Ep 69: Why Alignment Cues Don’t work For Everyone - Part 2

We discussed safety in the last episode because I believe we all come from that standpoint. Thinking safety begs the question, “Is our understanding of 'correct alignment' safe for all students?” That took me down a deep rabbit hole and was an inspiration for these episodes on what we teach students about alignment.

Ask yourself if, since your initial Yoga Teacher Training, have your beliefs around alignment in yoga evolved significantly? 

In this episode, we’ll explore more around changing our ideas & our teaching about alignment by focusing on skeletal variations & students’ personal preferences.

Transcript

Monica: 0:01

We are back with another alignment conversation. Since this conversation has so many legs, I've been careful about how I cover the many beliefs around it. I wanna continue to be mindful of your time and how you receive and integrate information. So if I were to cram all of my thoughts into one episode, it would be a really long episode and. One thing my career in education has taught me is how to disseminate information easily and to give you space to ponder and understand it. In this episode, I'm going to focus on two more perspectives that we once held onto, but are moving away from. Those are skeletal variations and personal preference. If you don't have it already, go get your journal, 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. You know, I love having conversations around anatomy, pain, injuries, the nervous system, and how these affect your sequencing. Over the years and throughout my continuing education, I found that these different conversations were not being tied. Together. For example, if I wanted to learn more about injuries, I was just learning about specific injuries, but that education was not being tied back to sequencing. I had to put those pieces together myself, and while I was doing that, I started diving even deeper into certain subjects, one of them being alignment and why we're so rigid when it comes to it. Okay. We discussed safety in the last episode because I believe we all come from that standpoint. However, it begs the question is our understanding of correct alignment safe for all students. That took me down a deep rabbit hole and was inspiration for these episodes on what we teach students about alignment. Here's a question. Since your initial yoga teacher training, have your beliefs around alignment in yoga evolved significantly? Traditionally alignment was taught as a set of fixed universal principles, certain cues, angles, and posture requirements that were considered correct for all bodies. You can see examples of this in many yoga books. However, the discussions we're having now about alignment rules are influenced by movement, science, biomechanics, and inclusivity. Now we've incorporated an emphasis on functional movement, individual variation, and nervous system safety over rigid alignment rules. In this episode, we'll explore more around changing our ideas and our teaching about alignment by focusing on skeletal variations and students' personal preference. First up, let's discuss skeletal variation and why people's poses look different. Skeletal variation refers to natural differences in bone structure, joint shape, and proportions from. Person to person. These differences can affect how someone moves, how much mobility they have, and how their body aligns in different yoga poses. Think about the student who is six foot three inches with long legs, versus another student like myself who is four feet, 11 and three quarters inches, and hey, I claim all of those three quarters. Of an inch. Imagine us both in a standing forward fold, If we just stay on the topic that our bones are different lengths, the taller student may never be able to touch their fingers to the ground no matter how often they fold or practice. It's because of their skeletal makeup that the pose looks different in our bodies. As teachers, we must honor this truth For many years, we were trained to assume that if a student couldn't achieve a certain alignment, they just needed more flexibility or more practice. But we now acknowledge that bone structure, not just flexibility, limits movement. So remember. Bone structure plays a huge role in yoga poses. Some students will never be able to get into certain shapes due to differences in joint structure, and instead of forcing students into a specific look, we should encourage exploration and adaptation. So let's look at a few more skeletal variations that affect alignment in Asana. First is The shape and depth of the hip socket, the acetabulum and femur head, that's the thigh bone, will vary from person to person. Some people have shallow hip sockets allowing for more external rotation, meaning it's easier to do poses like lotus pose or even just a seated cross leg pose. Others have. Deep hip sockets, which may limit external rotation and make poses like lotus or wide-legged forward folds or even tree pose a little bit more difficult. No amount of stretching will change someone's bone structure, meaning some poses just aren't possible for certain students. You'll never know someone's hip socket structure because students aren't coming to class with their x-rays in hand. That would be the only way you could know the shape of their hip sockets. Secondly, as I mentioned in the example above is femur length. That's the thigh bone. Now you can generally see this from the outside. The next time you're teaching, look at someone and just take a visual measurement from their hip crease to their knee joint. Compare the measurement to yours. Do you have a visible difference? If you wanna get more technical, maybe with someone you know, you could use a measuring tape and compare the difference or the similarities in the lengths of your femur bones. A person with long femurs may look different in poses than other students, But it's not wrong. It's just their alignment and that's appropriate for their bodies. All right. Number three is spinal curvature, the spine has natural curves, and it needs to, because this is how our bodies absorb shock and forces. Imagine if you were to jump from the third stair and your vertebrae were stacked straight on top of one another. It would affect how your body absorb the forces from connecting with the ground when you landed. The cervical and lumbar spines have what's called a lordotic. Curve and the thoracic spine and your sacrum have a natural forward rounding called kyphosis, or a kyphotic curve. You can move the thoracic spine a bit, but you cannot move your sacrum because the bones are fused together and although it moves a little bit, it moves as a unit. These natural curves of the spine vary from student to student, and they influence their back bends and forward folds. Some people's lumbar spine that's in the lower back has a greater natural curve making back bins like wheel pose feel easier. Others may struggle due to less curvature in their lumbar spine. And finally, let's touch on the structure of the shoulder joint. The shoulder joint is naturally a more shallow joint than the hip joint, which makes it more mobile and more prone to injury. Some people have naturally more mobile shoulder joints, which allows for more overhead arm movements, for example, in downward facing dog. However, again, I caution you that this joint can be unstable and we should not be forcing extreme movements, especially