Ep 137: Yoga Cues That Need Updating & Why

Many of the cues yoga teachers use with students were built around helping students maneuver their bodies into what we think a pose is supposed to look like rather than what their bodies actually need to do. This episode examines three of the most widely used cues in yoga, breaks down what the anatomy tells us about each one, explains why individual body proportions make some of these instructions impossible for certain students to follow, and offers specific alternative language teachers can use instead.

We'll cover:

• Why These Cues Exist
• "Navel to Spine" and What Actually Creates Core Stability
• "Flare the Ribs" and How We Should Teach Backbends Based On Spinal Movement
• "Stack Your Ankle Under Your Knee" and Students' Individual Bone Proportions
• How To Evaluate The Cues You Use Going Forward

Book a Strategy Call

Monica facilitates anatomy trainings for yoga teachers and mentors teachers who want to build a practice grounded in real anatomical understanding. Book a strategy call to talk about what deeper anatomy education could look like for you.

Free Resources

10 Questions to Ask Injured Students
Sequencing for Students with Injuries

Transcript

Monica 3:59

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here is where we talk about anatomy, injuries, the nervous system, and answer the real-life questions that may not have been included in your yoga teacher training. If this is your first time listening, I'm a yoga teacher who specializes in helping teachers work confidently with students who have pain and injuries. I facilitate anatomy trainings for yoga teachers, and I mentor teachers inside my six-month mentorship program, and we talk a lot about cueing, specifically the cues we say without thinking, the ones we inherited and the ones that don't seem to make total sense once you begin to question them and understand what is actually happening in the body. in this episode, we're gonna look at three of them; pull your navel to your spine, flare the ribs, and stack your knee over your ankle. These are cues you probably have said. I think I have said all three of them early on in my teaching career as well And I wanna explain why each one for us to really take a second look at them, what the anatomy actually tells us, and what you can say instead. But before we look at the cues individually, let's talk about something that connects all three of them because I think it will help to explain a lot about why they've been in the yoga world for so long The truth, as hard as it is to accept, is that a lot of the cues we use in yoga were not built around what the body needs to do. They were built around what a pose is supposed to look like or what we think a pose is supposed to look like. Think about that for a second. We have developed a visual vocabulary for yoga. There's a version of each pose that reads as correct in a photograph, whether it's a perfect 90-degree flexion at the hip or knee, a super dramatic arch of the spine, or a perfectly externally rotated hip. And when you watch your students who do not match that image, the instinct is to cue them toward it. But we've gotta move away from the idea that the image is not the goal. The image is a by-product of a particular student's body doing a particular thing. and when we cue everyone toward that image, we are asking a full room of different bodies, different skeletons, different proportions, different histories, and different capabilities to produce the same external visually acceptable shape. Some students can, some of them can only get there by compensating somewhere else, and some of them cannot get to where we're cueing them at all. No matter how hard they try, how many times you repeat the cue, no matter if you say it in a different way or even if you show them the pose. This is the thread running through all three of the cues we're going to talk about today Each one is asking for a look, and each one, when you look at what is actually happening underneath, is either not doing what we think it's doing or is asking something of the body that does not serve it well. So let's start with the cue of cuing the navel to spine because it's one of the most repeated cues in all of yoga. Teachers use it in an effort to get students to engage their core. We say it in plank, in boat pose, even in standing poses, and sometimes just as a general instruction at the beginning of class. And I get the intention behind it because we wanna encourage students to create stability through their center. We want them to feel supported and engaged. But here is what is actually happening when a student pulls their navel toward their spine. That cue creates what is called a hollowing pattern. It draws the abdominal wall inward and primarily recruits the transverse abdominis in a specific isolated way And for a long time, this was thought to be the gold standard for core stability, but our understanding has shifted. We know now that what actually creates stability through the trunk is not hollowing. It is a coordinated 360-degree engagement where the abdominal wall, the back muscles, the pelvic floor, and the diaphragm all work together to create pressure that supports the spine from all sides. Hollowing does not do that. It pulls in from the anterior portion while leaving the rest of the core system less involved. And in some cases, it can actually reduce stability rather than build it. There's also a breathing problem here because when a student is holding their navel drawn in toward their spine, they are restricting the movement of their diaphragm. The diaphragm is the primary breathing muscle. It sits just underneath the lungs and it needs to descend on the inhale, which requires the abdominal contents to move and the belly to expand. If a student is constantly pulling in, they cannot breathe fully. And now you have a student who is concentrating their breath into their upper chest. They're working harder and getting less oxygen all while you're cueing them to breathe deeply. And then there's the aesthetic piece. The reason this cue took hold so strongly is not purely biomechanical It is because a pulled in or a flattened belly matches a cultural idea of what a fit body looks like. For students with different body compositions, for students who have had children, for students with abdominal separation, this cue can be heard not as a movement instruction, but as a subtle comment about their body. so what should you say instead? Cue for actual bracing rather than hollowing. Something like, "Push out," or, "Imagine you're about to be gently poked in the stomach and firm up all the way around your midsection," or, Feel your whole torso become stable, front, back, and sides while your breath keeps moving." You're asking for the coordinated engagement that actually stabilizes, and you're leaving students with the ability to breathe easily. The second cue is one you hear in backbends, and is a good example of an aesthetic cue producing an outcome that we do not actually want. You will often hear teachers cue students to open the chest, lift their heart, flare the ribs, and expand the front body. And when a student does that, the pose looks like a bigger backbend. The chest is up, The front line of the body reads as more open. From the teacher's point of view, it looks like you're helping students get into more spinal extension. But let's stop and look at where