strain on
the joint, which is not meant to support the whole body weight
like this. So keeping a micro bend in your
joints is one of the best things you can do to support the joints
and avoid damaging the joints and have a lifelong practice and
using your muscles and your bones and not the joints to do
the job of the muscles and the bones.
So I definitely recommend this cue and don't recommend locking
the joints. It's very rare that that would
be beneficial. If you are very aware of your
body, you could say lock the knee and no that actually you're
really just about contracting the quads.
Like if you're in tree pose, you could say lock the standing leg,
but really it's trying to activate the quadricep muscles
and not just locking the joint and focusing on the joint.
Which if you, you can do that without engaging the quads and
then you're going to overtime probably wear down the joint,
the tissue there, which is not meant to support the body weight
quite that way. It's meant to work with the the
muscles. And if you think of like how you
would move in nature if you were trying to, let's say, balance in
nature, like you wouldn't necessarily lock your joints.
Or if you're just moving things around, picking things up,
carrying things around, you're going to have a microbend in the
joints. Most of the time you're going to
be using the muscles and not just the joints.
Number four thing that teachers often repeat is tuck the tail.
Tuck the tail, tuck the tail. Why do they say tuck the tail?
What is that really pointing to? Well, this is one of those cues
that just kind of floated around yoga world for a long time and
people just always repeat it and nobody seemed to really question
it or really think about it too deeply.
And there's a lot of cues like this.
But tuck the tailbone. Often they people will say it's
to protect your low back. Like let's say in bridge pose,
you can tuck the tail. But really what is more
beneficial there is to think of contracting the glutes, and the
glutes function is hip extension.
So if we want to really do a bridge pose, or if you do this
at the gym, it's a hip thrust. You are extending the hip
flexor. So the front of your hips are
lengthening versus when you're in hip flexion, like when you're
sitting down in a chair, that's hip flexion.
When you go into a squat, that's hip flexion.
The front of the hips, the distance between your belly and
your thigh is shortening. That's hip flexion.
The opposite of that is hip extension.
Like think of Warrior 3. When you say you're Warrior
three, you raise your right leg up and back.
It's a straight leg. Your glutes must engage to do
Warrior 3 because the glutes are the hip extensors.
So you've got a straight front of your hip, you've got an
active glute. That's ideal anatomy.
You do a bridge pose, you've got the front of the hips
lengthening, you want to engage the glutes.
That's ideal anatomy. That's how the body is meant to
work. But something like chair pose,
what's happening in chair pose? This is where people say tuck
the tail a lot. Chair pose, tuck the tail.
Why? Why do we say that?
So what's happening in chair? Well, the glutes are getting
lengthened in chair pose. We're going into hip flexion in
chair pose. So this shortening the distance
between your belly and your thigh, chair pose, it's like
when you're sitting in a chair, your hips are in flexion and
when the hips are in flexion, the glutes are lengthening.
And if you try to tuck the tail, that is an action that will
typically activate the glutes. So anatomically, why would we
want to activate the glutes, contract the glutes when we're
doing a hip flexion, that's the opposite of what the glutes do,
right? When we activate the glutes, we
go into hip extension. So there is a little bit of
isometric activation in every yoga pose, especially balancing
poses. So there is a little bit of the
glutes are a little active in chair pose, but the main thing
that's happening is they're lengthening and the main thing
that's contracting are the hip flexors, the SOAS muscle and the
ileosoas. The front of the hip is
contracting. So when we say tuck the tail
from there, it just doesn't really need to happen.
So most of the time in chair pose, I'll just say come into
chair pose and not talk about the pelvis or the tailbone
because it's not really necessary there unless you see
something dramatic, like if somebody has a spinal lordosis
where they have a major arch in the back, it may be a big
imbalance. For now, they're putting a lot
of weight into the lower back and a lot of stress on the low
back that doesn't need to be there.
So if you see a huge arch in the low back and chair pose, maybe
that person would benefit from tucking the pelvis a little bit.
