Consistency Beats Variety in Yoga Class Sequencing

Are you spending too much time planning each yoga class? Changing your approach could benefit both you and your students! You’ll feel more relaxed, your students will grow better, and the entire experience will be more fun for everyone involved.

In this episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential, Sage Rountree explores the importance of consistency over variety when planning yoga classes. Sage offers insights from exercise physiology to demonstrate how consistent sequencing not only enhances learning but also deepens students’ connection to the practice. Plus, she shares practical ways to simplify class planning, keeping it fresh without losing the grounding benefits of a consistent container.

You'll Learn:

• Why too much variety can hinder student growth and engagement

• How exercise physiology principles, like specificity and progressive overload, apply to yoga teaching

• Ways to shift focus from your own performance to student-centered teaching, so you feel more confident in your yoga class and your students feel more consistent

• Practical strategies to build consistency while reducing class prep time

• Benefits of a more consistent class structure for students’ nervous systems and learning

Tune in to learn how a few small adjustments can elevate your teaching, build your students’ confidence, and save you time.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Art of Yoga Sequencing

• The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery (2nd edition)

• Yoga Journal article on common yoga teaching mistakes: https://www.yogajournal.com/teach/yoga-sequences/

• Download Sage’s Greatest Hits Lesson Plan

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Can I tell you something? You're spending way too much time on class planning and it's making things harder, not only on you, but on your students. There's a better way. A way that will actually fast track your students' sense of connection and yoga and union. While making things so much simpler for you.  

If you're teaching a new sequence, every class developing a fresh theme for every single class or even making an elaborate playlist every class, this is an episode you need to hear. I'm Sage Rountree. And this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. Here I share the secrets of becoming a great yoga teacher, of becoming the best yoga teacher  

you can be. These are lessons that I have learned in 20 plus years of teaching yoga and a dozen plus years of running a yoga studio and a yoga teacher training. I really want in this episode to give you an argument for consistency over variety.  

This is a mistake that I [00:01:00] used to make.  

I understand how easy it is to succumb to the sense of ego. Of wanting to prove yourself as a yoga teacher by demonstrating your chops every single class, by making it as creative as it can be as exciting as it can be. What you might feel is as engaging as it can be. But what we do when we operate at that level is serve our own ego  

instead of our students. What our students need from us is a base of consistency. And only once they have this consistency should we offer in some variety.  

I think there are several reasons why this happens. At the root is this idea of avidya, of wrong seeing, being the most base cause of suffering. It's the, the daddy of the kleshas. We see our role wrong. We see ourselves as a choreographer or a director. When, [00:02:00] instead, as I said, in episode one of this podcast, we're way more like the stage manager, just kind of out in the wings and our students take the lead.  

You are the only one who has ever been in every class you've ever taught.  

And you're the only one who has heard yourself say the same things over and over and over again. So when you are devising a new class just to keep yourself engaged and keep yourself from boredom, your focus is in the wrong direction. It's on you rather than on your students. When you try to create an elaborate fresh sequence every time, because you feel like you need to prove yourself as a yoga teacher, now you're letting your sense of imposter syndrome drive the bus.  

And that's not the way that you're going to fast track your students' progress. 

What's your students need to progress is consistency. Patanjali lays this out for us in the yoga sutras. Saying that your practice [00:03:00] becomes deeply rooted, well-rooted when it is attended to consistently over time. The yoga sutras do not give us the advice to make things fresh and exciting every class! That's not the way that we grow. In order to explain this, let me teach you a little lesson about exercise physiology.  

Never fear exercise physiology is easy. In fact, when you hear this lesson, I imagine you'll be nodding your head and saying, well, yeah, yeah, of course. That makes absolute sense. Sidebar. This is why I think we should focus on learning exercise physiology, the physiology of adaptation in yoga teacher trainings, way more than anatomy and pathology. Because your students are there to grow, to adapt. And that's where exercise physiology gives us the precepts of how we can help them with that growth and adaptation. So principle number one is that adaptation happens when you apply a stress and then balance that stress with [00:04:00] rest. So training is the formula training equals stress plus rest. We focus a whole lot on the stress.  

And often we don't focus very much on the rest side of the equation, but this is another way of telling us sthira sukham asanam, the pose that application of stress needs to have elements of stability. But then there also needs to be some sweetness and some ease and some rest in order for our bodies and our brains and our spirits to adapt to the stresses that we have intentionally put them under.  

I love how this all ties together. So if training equals stress plus rest, then the pose should have elements of sthira and elements of sukha. . It's all saying the exact same thing. If you're interested in learning how very important recovery is, including a chapter or two on how yoga can help enhance your recovery and adaptation to stress. Check out a book [00:05:00] I wrote called The Athlete's Guide to Recovery.  

