Ep 67: How to Teach Anatomy? - Teacher Questions Answered

Understanding anatomy is super important as a movement teacher. You may have noticed that I weave this sentiment in many of my episodes. I've received a few questions from teachers who listen to the podcast about their challenges with teaching anatomy in their classes, and I thought I’d answer their questions in this episode because I wonder if you have these same questions as well!

I'm excited for you to listen because the answers will surely be helpful for you too!

Mentioned in this episode:
Ep 66: Staying Within Your Scope of Practice

Transcript

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Understanding anatomy is super important as a movement teacher. I weave that sentiment in many of my episodes. I received a few questions from teachers who listened to the podcast, and I thought I'd answer them in this episode because I wonder if you have these same questions too. Okay. Let's hop right in. Welcome to the Essential Conversations for Yoga Teachers Podcast with me. I'm Monica Bright and I've been teaching yoga and running my yoga business for over a decade. This is the podcast for you. If you are a yoga teacher, you're looking for support. You love to be in conversation, and you're a lifelong student. In this podcast, I'll share with you. My life as a yoga teacher, the lessons I've learned, my process for building my business and helpful ideas, tools, strategies and systems I use and you can use so that your business thrives. We'll cover a diverse range of topics that will help you, whether you're just starting out or you've got years under your belt and you wanna dive deep and set yourself up for success. I am so glad you're here. Listen, I don't take myself too seriously, so expect to hear some laughs along the way. Now let's do this together. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. If you've been listening since the start of the podcast, I love it and thank you for sticking around. If you're new, welcome. We talk about a lot of subjects to help you with your teaching career. Many are some deeper conversations that we really don't have in the teaching world, which is why I titled the show Essential Conversations for Yoga Teachers. Smart I. Right. I've really enjoyed creating each episode for you, and they are packed with information, so if you binge them, I won't mind at all. I add a link at the end of every episode for you to send me a message. It could be a question or a comment or anything you wanna share with me. I love teaching anatomy and I weave that sentiment in many of my episodes. I got a few questions from teachers who listen to the podcast and I thought I'd answer them in this episode for everyone to hear because I wonder if you have these same questions as well. Alright, let's get started. Question number one is from Nicole. She wrote, I teach vinyasa, and with the pace of the class cues and theming, I feel like I would be stumbling over all of my words. I have started to study a little anatomy, but my question is how do I start to incorporate anatomy information into my classes? I have no idea where to start. Okay, first, Nicole, congratulations for taking the step you did to begin learning a bit more about anatomy. What I want you to remember, and you can put this in your back pocket, is that this road is never ending. There's so much to learn and there's always something new to learn, which is exciting because that means we're all learning something new every day. So resist getting into the mindset that you have to know it all or that you'll never know it all. One piece of advice that I give Vinyasa yoga teachers is to learn to talk less, and sometimes that can be hard. Think about giving a little space, a little breathing room for your students to hear your words and let those words soak in. Think about giving a few less cues. I'm gonna ask you a question, and I just want you to be honest with yourself. Are you actually looking at your students? Listen, I have been there where I wasn't looking at anyone because I was just trying to get through my sequence. It wasn't a good feeling, but that was early on in my teaching career and I was teaching a lot of fast paced classes. I made a point to slow down a little bit and look at what students were doing in class and speak to something specific that I saw. I am gonna give you an example of a movement that I would teach and weave in a little bit of anatomy or movement knowledge into the queuing. Imagine your students are lying on their backs in half Corps pose, so. Knees bent and their arms by their sides. The movement I'm going to teach is called Pelvic Rocks. It's a somatic movement that can be easily weaved into a Vinyasa class. It will help students pay attention to their own movement. Notice what it feels like and give you information about the degree of movement that students have, or at least an idea of how well they connect to their bodies. You'd be surprised with the differences you see teaching. This little movement will help you get in the mind frame of looking at your students and noticing what's happened. Then choose your queuing from there. I'll often ask them to place their peace fingers on the bony protrusion on the. Front of their pelvis and as they rock their pelvis, notice how it moves forward and back then, I'd ask them to notice how their low back lifts away from the floor, and then lowers and connects to the floor. I might mention how their lumbar spine is moving with the movement of their pelvis, and ask them to imagine that variation of movement in their lumbar spine, and then be quiet. And give them space to do that. Even in a Vinyasa class, you can do this. It could take as little as 90 seconds. At the start of class, I like to also connect movements throughout the sequence. So I would also teach this pelvic rock in tabletop and chair pose and begin to weave in more information like anterior and posterior tilt of the pelvis, and ask students to rock back and forth between the two and settle their movement on where it feels like neutral to them. Here's a hint. Neutral is different for everybody. You see how you're moving away from strict alignment rules and encouraging students to find their own positioning that feels good in their bodies. I'd also add, we've done this before, just in a different orientation, and if you are leading up to a peak pose where you want students to be mindful of the position of their pelvis, for example, let's say a standing balance such as tree pose, you can then continue the queuing you've done throughout class. Notice the position of your pelvis. Does it feel like it's in neutral? Okay. I admit, I ask students questions in class, questions that I want them to answer for themselves and make their own decision on whether or not they want to shift their alignment. My belief is that it's all about students choosing what's best for them, what feels right and what doesn't. We don't live in their bodies, so we can't know how they experience a particular alignment. Give them the freedom to choose. Okay? This was a really simple way that I'd weave in a little bit of anatomy information into my classes. Again, slow down, talk less, add a movement, give students a chance to experience it, and drop in a little bit of anatomy. It might take some practice. Yes. It took me time to get used to talking in class like this too, but the difference was that I wasn't just giving alignment cues for students to try to follow. I was starting to look more at students, teach them something I was learning, ask them questions, and