Ep 89: Sequencing Struggles That Still Haunt Experienced Teachers

Sequencing is more than putting poses together; it’s actually a puzzle if you think about it. Inside that puzzle are nervous systems, mixed abilities, injuries, as well as the human need for meaning and understanding. If sequencing still feels like a challenge, it’s totally understandable that it would. 

In this episode, we’ll consider the hidden mistakes even experienced teachers continue to make, and how to design classes that actually build capacity in the body… especially for students arriving with pain and injuries. 

Transcript

Monica: 0:00

Sequencing is more than putting poses together. It's actually a puzzle if you think about it. And inside that puzzle are nervous systems, variable anatomy, mixed abilities, injuries, as well as the human need for meaning and understanding. If sequencing still feels like a challenge, it's understandable that it would. In this episode, we'll consider the hidden mistakes. Even experienced teachers continue to make and how to design classes that actually build capacity, especially for students arriving with pain and injuries. 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. Here we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system, insights, and all of the real life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. Have you ever just finished teaching a class and feel like you taught a lot, but also nothing at all? Well, you are not alone. Sequencing is the yoga teacher's lifelong puzzle. It looks simple from the outside. You put poses in an order, set a pace, sprinkle in the breath, start your playlist. But inside that puzzle are nervous systems, variable anatomy, mixed abilities, injuries, as well as the human need for meaning and understanding. If sequencing still feels like a challenge, it's understandable that it would. Let's consider the hidden mistakes that even experienced teachers continue to make and examine how to design classes that actually build capacity, especially for students arriving with pain and injuries. The first problem is that many classes are designed around being creative rather than outcomes. Variety can be a lovely thing, but progress requires a through line. Ask yourself, what capacity are you helping students build today? Stability at In Range Hip dissociation, Slow eccentric control. If you can't answer that in a sentence at the top of your planned sequence, your students are not gonna feel this in their bodies at the end either. The second problem is the idea of always reaching for the end range. Are you chasing bigger shapes, deeper folds, higher back bends, more open hips? The belief that end range helps with resilience is unwise. Untrained range is like hanging out in your joints without active control of them. What students actually need is strength, control, and confidence inside the ranges they already own before they push deeper. The third issue with sequencing is disregarding the tempo and the pace of the class. We talk about alignment and breath a lot, but rarely about speed. Tempo is another form of dosage, hold times, eccentric counts, and transition speed, change the tissue load and the nervous system experience more than a perfect cue. Ever could. If you always move at one speed, you're over training one kind of capacity and under training others. Here's a hint. Slow down your transitions. Slow down your classes, slow down your instruction, and vary the speed and flow of your classes. Let's talk about a few different types of teachers and see if any one of them sound familiar to you. The first is the Instagram algorithm teacher. Without really ever noticing, you start designing classes to be clippable instead of useful. Including novel combinations of poses, impressive transitions, shape first sequencing. Your class looks great on video, but it cannot be queued by you or understood by your students effectively. The second is teaching from, let's say, a salad bar. You try to serve everything all at once, mobility, deep stretch, peak pose, pranayama philosophy, the core hips, inversion, and then theme about letting go. Students get full, two full and not effectively fed. The third type of teacher, is the Q over giver. In an effort to be helpful, you stack cues until students can't feel anything. Motor learning needs space. If you're talking, they're not integrating, and you have to give students the space and time to understand what you're asking or offering them. When you keep talking, you fill up that space. The fourth type of teacher is the mat conqueror orientation. Changes without landmarks can disorient nervous systems, especially for beginners or for those students in pain. If your sequencing flips the students back and forth around the mat, Your students will spend half of their time dysregulated and trying to find the front of their mat. The fifth type of teacher is the one size fits all alignment teacher. Do you notice that you plan around textbook angles and forget that pelvis shape, femoral variation and ligament laxity vary. What looks off on one body is optimal, on another. Alignment is really about problem solving. Okay. Did you notice yourself in any one of those teachers? If so, no worries. This quiet reminder will help you realize it and make a shift in your teaching and class expectations. So how do you build sequences that build people? Think about trading in the idea of adding in more poses. For choosing smarter constraints, start by writing a one sentence outcome for your class. Then choose two to three constraints that force the group toward that outcome. If your outcome is hip dissociation, meaning you are just focused on isolating movement to the hip joint. Then you might set a constraint like no lumbar flexion or extension for the first 10 to 15 minutes of class, which will immediately shift your teaching and queuing toward hip hinges, lunges with spinal neutrality and avoiding back bending and step backs that teach pelvis on femur movement. Another example is if you want the focus on eccentric hamstring control, you might. All forward folds to include a three count descent and a two count pause right at the start of the feeling of the stretch, which changes dosage without changing the poses you've chosen to teach in your sequence. Next, think like a teacher of motor learning rather than a picker of poses. Early in class, use shorter sequence blocks. Repeat a small family of related shapes with tiny variations, so the nervous system recognizes the pattern. Mid-class. Introduce variability and some contextual interference. You could change the order. You could add a prop. You could alter the tempo. So students earn adaptability, not just repetition. End with integration. Put the skill you're teaching into a simple flow, and ask them to notice what changed. This isn't fancy. Instead it's deliberate. Make transitions. The main course. Poses are snapshots. Transitions are where repetitive stress injuries can happen, but also confidence can be built here as well. Teach students how to step forward to a lunge without yanking at their hip. Teach them how to hinge without collapsing into their low back. Teach them how to exit a pose as carefully as they would enter it. And if you treat transitions with as much respect as peak poses and the rest of the sequence, students get stronger between the shapes, which is