But again, we're doing a hip flexion there, so we want to use
the hip flexors in the pose, which means we don't tuck the
tail. We just hit the hips back and do
chair pose and the hip flexors activate, the glutes lengthen,
everything's good. So I do not recommend saying
tuck the tail in chair pose, but I do recommend thinking of
activating and cueing to activate the glutes in bridge or
other hip flexion or hip excuse me, other hip extension poses
like Warrior 3 #5 why did the teacher say roll up to stand 1
vertebrae at a time? Like we're going from forward
fold, we roll up to stand and sometimes this used to be more
common, people would say swan dive up and that's these are
both fine. These are both OK, you can do
either one. But why do we roll up to stand?
Well, if you do it slowly like this, it helps to avoid low
blood pressure issues. If somebody has low blood
pressure and they stand up too fast, they're going to get
dizzy. They might even faint as an
extreme case. Also, if they have low blood
pressure, they might benefit from doing things like
inversions, legs up the wall, improving their hydration,
improving their iron in their diet.
These are other issues for low blood pressure, but that helps.
That's one of the reasons why helps with that.
Another is to activate the core as you come up, so you're using
more of your whole body and not just kind of throwing yourself
up into standing. Maybe by doing so, you move too
fast in the low back. You don't distribute the weight,
and now you're low back takes on a lot of stress and the
vertebrae of the low back are quickly moved from one position
to another. And that's a problem.
Like that's something we want to avoid in yoga is quickly moving
from flexion to extension in the spine.
That kind of fast movement is where we're more likely to slip
a disc in the vertebrae, which in yoga is probably not going to
happen just trying to stand up. But over time that's an
unnecessary stress. So I do recommend rolling up 1
vertebrae at a time slowly like this.
I think it's a good cue. The reverse swan dive coming up
can work well, but you've really got to emphasize activating the
core, and it's more like the core is doing all the work.
So if you used your low back too much in that if you start to
round your low back and you're putting all this weight on it of
your arms extending and your spine lifting, that is when you
can likely slip a disc in the low back and you can have issues
there. So if you're going to do the
reverse swan dive, really focus on emphasizing the core,
activating the core 1st and it's like the core is doing all the
work to get you up and that's fine.
That's an OK way to do it. And if you don't have any blood
pressure issues especially, that's fine.
But if you do have blood pressure issues, if you want to
protect your low back, if you want to move slowly through the
vertebrae to not rush from the flexion to extension, then
rolling up one vertebrae time is great.
Especially at the beginning of class, as you get flowing, as
everything gets warmed up, these bigger movements are less
consequential, so you can more easily go from the flexion to
extension in the spine with less risk because your body's warmed
up and ready for it. But especially in the beginning,
go slow #6Q. Root down through your feet.
How do I root down through my feet?
I don't have roots in my feet. What does that really mean?
Well, it's an energetic thing and if you want to experience
it, I think you can explore this by just standing in mountain
pose and just give a little more bend to your knees and even
maybe bounce a little bit, like just a slight bouncing in the
knees to feel the weight shift down into the feet.
You could do heel drops as well, like lifting and dropping your
heels a few times to bring more attention awareness to your
feet. But it is an energetic hue and
it's more subtle and maybe not for beginners because beginners
might be like, I don't know which would how do you root
down? I'm already standing.
Like, how much more could I be standing?
So it doesn't quite make logical sense.
And I think there's a lot of importance in the space for
spiritual energy and energetic work and yoga.
That's a very important part of the practice.
So what does it mean to root down?
Well, energetically, there's a feeling of energy moving down
rather than up or out or to your center.
This is one of the values which I'll save for another episode,
but the values are 5 directions energy can move.
One of them is down. And when we allow energy to move
down, there's a sort of relaxing of tension moving up.
Maybe your shoulders are hunched up, but you relax them a little
bit. Now energy can move down.
Maybe you've got a little tension in your belly you've
been holding on to, and you can relax that a little bit and
energy can move down the feet. So if you're listening to this
podcast, you've probably experienced it at some point.