in weight-bearing poses. Some students may experience bony limitations that make raising their arms overhead, uncomfortable, or restricted. Again, you would not know this for sure unless you looked at their x-rays. However, there are some arm movements that you can practice with them and see where they naturally stop. That might be an indicator that they have a skeletal restriction, which will limit more movement. here's the takeaway. Instead of telling students that oppose must look a certain way, offer variations, encourage your students to explore what works for their bodies. Some students might need a wider stance, a different hand position, or props. and resist, assuming that lack of flexibility is the issue. If a student is struggling in a pose, it could be their bone structure, and not tight muscles. Now let's shift and discuss students' personal preference because this is a big deal. As teachers, we should hold the belief that alignment is a personal matter. What works for one student may not be safe. Functional or accessible for another. Instead of trying to fit students into rigid alignment models, we should help students explore and decide what alignment works best for their own unique bodies. It should be taught as a personal decision because like I mentioned before, skeletal variations matter differences in joint shape, bone length, and spinal curves Affect how oppose feels and functions for each student. If you find that a student struggles in a pose, it might not be about their flexibility or how strong or tolerant they are. It could be simply their bone length and or how their bones fit together. Okay. Secondly, what if a student has their own personal goals and intentions for their practice? Some students practice yoga for movement while others focus on strength, stress relief, or injury recovery. The best alignment depends on what they need and what they want from their practice, which also means they need to seek teachers that can give them what they want. Third, a student's pain and injury history plays a huge role in their practice. A student with a history of back pain or knee issues may need a different stance, A different kind of prop support or even another pose variation than someone without those concerns. It's our job to help students modify their alignment based on their comfort and function rather than fitting them into an aesthetic idea, Since I've had hamstring injuries on my left leg, my warrior too looks different on the left side than it does on the right. It continues to feel different side to side for me as well. So if a teacher would've asked me to go deeper on the left side, I wouldn't really wanna do that because of my own personal injury history. Finally, there's movement, preferences, and comfort. Some students feel better in a slightly different alignment than the textbook version of a pose. For example, in Warrior One, some students will naturally turn their back foot out more because of how their hip joint is structured. Forcing them into a narrower stance could create unnecessary sensation or strain. I could go on for days about alignment rules in Warrior One from the length, width, and foot positioning of the stance to the hips spine, where the shoulders face overhead, arm positioning to the gaze. Warrior one is a lot. And I used to hate this pose because I was being taught specific alignment rules And simultaneously being told that if I hated it, it meant I needed to practice it more. That's a whole entire rabbit hole that we could go down. We should be giving students permission to position their bodies in ways that feel right for them. I have so many examples of this in my body and in students' bodies. I could go on and on. If there's a specific pose that you feel like you wanna give students some leeway in but don't know how, send me a message. Let me know which one, and I can talk you through it. Instead of trying to adjust students to fit a specific pose, think of alignment as a conversation, not a command. Resist assuming that there is an ideal alignment for everyone. Students already feel pressured to look a certain way, poses, but we can teach them to listen to their own bodies and encourage students to explore what feels best for them. Instead of saying the correct alignment for this pose is try saying, pause here and explore what alignment feels best for your body right now. or instead of saying, your feet must always be hip with distance apart. Try saying. Try a few different foot placements and notice what feels the most stable for you. The main takeaway from this episode is to help you to encourage students to listen to their bodies and make alignment choices based on what feels safe, stable, and functional, rather than what looks. Correct. Our bodies are different whether it's because of skeletal variations or personal preference, and students should be given the freedom to practice in a way that feels safe and supportive for their bodies, not following an arbitrary alignment rule or a picture in a book. Remember, alignment is personal and your cues should be exploratory and encouraging. In next week's episode, we'll dive into strength versus flexibility, nervous system responses, and injury prevention. If you leave knowing this, students' bodies are different, and we should celebrate all of the differences we see then I think I've done my job on this episode. what do you think about queuing alignment? Have you ever told a student to just keep practicing and one day you'll get it? Have you ever asked a student to change their alignment based on what you think they should look like? I always want you to leave feeling empowered. I too have been here. I didn't know any better, but then I learned more about anatomy, movement, injuries, and the nervous system, and it changed my teaching forever. This is what I want for you to continue to learn and evolve your teaching. If you want a deeper understanding of anatomy and how it might change the way you teach, you are in the right place. I know it might feel overwhelming at the start, but there are ways to make understanding it a little less complex. I teach anatomy as it relates to teaching yoga, So you aren't learning random bones and muscles, but understanding how these parts of the body are incorporated into the yoga practice. I believe with all my heart that yoga teachers are movement educators, and we must understand the human body and its movements in order to be effective in our teaching. It is so important for us to have this conversation, and sometimes teaching can feel lonely, which is another reason why I started this podcast. So you'd have a place to go to ask questions and to get answers. If you haven't already download the ebook sequencing for different injuries. The link is in the show notes. 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. You know that my goal for you is to love the yoga teaching life and allow it to be fulfilling and rewarding. If you love this episode, let me know. I've added a link in the show notes for you to send me a quick text message about your thoughts on this episode. I won't know your phone number. It's just a neat addition to the platform I use that allows for this easy way for you to communicate with me. Once you click on it, it will 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 know 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'd love to hear about it. Alright, that's it for now. Bye.