What I Learned About Cues in Yoga Teacher Training Wasn't Working. Here’s What I Do Instead.

Like a lot of new yoga teachers, I graduated teacher training knowing a list of “correct” cues for each pose. The feet should go here, the knees there, the hips just so, and the same for the shoulders, arms, and head.

It didn’t take me many classes to realize that by the time I’d rattled off the list of cues, there was no time left to mention the breath or provide an experience of quiet stillness for students in the pose. Even worse, regulars seemed to completely tune out after hearing the same instructions again and again.

That list that had once seemed so helpful began to feel rote, like a mediocre script to recite rather than something that provided meaningful insight to students.

I was forced to confront something that I knew to be true but didn’t know how to work around: being a yoga teacher is about a lot more than repeating memorized cues. Somehow I had to find a new way to guide students to and through poses that provided key information they would listen to, while leaving space for their own experience.

How I Learned to Cue Yoga Poses

It gradually occurred to me that my regular students knew the poses well enough to come into them without my cueing each aspect. Anyone who was new to yoga or to my class could figure out how to come into a pose by looking at others. With that in mind, I began to test out a different approach to cueing.

I split my list of most reliable cues into small sections. The first time students came into a pose, I would carefully cue the lower body. When they came into a pose on the second side, I would cue the upper body.

Not only did student alignment not suffer, the approach allowed me enough time to include details that extended beyond the cookie-cutter cues I had memorized from teacher training. Instead of instructing students to “ground through your feet,” for example, I had time to encourage them to “spread your weight evenly between the four corners of each foot and spread your toes.”

I also learned that if I repeated a pose multiple times, I could break the cues down even further. The first time I cued Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana II) from a lunge, for example, I could carefully position the feet and legs by asking students to ground their back heel, align their front heel with their back heel or arch, and magnetize their feet toward each other to engage their legs. Then I could simply add “keep your front knee bent, and rise to face toward the long edge of your mat for Warrior 2.” The second time I cued it, I could set students up more succinctly by saying “plant your feet and come up to Warrior 2,” then hone in on the position of their hips and engagement in their core.

As I began to experiment with my cues, I varied my words to speak even more to the intangibles I was hoping to cultivate in each class. For example, in an energizing practice, I might invite students to “stoke the fire in your core,” “shine your chest forward,” “radiate out through your fingers,” or “brighten your gaze.”

I still rely on some of those YTT cues, but they are no longer my only options. Varying my language not only inspires my creativity, it inspires my students. Instead of the well-worn prompts that can become so familiar as to feel like background noise, more specific cues and creative language can cut through the clutter. This encourages even the most experienced student to listen, and perhaps learn. And isn’t that, after all, what we teachers are trying to cultivate in a yoga practice?