It just came out in a second edition because when it first came out a dozen years ago, It was at the cutting edge of the science of athletic recovery. And that field has grown and adapted. So I went in and tweaked a few things for the revised and expanded second edition, which you can pick up at your favorite bookstore. Okay.  

So if training equals stress plus rest. Then what goes on with the stress part? How much stress do we need to apply? Here exercise physiology gives us a few more principles that can come in really handy. One is called the principle of specificity. In order to adapt at doing something, we need to practice doing that thing.  

This should sound so patently obvious that you're like, wow, I'm a pro at exercise physiology because you are because you know this to be true in your own body. In order to improve at something, you must practice that thing. That's the principle of specificity in a nutshell, to [00:06:00] apply it to training:  

if you want to run a marathon, you don't go hit up the gym and work on your bench press. And on the other hand, if you want to set a personal best at your bench press, you don't go out on a 20 mile run, which you would do if you were trying to run a marathon. But you would also build up to that. And that is the principle of progressive overload. So the principle is specificity says in order to get better at doing something, we must practice doing that thing.  

And the principle of progressive overload says we need to hit our bodies with the appropriate amount of stress, too much stress. And we break them down. We create injury, the body just can't handle it. Not enough stress and the body doesn't get the stimulus it needs to change. So the load needs to be, um, in the appropriate dosage, the appropriate proportion of what the body can handle.  

And that is where teaching group exercise, which is what part [00:07:00] of what we're doing in yoga, not the entirety of what we're doing, but what is happening in an Asana class does follow the rules of group exercise, it can get really tricky, because it's tough for us to figure out exactly what the right amount of load is for each of our students. But friends,  

I have good news here. That is not your job as a yoga teacher. You are not there as a conditioning coach, you are there to set out a buffet of ideas of things that your students might want to do with their bodies and then to step back and let them make the choices that work best for them. So remember when we center our students and when we uplift their agency, when we put their agency as the number one driver in class, then we don't need to figure out exactly how any pose should be tweaked for everybody in the room. We mentioned some options.  

We remind our students that they get to choose what they put on their plates. And then we stopped talking. So we have the principle of [00:08:00] specificity in order to get better at doing something we must practice doing that thing. Then we have the principle of progressive overload. We apply the stress stimulus and dosages that are appropriate for the practitioner. In a marathon training that would mean not that you go out and run a 20 mile run, but that instead you start with regular shorter runs and eventually build just one run a week to be longer. Same thing goes for strength training.  

You don't just go. If your, if your goal is to bench press 150 pounds, you don't go and load up 150 pounds of plates on your barbell, you might just practice pushing the bar itself for quite a while. Before you begin progressively to overload your system. So if we have these principles in mind, Let's think about how, what we might be doing with this anti-hero energy in our yoga classes about how that is way, way, way the wrong way to approach it for our students to [00:09:00] grow. They need specificity. And in the classroom context, that means they need your class sequencing to be consistent week over week. Not to be different, but to be consistent and to change only a little bit week over week.  

And that's how we try to service the principle of progressive overload in the context of a group yoga class have an Asana class. So here's how exercise physiology comes into the yoga classroom. The principle of specificity and the principle of progressive overload. When you are serving your own ego and trying to choreograph a class, that's exciting because you feel bored or you feel like you need to prove your worth as a yoga teacher,  

when that is where your brain is as you sit down to plan your class week to week, then you are entering in it from this perspective of wrong seeing you're seeing your role wrong and you're seeing what your students need wrong. So let's try to get really [00:10:00] clear about what our students need in terms of consistency. They need for your class plan to be pretty similar week over week. That's how their bodies are going to adapt.  

And that's also how their minds and spirits are going to adapt. That's how they practice learning the poses, learning the constituent parts of the poses, learning the actions, learning how to layer breath onto the movement in the poses.  

When we give them this consistency week in and week out, we are equipping them to have a lifetime of yoga practice. Not just to come to class twice, find that it was drastically different from week one and week two and never return. That's not going to enhance the, um, the global climate. It's not going to contribute to world peace through yoga, which I say kind of with. Uh, an eye-roll, but I mean, with my whole heart, I think the more people we get doing yoga the better, and the more that [00:11:00] we can draw our students into a practice, which they may continue with us, or may continue with other teachers, or may continue on their own, the better we are doing that is in service to humanity that is in service to the earth.  

That is the biggest goal that we all have as yoga teachers is to help make this a better place. Right. And we do that by giving our students consistency week in and week out. It's good for their bodies because they are working on the principle of specificity and the principle of progressive overload. It's good for their nervous systems because they're not constantly getting this fire hose of new information coming their way.  