Another way to experience it is to really put your feet in the
earth, like on the dirt or in sand, and even cover your feet
up so you feel the earth energy. It's it's an energetic effect to
bring it to your attention in a yoga class.
One thing you might try to do also is to do a chair pose and
then come back to stand holding chair for a while and the energy
is moving down, down, down in chair pose.
And you might feel your feet a little more consciously, a
little more heavy in the feet just from holding chair pose for
a little bit. And then another thing, the last
thing I'll say you could try with this is just one foot
balance. It's like holding tree pose for
a while and feel how different it feels to have one foot
floating off the ground and the other foot rooting into the
ground and then shift to the other side.
So this can bring more awareness to this as well.
Number seven thing, why do people often say engage your
core? I already talked about it today.
So engage your core. What does that really mean?
Well, there's different ways to engage your core.
And often what we're referring to as yoga teachers is the sort
of bracing of activating the transverse abdominals.
This is when you do plank pose. What holds you up in plank?
Because you're not doing a crunch, you're not activating
the rectus abdominals, the six pack muscles, you're not doing
side bends, activating the lateral muscles in the
intercostals. But we're just holding and sort
of bracing. Like if somebody was going to
punch you in the stomach, you would brace for impact.
And it's kind of like a corset around your core and literally
is around your organs to support the organs.
So when we say engage the core, engage the transverse abdominals
like plank, like you're sort of bracing for impact on your core
and that is going to support your spine.
It's going to support every other function of the body and
every other pose. So it's a great cue.
And it can be a little vague again.
So if you want to focus on how to engage my core, what are they
talking about? Plank pose is your friend there,
or forearm plank if you have any wrist issues #8 teachers so
often will say inhale to reach up, exhale to fold forward.
Why don't we say inhale to fold forward, exhale to reach up?
Well, it's working with the lungs.
And this is a good a cue I recommend, and I think it's
useful. So many time we're expanding,
opening, lifting, raising, creating space.
That is a time to inhale. And anytime we're contracting,
closing, folding in, that's a time to exhale.
So we're just working with the natural movement of the, the
front of the body because the back of the body is actually
doing other stuff. There's back of the lungs as
well, but we're really focusing more on the front of the body
with this breath pattern. And you could, you could switch
it up, you could try it and see what it feels like.
But you might find that it feels very restrictive and limiting
and just the way everything moves with the organs and the
diaphragm and the breath and the lungs.
This is often the best way. Inhale, reaching up, creating
space, lengthening back bends, your inhale.
And on the exhales, you fold, you close in, you contract, you
create less space on the front of the body.
And it's a great cue. So I think it's one of the most
important ones to know as a teacher #9 soften your gaze.
Why do teachers often say to soften your gaze?
Let's go. Let's say you're sitting in
bound angle pose, feet together, knees apart, and the teacher
says soften your gaze. Well, this is an energetic
effect, right? If you want to be more alert,
more sharp, more clear, more focused, you focus your gaze,
you sharpen your attention. You pick a single point of focus
of a drishti, a focal point, and that sharpens your attention,
makes you more, a little more pizza, a little more Yang.
Again, this is an energetic thing.
Try it for yourself, test it out, see if it feels true to
you. But when you soften your gaze,
that's more relaxing, more kapha, more letting go, maybe
diffusing energy. Maybe you've got a lot of
tension going on in your day and you want to start to come to
yoga practice to relax a little bit and release some of that
tension. Softening your gaze helps to do
that. So it's a cue I recommend.
It's a good cue. It's useful to soften your gaze,
but it's not always ideal for everybody.
And this is true for most cues that it's just a choice.
It's an energetic effect. If I soften my gaze, it's a
softening effect. If I sharpen my gaze and focus
my eyes, it's a focusing effect. And you as the practitioner,
always have choice in what you want to do in your class and
your practice. And if you're a teacher, it's
important, I think, to give students this option.
And sometimes you might just say soften your gaze here.
Sometimes you might teach like I just did here and, and just give
options of notice how it feels for you.