the movement is coming from. The spine is designed so that back bending or extension is distributed across multiple regions. The thoracic spine, which is your mid and upper back and is connected to the ribcage, is designed to extend, though it has a more limited range because of the ribs attaching to it. The lumbar spine, your lower back, has a greater available range of extension because when the ribs flare forward and up, that movement is generally not coming from the thoracic spine extending. It is coming from extension concentrated at the thoracolumbar junction, which is the transition zone between the thoracic and lumbar spine, and from the lumbar spine itself So what are you actually seeing when a student's ribs flare dramatically in a backbend is not a well-distributed backbend. It is a backbend where most of the movement has been dumped into one small area of the spine, usually the lower back, while the thoracic spine stays relatively rigid. You can see it too if you look really closely at students. This is the opposite of what we want. A well-distributed backbend spreads load across many segments. A rib-flaring backbend concentrates load only in a few. And for students who already have a lot of lumbar mobility, which is a lot of the students who look most impressive in backbends, this cue is encouraging them to go further into one pattern that tends to create low back discomfort over time. So what do you say instead? Cue for thoracic extension specifically, and cue for the ribs to stay integrated with the front body. You could say something like, "Lift through the upper back and chest while keeping the front of your lower ribs drawing gently down towards your hips." That gives you the opening you want in the upper body without the dump in the lumbar spine. This can be effectively taught and demonstrated before the start of class, and it's going to require you to slow down your classes a bit. You might see students with backbends that are less deep, but they're often the more aligned backbends. The third cue is one I hear constantly in lunges, in squats, in Warrior 2, and sometimes in Chair Pose too. It's the cue to stack your knee over your ankle, keep your shin vertical, and do not let your knee push past your toes. The origin of this cue is a fear about the knee joint. We began thinking that letting the knee travel forward over the toes would damage the knee joint, and teachers started cueing this way in order to prevent that damage. But this does not make sense when you look at how bodies actually move. The knees traveling past the toes is a normal part of human movement. You do it every time you walk down stairs. You do it when you sit down and stand up. You do it when you kneel. The knee is designed to flex and to bear load in flexion. Restricting that movement in the name of safety is not supported by what we understand about the knee joint. And here's what I really want you to take away from all of this because it's what connects to everything else that we've been talking about in this episode. Whether a student can stack their shin vertically in a lunge or a squat is determined by their individual anatomy, and specifically by their relative length of their femur and their tibia, along with the available range of motion in their ankle. A student with a long femur relative to their tibia physically cannot maintain a vertical shin in a deep squat while keeping their heels down and their torso upright. So it's not a matter of trying harder or engaging more. The proportions of their bones do not allow for it. If you cue them to keep their shin vertical, one of a few things is going to happen. They're going to fold their torso forward significantly to keep their center of mass over their feet, which then loads the lower back. Or they're going to shift their weight backward and lose stability and might even fall backwards on their mat. Or they simply will not go as deep, which may be fine, but it's worth understanding that they're not squatting as deeply because they're trying to do what you're asking of them. We've gotta talk about the range of ankle dorsiflexion because it really matters here. A student with limited ankle range has less ability to bring the shin forward over the foot, and their body will compensate elsewhere, often by lifting the heel or turning the foot out or shifting the knee inward. So when you cue the whole class to stack the knee over their ankle, you're giving an instruction that some students can follow easily, some can follow by compensating in other areas of the body, and some cannot do it at all. What do you say instead? Well, cue for what you actually want, which is generally stability and comfort in the knee. So say something like, Find a position for your front knee where the joint feels comfortable and you feel stable in the pose." Then observe what your students are doing. If a student's knee is collapsing inward, that is worth getting curious about and addressing because that could be a control issue rather than a bone proportion issue. But a knee traveling forward over the toes in a body that is stable and comfortable is not necessarily a problem you need to fix. That student might be able to handle the load on the knee joint needed to keep the positioning. The bigger question is, what does their movement diet look like? Do they train outside of yoga with their knee tracking past their ankle on a regular basis? the answers to these questions will help you realize if you need to talk with a student who is practicing with this alignment. I wanna bring these three together because as always, The specific cues matter less than the habit of thinking underneath them. Many of the cues we use persist because they help to produce a certain look, and each of the ones we covered today, when you understand the anatomy, is either doing something different in the body than we thought it was, or it's impossible for some of the students in your classes to do, period. So the question I want you to ponder going forward for all of the cues you use in your classes is to ask yourself, When I say this cue, what am I actually asking for? What is the result I'm looking for? Am I asking for a shape or am I asking for something the body needs to do? And is what I'm asking even possible for the various skeletal makeups in my class? These questions change how you think about the cues you use. It moves you from repeating language you inherited from trainings or what you heard from other teachers to teaching the students actually in front of you. And this process is you becoming a different kind of teacher, one that is considerate of your students' bodies, their movements, and their needs. If this episode makes you think about the anatomy underneath the cues you're using, I would love to have a conversation with you. So book a strategy call with me, and we will talk about where you are in your teaching, what you want to understand about anatomy better, and what is the right next step that looks right for you so that you can become an anatomy-informed teacher. It might be anatomy training, or it might be the mentorship, but it just might be the conversation that gets you more clear on the direction you want to pursue in your teaching career. The link to book a call is in the show notes. as always, thank you so much for being here and being part of the conversations we deserve to have to help continue your education. All right, bye.