They have this consistency and repetition, and that is the key to learning. It's also really good for your energy because you know what's coming and when you know what's coming, when this is something that you have practiced, you're going to do so much better at it. Now we've already established that as a yoga teacher  

you're not a performer on stage. [00:12:00] However, if you were working up toward a performance, you're not just going to look at the song you're singing, get out your book of German lieder and sight read a song and say, okay, this is what I'm going to sing. No, you're going to practice it. And you're going to practice it over and over and over again, until you really feel like you've got the constituent parts down.  

You understand the meta structures of the song, you know, um, ways that you might vary it a little bit experiment with what works best. And then you perform it that way over and over and over again. So while we're not performing in a yoga class, the principle is the same: when we teach consistently the same sequence so that we feel really comfortable with it, then we do better. We come into the room with more confidence.  

We come into the room with more capability and control. We are more relaxed because we're not walking out on stage with a song that we've only sight read. We really know what we're doing, and that creates a container in your classroom that your [00:13:00] students will notice, even if it is their first experience in your classroom. They will read your energy, your familiarity, and it will make them feel like you are holding the space  

well. Check out season one, episode six, in which Karen Fabian made the same point with her wonderful affirmation. When I teach from what I know, my confidence grows. So teaching the same sequence week in and week out and only then layering in some changes is going to help your students. It's going to calm their nervous systems.  

It's going to make it easier for you to plan.  

I am not too proud to admit I messed this up for years. And even now my weekly class yoga for athletic balance, I've been teaching it on the same Monday for over 20 years now, same Monday, Monday 6:00 PM class for over 20 years, I used to put on a whole bunch of variety in like week to week  

the class would be totally different. And if you happen [00:14:00] to show up on the day when we were doing Paul Grilley's like really cool, um, yang yoga sequences to complement the yin yoga I was studying with him, then that was what you got that day. And you weren't going to see it again for another half of a year or so.  

The day that, uh, Pattabhi Jois died, I was like, oh, let me get out my books of Ashtanga yoga and teach the sequence. What! That wasn't what the students needed. That was just me serving my own ego. What your students need is consistency week in and week out. And then we layer on a little bit of variety. Speaking of Ashtanga yoga.  

You probably know that there are some set sequences like Ashtanga or like the hot 26, uh, formerly Bikram yoga sequence that are the same week in and week out. That is giving students a whole lot of consistency, which is fantastic as they are coming up to speed and learning and dedicated practitioners  

in those styles will tell you that [00:15:00] they get to notice the difference in their body, in their mind, in their spirit week to week practice, to practice because the variable of what poses are happening in the practice for how long in what order is fixed. So because of that is a fixed variable they get to notice the variation that they have in other elements, from practice to practice. I think that's awesome. I also think that at some point, if you only could ever do one workout for the rest of your life, say you were a runner and your workout was 12 by 400 on the track at your mile pace. Um, you might get really good at doing that, but then you're going to plateau at it.  

So while I am advocating for consistency, Don't think that I am not also a fan of variety because we need the progressive overload. We need change to keep us engaged over time. I am simply saying. That we should check ourselves to see whether we might be prejudiced [00:16:00] toward variety over consistency, whether we are favoring changing things up in ways that keep us feeling good about ourselves, but that don't really serve our students.  

I've gotten this far into the episode with no food analogies.  

So let me give you a food analogy. If your student's first experience in your class is like coming to your restaurant for the first time. Then they are having a whole lot of impressions being made in that first experience. Right? The first impression is huge. If you are lucky enough to have your students come back to your class again, it's because they liked what they had at your restaurant  

the first time. Maybe their dining partner ate something that looked interesting and they want to try it. So we want them to give them a chance to experiment within the same container, within the same style of cooking, within the same, um, seasonality of ingredients as they had in their first experience. They came back [00:17:00] because they liked it.  

They do not want it to be wildly different from time to time.  

You may know, I specialize in teaching yoga to athletes and I work with many of the UNC sports teams. University of North Carolina. I'm coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And I've been working with the football team this season for about 10 weeks. We started back in August in training camp with a sequence that we have carried through all the way. In training camp.  

I saw four groups of players because we had over 120 guys at that point. I saw four groups. They was divided up into groups of about 30 guys for a 30 minutes. And now I have a smaller group now that yoga is optional instead of required for the players, I have the smaller group of a dozen or so guys who come every week for a full hour of yoga. And what we're doing is carrying through this same through line that was established way back in training camp, such that we always start with the same sequence.  

And we always end with the same sequence, [00:18:00] what we do in the middle changes a little bit, week to week. Depends on who's there. Like last week I had only the kicker and that was, um, that was absolutely great because we were able to focus on some of his personal needs. It was the context of a private lesson instead of a group class.  

