Ep 94: Confidence Is the Key to Teaching Injured Students

As yoga teachers, we often feel pressure to be endlessly creative in our sequencing, transitions, and class themes. But when a student walks into class with an injury or persistent pain, creativity isn’t what they need most. They need you to be confident about how you're going to teach them!

In this episode, I break down why confidence (not flashy sequencing or the “perfect” peak pose) is an important foundation for teaching students safely and effectively when they show up injured. 

Whether you’re a new yoga teacher still finding your footing or an experienced teacher who feels nervous about working with injuries, your confidence is key. In this episode, I'll help you reframe your approach to sequencing and teaching, and you’ll learn that confidence comes from clarity and steady presence, not from being overly creative.

Transcript

Monica: 0:00

Let me start by saying education is first and foremost when it comes to teaching injured students, but in this episode I want to focus on your confidence as opposed to your creativity as being super important when you're working with these students as yoga teachers. I get it. We often feel the pressure to be endlessly creative in our sequencing, our transitions and class themes. But when a student walks into class with an injury or persistent pain, creativity isn't what they need the most. They need your confidence. In this episode, I'll break down why confidence not flashy sequencing or the perfect. Peak pose is the foundation for teaching students safely and effectively when injuries are present. 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, plus all the real life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. Today we're gonna cover a topic that I think every yoga teacher needs to hear, why confidence and not creativity is the key to teaching students with injuries. Now, don't get me wrong, creativity has its place. Creativity helps keep our sequences engaging. It brings variety to the practice, and it also allows us to express ourselves as teachers. But when it comes to supporting students Who are in pain or dealing with injuries, creativity alone isn't enough. What really matters is your confidence in your knowledge of the body, in your ability to adapt and in your understanding of how to guide students safely through a yoga practice. So let's begin to unpack this together. When I first started teaching. I thought that the more creative I could be, the better of a teacher I was gonna be. I would spend hours making sure that my sequences were fun, different, and even unexpected. And while students might have enjoyed the novelty, what I quickly realized was that if someone walked into my class with an injury, all of that creative sequencing felt irrelevant. My super creative transitions or unusual peak poses didn't help the student who told me their shoulder was flaring up that day. In fact, in those moments, I felt completely unprepared, and that's where the problem lies. Creativity can keep students engaged, but being educated and confident is what will allow you to. Hold space for the messy reality of teaching human beings. Students come in with histories, with chronic pain, with injuries that flare up unexpectedly and with fears about what their bodies can and cannot do. if you are leaning only on creativity, you will feel ungrounded and uncertain when these students show up. But when you have confidence built from understanding anatomy, pain science, the nervous system, and adaptive sequencing, you'll be able to respond calmly and effectively. Let's talk about why yoga teachers sometimes prioritize creativity over confidence. Many of us were trained to build a class around a peak pose to make the flow interesting. To make sure students don't get bored, and in many cases, sequencing is presented almost like a performance art. The unspoken message is that a good teacher is a creative teacher, so naturally many of us put our focus there. But here's what's missing from that equation. We are working with real people and real people bring real injuries and pain into our classes. When someone's knee hurts or their back is sensitive, they don't care if your sequence has a clever transition or if you linked your class theme to a seasonal metaphor, They care about whether you can help them feel safe, supported, and included in the practice. This is where confidence comes in. Confidence as a yoga teacher doesn't mean you know every answer or that you can fix someone's pain. It means you understand your scope of practice and you know how to use the tools of yoga movement. Breath, nervous system regulation, your language to create a safe container for students, even when. Injuries are present. So let's go deeper into what that confidence is built on. First, it comes from understanding anatomy, but not in the way that most teachers imagine. You don't need to memorize every muscle origin and insertion point. You don't need to pass an anatomy exam to feel confident. What you need is functional anatomy, the kind of knowledge that helps you understand how the shoulder joint moves differently in a back bend versus an arm balance, or why hip shape will influence how a student experiences. Pigeon impose versus malana. This kind of applied anatomy