Top 5 reasons you should learn to teach beginners
Focusing on beginners in my early stages of studio ownership built my clientele, but it also made me a better teacher, in ways I didn't expect.
1. It sharpens your cuing. If you say lengthen through the crown of your head to students you've been teaching for a while, most students will lengthen their spines. If you give the same cue to someone who has never done yoga they will lift their chin. A beginner shows you the distance between what you meant and what you said.
2. You start seeing the through lines between postures. Down Dog is a forward fold. If you've done my YTT, you know that, and maybe you practice that way, but as a teacher of people who are unfamiliar with yoga postures, you can help them to make connections between postures, which helps them (and you) to start seeing families of postures instead of 100 individual ones. It transforms your cuing and sequencing and makes yoga a lot less intimidating for your students.
3. It makes you better at solving problems in a body. Cues don't land on a beginner's body in the same way they do for someone who has done yoga before. They don't know what they should feel like, so they can't make their own adjustments. So you look and work out how to get them to the engagement goal of the posture. You will come home from this training with cues that solve problems rather than describe positions.
4. You bring yoga into someone's life. Somebody walks in feeling awkward and wondering if yoga is really for them. By the end of the series (or even their first class) they feel like they belongs in a yoga class You did that.
5. They stay. Students I taught in my beginners series ten years ago are some of my most loyal students today.
In our weekend training for certified yoga teachers, we'll build the structure of a series that makes sense to someone new and work out the cues that help beginners to feel their bodies working and understand the goal of a posture.
We'll practice changing cues so that students new to yoga feel successful and engaged, and look at the through lines between postures so you can develop a curriculum for your next Beginner's Series and both cue and sequence thoughtfully.
You'll leave with a blueprint of a program you can run and the follow-up that brings students back.