what we really want. Now let's get specific with non-specific low back pain, which is a condition that many students show up to class with. It isn't tied to any clear structural diagnosis, but they often fear movement, confused, stretch with relief and brace their way through class. Your job isn't to fix a back, it's to create a map that rebuilds confidence, tolerates load, and calms the system. Begin by reducing threat without reducing student agency in the first 10 to 15 minutes of class. Keep their spine in neutral and explore movement around it. Teach hip hinge patterns build awareness of pelvis on femur movement versus spine on pelvis movement, and layer gentle isometrics that give the back something to do without provoking it. A standing hip hinge with hands on the thighs, a supported chair with a block squeeze or a low lunge where the cue is to keep your ribs still while the pelvis glides are simple, powerful starts. Dosage matters as well. Use slow eccentrics and short isometric holds three to five breaths on the way into a hinge, a five breath mid-range hold in bridge with emphasis on heel drive and hamstring co contraction, a controlled return to the mat from a seated fold, stopping just shy of sensation. This isn't about never flexing or extending the spine, but it's about graded exposure. Later in class, test gentle flexion or extension within comfort, then come back to mid range. The message is not, your back is fragile, but your back is adaptable. Transitions require special care here. Stepping forward from downward facing dog can be provocative, elevate the hands, shorten the stance, use blocks to make the arms longer, or teach a two step approach to meeting at a forward fold at the top of the mat. Rolling up from a forward fold quickly can potentially spike symptoms instead, cue a hip hinge to stand while pressing through the feet with a neutral spine. Twists aren't off limits, but lead with the breath. Twist slowly and intentionally, and allow for pelvic movement too. Finally, keep the range small, smooth, and gentle. If someone's nervous system lights up, give a clear off ramp like lowering to their knees. Placing their hands on blocks, focusing their eyes on one fixed point, and to breathe slower and try to mitigate the urge to rush. You know your language is a huge part of the sequence. Replace fragility stories with agency stories. Keep your spine in a comfortable neutral position while we focus on your hips. Will land differently than avoid rounding your back or brace your core to protect your back. Offer choices and remember to name them as equal. If someone chooses blocks, you can say, this option gives you more room to hinge from the hips. Rather than saying, take the modification, you'll also help these students by deliberately working on endurance as opposed to maximum effort. Non-specific low back pain sensations often benefit from repeatable, low threat effort across time. That means sets of manageable, holds measured breathing, and predictable patterns. It's okay if your class feels slightly boring compared to an Instagram flow highlight reel. Boring is nervous system gold, especially when pain is present. Let's circle back to suggestions that will make you think about your sequencing with more thought. Try designing an entire class around verbs instead of nouns. Build 80% of your plan around the cues, hinge, rotate, small step with control. Breathe slower and let the poses follow these verbs. You'll instantly stop obsessing over which Asana is trendous and start obsessing over which types of behavior you're training. Run an experiment where you keep your sequence exactly the same for three consecutive weeks, but change only the tempo and breath count. Week one uses three count descents. Week two emphasizes. Isometric pauses. Week three plays with quicker concentric exits. Notice how the same poses build entirely different capacities when the dosage shifts. Share that with your students so they learn why today feels different from last week, even though the sequence is the same and the shapes look familiar. Invite a nervous system lens, start classes with orienting and ending with downshifting, not as add-ons, but as part of the sequence logic, two minutes with their eyes open. Slow head turns and breath at the start can settle vestibular systems and improve balance work. Later, a deliberately longer exhale, cadence at the finish can lower overall arousal so students leave feeling collected, not just stretched. Create decision trees in your plan rather than one perfect arc. write a couple of branches for the middle. Third of class if the room looks amped. Increase complexity If the room looks fearful, slow the tempo and shorten the ranges. This is one way to protect injured students without sacrificing group flow. Build feedback loops. At the end of class. Ask one specific question that relates to your outcome, not a generic. How do you feel? You can ask which transition felt smoother at the end of class than it did at the start? Your training. Student perception, awareness, and mindfulness over performance, their answers may even inform next week's sequence. A final piece you may not be aware of is time under tension for the parts we claim to care about. If back resilience is your goal count, how many minutes of the class actually trained posterior chain endurance and trunk control, versus how many minutes went into movement and flow. If shoulder health is your theme. Add in isometric times at different shoulder angles rather than tallying how many shoulder RGAs you squeeze in. You'll find that what you help students measure is what you'll help students improve. Remember, none of this replaces medical care, and you should always refer out when the student's pain is severe, worsening or accompanied by red flags, but within your scope sequencing is where you quietly do the most good. You're not just arranging shapes, you are shaping a movement experience. When you choose an outcome, constrain your options, dose the work, honor nervous systems and treat transitions like their teachers. Students leave classes with more education and awareness of themselves and their bodies. If your classes have been feeling busy, but for no real reason, you don't need more sequencing and poses, you need clearer outcomes, smarter constraints, And deeper respect for the invisible layers that make movement feel safe. Start there. Your sequences will get quieter. Your students will get stronger and the room will feel like it finally makes sense. Understanding anatomy, biomechanics, and the effects yoga Asana have on the body helps you help your students. If you've been enjoying these episodes, I know that you are a yoga teacher who's ready to teach with more intention and less fear around injuries. Let's continue to raise the bar for how yoga supports real bodies in real life. It's so important for us to have this conversation so that you remember that's. Students of all shapes, sizes, alignment, and abilities come to your classes and you can serve all of them. You know that my goal is for you to love the yoga teaching life. It's important to understand movement and the issues students come to your classes with. 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. And finally, thank you for helping to spread the word about this podcast. Alright, thank you for listening. That's it for now. Bye.