Have you had a burnout yet?

I did and mine happened early. A lot of teachers started to have burnouts after many years of teaching. I was already having frequent burnouts during my 3nd and 4th years of teaching.

When you have a burnout, you may dread teaching a class, you might get impatient or feel scattered while teaching, you could feel drained instead of energized after teaching or you could be like me, dread planning a class and feel exhausted after planning a few.

I wish there was somebody assuring me the importance of consistency when I first started teaching. I was trying to create every single class with different yoga poses. I have learned this is not a sustainable way of teaching. There is a better way:

Make basic poses interesting. For example, when you teach Sun Salutation, for Half-Way Lift, you can stretch arms overheard to frame your face or lift them up next to your torso like in Locust, besides placing hands on your shins or the floor. Just do a little tweak depending on what the focus of the class is. Here is another example: when you teach downward facing dog, you may propose creating external rotation or internal rotation in glenohumeral joints. It looks the same from outside, but your students could feel the difference in their shoulders and arms. Click here to watch the video.

Being creative is great if it doesn’t drain you out, but please still know that consistency is the key for setting your students up for success. It could take up to a few weeks for a dancer to become proficient at a new routine. Sure, this is not exactly the same as taking a yoga class. Some of your students probably know all the poses, but what about the rest of your class who don’t? What if the students who seem to know all the poses, are actually not doing the poses with skill? If you teach all level classes, I recommend focusing on one theme for at least a couple of weeks, depending on how often you teach. People learn better from repetition. You may focus on one part of the body, one peak pose, or one yoga philosophy etc. Since I have a great interest in anatomy, it just feels natural for me to plan the classes with a focus on one part of the body at a time. Check out the 12 anatomy-informed classes for your whole body.

When you find yourself running out of options and introducing new postures you saw in “thousands yoga poses” encyclopedia, but more than half of your class couldn’t do them with skill, go find inspiration in other movement modalities or peers outside the yoga world. Borrow their movements that are accessible to the general public. Incorporate them into your class how you see fit. In the 12 anatomy-informed classes, a lot of the movements during the warm-ups are borrowed from Pilates and physical therapy. Take a sneak peek in this warm-up video.