helps you see your students with more clarity and adapt to their individual needs. Second confidence comes from understanding pain. Many yoga teachers avoid the topic of pain because we've been told it's outside of our scope of practice. But let me reassure you, You are not diagnosing, and you are not. Stepping into the role of a medical provider by learning about pain. What you can do is learn modern pain science, which tells us that pain is not just a reflection of tissue damage. Pain is an experience that is in. By the nervous system past experiences, stress, and even fear. When you understand this, you stop panicking when a student says that something hurts because you learn how to adapt and how to give them choice with without creating fear. Third, confidence comes from sequencing with purpose, with intention. When you're only focused on creativity, you might throw in lots of variety without a clear why, but confidence sequencing is built around principles. Knowing how to warm up the body for certain poses, knowing how to create balance in a practice, and how to adapt the sequence for a student. Who might not be able to practice a particular asana. This doesn't mean your classes won't be creative, but it means your creativity will be grounded in intention rather than novelty. And finally, confidence comes from your ability to regulate your own nervous system and to co-regulate with your students if you get flustered when an injured student walks into your class. Your students will feel that if you project fear in your cues, students will feel less safe. But if you can stay calm, grounded, and steady, students will feel more at ease. You don't have to have the perfect answer in the moment, But you can project assurance that you will be able to support them. Now, let's look at some practical ways that you can build this kind of confidence. One step is to shift your mindset around continuing education. Many teachers feel overwhelmed at the idea of learning more anatomy or studying injuries. They think it's too complicated, But the truth is you don't need to know everything. You just need to know enough to support the kinds of situations you'll encounter in the yoga room. Break it down to bite-size pieces. Start with one joint, one movement pattern, one type of injury. Another step is to reframe how you think about creativity instead of trying to make your classes flashy or unique for the sake of it. Use your creativity in service of clarity. For example, if you're teaching Warrior two and you know a student has hip pain, your creativity can be in finding variations of Warrior two that still allow them to explore strength and grounding without pushing into too much discomfort. That's creativity with a purpose, which is very different. I also encourage teachers to practice teaching scenarios in their own time. Imagine that a student comes to you with a rotator cuff injury. What would you do? How would you adapt? The more you walk through these situations, the more comfortable you'll feel when they happen in real time. And finally. You gotta seek mentorship confidence often comes faster when you have someone to guide you, answer your questions, and give you feedback. A mentor can help you see blind spots in your teaching and give you frameworks that make the learning process less overwhelming. At the end of the day, what students need most is not a creative sequence, but a teacher who can help them feel safe, supported, and capable. When you prioritize building your confidence Through anatomy, training, sequencing, understanding pain science, and understanding the nervous system, you create a teaching practice that is sustainable, impactful, and empowering for your students. So as you move forward I invite you to ask yourself, am I leaning too much on creativity at the expense? Of my confidence, and if so, what's one small step I can take today to begin shifting that balance? Maybe it's studying one joint more deeply. Maybe it's changing the language you use around pain, or maybe it's simply reminding yourself that you don't need to have all the answers. You just need to be willing to learn to listen, and to hold space for your students with competence. This is the work that will transform not only your teaching, but also your students' experience of yoga. And that's exactly the kind of work that can help yoga become more inclusive, accessible, and healing for those who need it most. So how confident would you feel right now if a student with chronic pain or an injury walked into your class? What would you do right now to feel more confident? To feel like you can support your students no matter how they showed up for your class? I want you to think about this and think about how you can transform your classes by learning more about anatomy, sequencing the nervous system, understanding pain. And learning more about students with injuries and the common yoga injuries that students typically show up with in your classes. Understanding anatomy, biomechanics, and the effects yoga Asana have on the body helps you help your students. If you've been enjoying these episodes, then I know that you're 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 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, and 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.