give them the space to feel into their own bodies. You can do it too, so try it out, and I would love to hear how it goes. If it feels choppy or uncomfortable, then you know you're doing something right, which is changing up and involving your teaching. I'm excited for you to try. Okay. Question number two is from Maria, and she asks, why is learning about anatomy so important? I'm just teaching yoga and I don't think my students wanna hear all of that. I get it, Maria. I get that. Well, you never know, but what I will ask you is do you want to teach more about anatomy? If the answer is yes, then I would advise you to step into the kind of teaching that you want to be offering and. You'll attract the students who want to hear about anatomy. You cannot please everyone, and if you try to, you'll run yourself into the ground. So don't do that. Be authentically you. Students will come and go anyway. It's just the nature of the business. But you will retain students and you'll find that students become more regular and your class sizes will increase. When I chose to start talking more anatomy in my classes, I attracted these types of students. They wanted this information, and so they found themselves seeking out my classes and asking me questions before or after class. Okay. I don't want you to freak out about that. Because that can be a little scary too, the idea that a student would ask you an anatomy question when you're just starting to dive in and learn more about it. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, I don't know, and I'm gonna look that up. You are learning in this process too, and they've just given you something to study that maybe you haven't thought of on your own. So be honest with yourself. Do you want to teach anatomy? If so, go for it. There are plenty of students out here who would love your classes. The main point I'm trying to make here is be authentically you don't chase students, just be you and the students will come. The last question is from Linda and she wrote, everyone keeps telling me that talking about anatomy is outside of my scope of practice. So when I think about talking about anatomy, I feel like I shouldn't because my manager will tell me not to. Alright. Warning here I am an against the grained kind of girly. I've always enjoyed stepping outside of the box and if someone tells me I can't do something, oh, you better believe I'm going to figure out a way to actually do it. Maybe it's the Aries in me. I don't know about that, but I wanna make a few points here. Number one, you are a teacher of movement. It is imperative that you understand anatomy and movement. So the idea that you would be outside of your scope of practice, I think is nonsense. We're talking anatomy, not diagnosing and giving medical advice. Yeah. Point number two, if you're curious about learning more on a subject and want to incorporate that education into your classes, you should be able to, if you were learning more on Ayurveda, you'd wanna teach students about that, right? It's the same thing. Point number three. I always encourage teachers to be cognizant of the source of the feedback they're getting. I've had my fair share of dealing with studio owners who were threatened by the amount of education I was acquiring and how that had such a positive impact on my classes. They were packed, but the source felt a certain kind of way about it because. her classes were not equally as full. This is probably a longer story for another day, but it taught me so much about considering the source. I have more stories about considering the source, but I'll just leave it at this one. And finally, point number four. You may hear doctors or physical therapists tell you to stay within your scope, and sometimes all of this is just a way to keep you in a box. You can teach anatomy and stay within your scope of practice. You can talk about injuries and stay within your scope of practice. Your job is to be mindful and educated on what you teach and what you share. If you have experience with an injury, talk about it. I think that's when I started to feel more confident with talking to students about anatomy and injuries. For example, I've had a hamstring tendon here, which is super common in yoga. I know what it feels like, what makes it worse, and what makes recovery better or easier to navigate, you think? I'm not gonna talk to a student who thinks they have a hamstring tear. I absolutely. Am I'm going to ask about their experience so far, but I'm also going to tell them that they need to get a diagnosis. So I'm not playing doctor, but I am speaking from firsthand experience. Episode number 66 is all about staying in your scope of practice. I'll link it below. Go have a listen, because I go a bit deeper in that episode. I think you'll enjoy it if staying within your scope is a concern for you. Okay. How are you feeling? Did any of these questions resonate with you? I could talk about this stuff for days, but I'm also trying to be concise and mindful of your time. If you have any follow up questions, please send me a message and I would love to read it and answer it. I love reading your questions and I feel more connected to you when you send them in. So thank you to Nicole, Maria and Linda. Your questions are on point, and I think a lot of yoga teachers have the same or similar questions as well. If you want a deeper understanding of anatomy, injuries, and pain, I truly believe that you are a movement educator and we all must understand the human body, it's movements and injuries in order to be effective in our teaching. It is so important for us to have these conversations so that you remember that there are so many opportunities for you in the teaching world. If you haven't already download the ebook sequencing for different injuries. The link is in the show notes, and I promise you it will help form a foundation for teaching students with injuries and aging bodies. The information will also help you understand how to accommodate students of different abilities, and it'll be a great resource for you to return to again and again. When you download the ebook, you'll be joining my newsletter. That's just for yoga teachers. I've got more exciting teachings coming soon, so I wanna tell you all about them. The link is in the show notes below, and I would love for you to join it so we can always stay. Connected. I've also added a link to episode number 66 staying within your scope of practice. But seriously scroll back and have a listen to other episodes I have on pain and the nervous system. You know that my goal is for you to love the yoga teaching life and allow it to be fulfilling and rewarding. And as always, it may take some time and some work to get there. If you love this episode, let me know. I've added a link in the show notes for you to send me a quick message about your thoughts on this episode. I won't know your phone number. It's just an addition to the platform I use that allows for this new and easy way for you to communicate with me. Okay, once you click on it, it'll take you to your messages, but don't delete the code. That's how your message will get to me, and I would love to read your thoughts. Subscribe to the podcast so you're always in the know when a new episode drops and share it with another yoga teacher who you think would love to be in on these conversations. Thank you for helping to spread the word about this podcast and if you've been taking notes in your journal as you listen to these episodes, I'm so glad you are and I would love to hear about it. Alright, that's it for now. Bye.