But I was there earlier today and we stop, stopped with this, we finished with this same sequence. If you're interested in what that sequence is, it is six moves of the spine prone, one leg. It appears in my book, The Art of Yoga Sequencing. You start down on your belly, you do a tree pose on your belly, like, um, a half frog pose or a tree pose.  

Sometimes I call it tree frog. Then you can twist toward your bent leg. You could straighten your bent leg. You could bend your straight leg. There are a couple different ways you can take it. You come back through center and you do the same thing on the other side. We layer in sometimes a Sphinx post and neck stretching and sometimes a child's post, but that's the sequence. Belly down.  

It's got a side bend. It's got a twist. And because [00:19:00] this is the last 15 minutes of class, every single week. There's this sense of familiarity and consistency that I love to see. And here's how you know that you're giving your students the right amount of consistency is that once this sequence begins, they move through it in their own pace without you needing to cue them. Maybe this is a standing flow and you do this and you see your students are moving ahead of your cues because they already know where to go.  

That is the sign that you are doing a great job with your consistent teaching for your students.  

How can you offer the same consistency for your students? If you feel like you were called out lately in this episode, if you feel like this might be, um, a pitfall of yours that you're focusing on variety over consistency. I invite you to try applying the 80 20 rule. To keep your class 80% consistent from week to week and change out only about 20%. One way that I [00:20:00] described this is thinking of your class as building a capsule wardrobe or packing for a trip.  

Like you just have t-shirts and jeans and you change things out with a jacket or a scarf or other accessories. So that the same uniform uh, applies day to day to day, the same uniform sequence is offered week to week to week. You don't have to do this for 52 weeks out of the year, but it might be worth trying for four to see how it is to teach the same sequence for basically a calendar month with only minor variations. If you're familiar with the model of sequencing I offer in my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing, this would be changing out no more than one quarter of the class, because in The Art of Yoga Sequencing, I talk about viewing your class as a chunks that has a warmup chunk, a standing pose chunk, a floor pose chunk, and then a finishing chunk.  

So it's like your outfit. You've got your hat, you've got your top, you've got your bottoms and you got your shoes. So you want to wear the same [00:21:00] thing across several weeks without changing it all wholesale every time. That's how you build your brand, right? That's how people know what your personal dressing style is.  

And that's also how your students understand what kind of yoga you were offering them week in, week out that will help them develop that base of consistency.  

If this makes you nervous. Try it anyway. Sometimes the things that make us nervous are the very things that we are drawn to. Try it just next week, teach almost the same sequence you taught this week or last week and see whether your students even notice. If they do notice, see whether they even care. Sometimes you could sell this as a feature and not a bug.  

So if your students say, Hey, this is kind of similar to what we did last week, you say yes by design. And how did it feel? Uh, since you knew what the foundation was, how does it feel? Uh, since your body got the chance to refine its understanding of the [00:22:00] sequence while you were recovering from doing the sequence last week? This is how you reduce your class planning time, how you offer your students the consistency that they need, and how you build a brand that will keep your students with you over time so that you can continue to help them help everybody around them. By being yogis by practicing yoga, union, and connection. 

Here's an affirmation.  

I hope you will take away. I offer consistency. I offer consistency. And once more to be consistent, I'll say it. I offer consistency. When you are consistent as a yoga teacher, you are reliable as a yoga teacher, you are offering that sense of connection between you and each of your students. They know they can trust you. They know that they can count on you. And as a result, their, um, their experience is going to be elevated so much because you'll be holding the room better.  

You'll also be spending way less time [00:23:00] on class planning.  

If this is resonating for you, I have some resources for you. Check the show notes for a link to an article. I just wrote for Yoga Journal about the one mistake almost all new yoga teachers make, and that many of us experienced yoga teachers make. You will also get lots more on exercise physiology on sequencing and on finding the right balance between consistency and variety  

in my most recent book, it's called The Art of Yoga Sequencing. It is available wherever books are sold, you can also get it in an ebook format.  

If you check the show notes and sign up for my newsletter through that link, I will send you my own personal template.  

My greatest hits lesson plan that I think is a really good sequence to teach week in and week out to all ages, all levels. I think it's a really adaptable, um, Um, outfit suggestions. So I have planned that out for you. And if you sign up for my newsletter, I will send it right over with some ways that you [00:24:00] can tweak it over the course of time.  

That way I have done the work for you and you can try it, see how it goes and let me know.  

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential. I would love to hear how it goes when you try offering more consistency in your classroom. You can reach me via sagerountree.com, on the socials at @sagerountree with no letter D. If you're enjoying this podcast, please let your friends know. You can do that by giving it a rating and review on your favorite podcast sites, but also by sharing the podcast with them. I really appreciate your support. And I look forward to seeing you next time.