When teachers try to learn anatomy as part of their yoga training, often what they experience is a feeling of overwhelm. Even for those that have a background in science, applying anatomy to yoga is a unique exercise, one that requires an understanding of anatomy as well as a way to apply that knowledge to movement.
Although teacher trainings each share a requirement for how much anatomy is taught, the process for sharing it varies from training to training. As such, teachers sometimes leave their basic training with only a cursory understanding of anatomy. Things are further complicated by the challenge to fit it all in and with so much to learn, student teachers are often overloaded with a great deal of information shared in a short period of time. Additionally, the topic is just so broad, that identifying the key elements to focus on is critical in order to help teachers learn this complex subject.
Not many teachers would argue that understanding anatomy is really important for teachers. Even if the teacher’s focus is on the spiritual side of the practice, providing cues in a movement based practice requires that we understand the parts of the body, how they work collaboratively to produce movement and even more importantly, how to assist students who are injured or might require modifications to the poses.
In the over 10 years I’ve been leading anatomy trainings, I’ve devised a blueprint to learning anatomy. This step-by-step process allows teachers to learn at a pace that allows for understanding of each step and because each step builds the necessary knowledge for the one that follows, it cuts overwhelm. The blueprint is targeted to understanding anatomy for yoga teaching, which, while it seems obvious, is worth noting as many trainings and educational material for teachers goes deep into subjects that have little relevance to the main thing they’ll be doing: moving people through a sequence on the yoga mat. While having deep knowledge can be helpful, it’s not critical and for such a broad subject with lots of complex parts, it’s important we focus on the key things to make learning it more reasonable.
Here are the 10 key steps to learning anatomy:
- Get down to basics: This means outlining why you want to learn anatomy for yoga in the first place. Why it seems obvious, identifying your goal from the start is key.
- Dive into how we apply anatomy to yoga: This would include identifying things like “anatomical position” and why that’s a central part of learning anatomy for yoga.
- Identify the key parts of the body you’ll study: There are some many parts of the body’s infrastructure. It’s important we look at just what parts we’ll study.
- Look at muscles in poses: This is where things start to get real, as we take our knowledge from the above step (the parts, including muscles) and we look at muscles at work within yoga poses.
- Identifying ways to share anatomy with your students: This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the time to apply all of what we know to teaching by sharing anatomy through the cues we use and the supporting information we share that comes from our knowledge of anatomy.
- Help your students by providing them with corrective cues to get them out of “red flag” alignment: With your new anatomy knowledge, you’ll be better able to distinguish between things that can be overlooked and actions on the mat that need to be addressed with corrective cues.
- Help your students by offering them other ways to do the poses: Modifying poses is more than just something to make poses easier to do it’s a way to focus on different things. As we learn anatomy, we can learn how to change up poses so that they fit in with different anatomy lessons or themes we’re bring into class.
- Create anatomy based themes that you can share in your sequencing: It’s really fun once you build a solid foundation of anatomy knowledge because then you’re able to build sequences that have different themes. One example would be a class focused on opening the front line of the body, knowing that students at the end of the day have been sitting, hunched over their desks.
- Providing cues that are clear and correct: The variety in cues is significant as each teacher expresses their teaching in a different way. This is wonderful and part of each teacher being authentic. However, anatomy based cues should be correct and once you build your anatomy knowledge, you’ll never have to wonder if what you heard in another class is right or you’ll never feel like you’re just repeating a cue you heard without knowing if it’s correct.
- Learn an important technique in self-care that is central to anatomy, myofascial release. One of the key parts of the body you’ll learn is fascia, the connective tissue that runs throughout the body. To keep it healthy, myofascial release is used to release tension in tight areas. While this is a potential workshop topic and might not be a technique you’d teach in a regular class, understanding more about it is helpful for developing a good understanding of anatomy.
So, those are the ten key steps in our blueprint. In order that you get an even better look at these steps, download my free PDF that lists them out in greater detail. This blueprint will give you a way to structure your learning and allow you to build knowledge in a step-by-step fashion. Remember; don’t proceed to the next step until you have confidence you know the information in the prior step. And, if you’re still overwhelmed, don’t worry. I’ll be sharing a lot more information about each step soon.
To get the blueprint in PDF form, your free download, click here.Â
What do you think? Does this sound like a good plan? Let me know by adding your comment!