If you feel like you need a little more sharpness, a little
more Yang energy, sharpen your gaze, focus on a single point.
If you feel like you need a little more softness, a little
letting go, soften your gaze. And there's so many choices
throughout yoga like this. So many other examples like you
can keep your fingers together in Warrior 2 or you can spread
your fingers out in Warrior 2 and they have a more containing
or diffusing effect on the pose. So we've got lots of options to
explore in every pose like this. And #10 why do teachers often
repeat this phrase? Well, again, if you want to go
deeper into more phrases like this, all the best cues I found
go to quiet mind dot yoga slash CWC.
Check out the Queue with Confidence workshop.
Join me live, ask your questions, test things out.
We'll be practicing and we'll be applying these lessons.
So the number 10 thing teachers often repeat is breathe down
into your belly. Now, why do we say that breathe
into your belly sometimes, let's say even breathe to the base of
the spine. And is that ideal to breathe
into the belly? Shouldn't we keep it more in the
upper lungs? Like there's some yoga
traditions that say only breathe in the upper lungs and you focus
there. Well, I think it is ideal to
breathe into the belly and to notice the effect, right?
If you focus on the upper lungs, it's tends to be ideal for like
fast-paced vinyasa practice where there's less space to
breathe and you're moving quickly through a lot of shapes.
But when you breathe into the belly, it allows your belly to
relax. It allows your organs to relax a
little more. It allows you to use more of the
full capacity of the lungs using the diaphragm as well.
And you really, when you're doing that, you're using the
diaphragm, which allows more space for the lungs.
And if you've ever tried to sing, and if you ever listen to
any singer hold a note for a long time, they're using the
diaphragm muscle to control the flow of breath to the lungs.
So that is the real ability to control the breath.
Pranayama, to control the life force energy is to use the
diaphragm. So this is a cue I do recommend
most of the time unless you're in a fast-paced vinyasa flow or
power class where actually breathing a little more shallow
in the lungs makes a little more sense and just happens
naturally. And there's maybe times where
you hold poses, you breathe into the belly to help balance that
out and relax a little bit. But you keep that sort of fast
pace and the activation and the more alert state of the lung
breath, but you get down in the belly, you get these more
relaxed breaths, you get more control of the breath flow, of
the energy flow, and it allows you to go into deeper meditative
states over time, especially when you start to go into
meditation after the asana practice, The belly breath is
ideal to go into the meditative states in my perspective and in
my experience. So these are 10 things I hear
often in classes. Maybe you've got some other
ones. You can send me an e-mail to
Jeremy at Quiet Mind dot Yoga. If you've got questions for
future episodes or want to talk about other cues you've heard or
why do we say this or what does that really mean, you can send
those to me. But hopefully this gave you some
perspective on ten of the most common ones.
And if you want to go deeper into your queuing studies and
get confident with some of the most common poses with teaching
and practicing them, I give you word for word what I find to be
the best way to teach all the most common poses.
And I've tried so many things like it.
It's like, there's so many ways you could say happy baby, how to
get in and out of happy baby. But there's one way that I find
it's like, it just covers everything.
It makes it so simple. And then when you get really
efficient with your words as a teacher, it gives you a lot of
space to have a theme to go deeper into philosophy or
anatomy or something that you want to share as a teacher
beyond just the poses. And you've got like the
essential G of the pose. OK, go here, step there, do
that. Now we're in the pose.
Now we can explore the values, or the doshas, or the koshas or
the chakras or the gunas, all these cool energetic things that
make the class so much deeper than just exercise.
There's space to explore it when there's space in your queuing,
when your words are efficient, when everything you say is
intentional and clear and to the point.
It has not a lot of wasted space of trying to explain things and
losing the students because they're not sure what you're
trying to explain or why you're explaining it that way.
So this is what we talked about at Q with Confidence, Quiet mind
at Yoga slash CWC. And if you enjoy the podcast,
leave a review, share with a friend, and look forward to
sharing more with you next time on the Yoga Teacher Training
Podcast.