98. What Most Yoga Teachers Get Wrong About Teaching Yin

My husband took his first yin class with me at Kripalu and told me afterward that I should rename the practice. He wasn’t entirely wrong: a room built on stillness produced an enormous reaction in his body, and that’s yin working exactly as designed.

In this episode, I break down the three mistakes I see yoga teachers make most often when they teach yin: treating it as a slower version of a flow class instead of its own physiology, cueing “find your edge” as though it’s a complete instruction, and building a class from five favorite poses instead of a real sequence.

Yin looks like the easiest class on the schedule to teach, and it’s the one most likely to leave a teacher at the front of the room wondering what her job is right now. Getting the physiology, the cueing, and the sequencing right is what turns a yin class into one students come back for.

You’ll walk away knowing what tension and compression actually explain about why every body looks different in the same shape, how to cue an entry so a first-time student understands what you mean, and how to adapt the 6–4–2 framework you already use for flow into a structured yin arc.

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Transcript

0:00

Can I tell you something? My husband, Wes, took his first yin yoga class with me at Kripalu in the middle of a three-day workshop I was leading for athletes. Wes is a very sweet man. He is a native North Carolinian, and he approaches yoga the way he approaches anything physical, which is to grit it out. He calls it yooooooooogaaaa! When the yin session ended, he came over and said, "Honey, you shouldn't call that yin yoga. You should call it win yoga." I said,"Oh, sure," because this was a yoga for athletes weekend, "because it gives athletes the mental edge to stay with intensity so they can win.""Nah," he said, "because the whole time it was happening, I was wondering when is this ever going to be over?" In his Greensboro accent, the word when sounds like win, and he was very pleased with himself at the win yoga. I think about that class a lot because Wes had an enormous reaction to 60 minutes of doing almost nothing, and I was the teacher standing in front of that room. Yin yoga looks like the easiest class on the schedule to teach, right? There are five or six shapes. There are long holds, not much talking, but yin yoga is the one most likely to leave a teacher at the front of the room wondering what exactly her job is right now. I am Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. Today, I am previewing the August Comfort Zone Conversation, where we will spend a full hour together on teaching yin yoga. Today, I would like to float a diagnosis to you, and then in the call, we will look together for a cure. We'll work through the three things I see teachers get wrong most often and talk about what to do instead what the physiology actually supports, what find your edge could sound like coming out of your mouth, and how to build a yin yoga class that is a real sequence rather than just a list of poses you happen to like. If a studio has ever asked you to sub a yin class and you said yes but with a small knot in your stomach, this one is for you. Let me start with the misconception that lies underneath all of the others, that yin is a setting rather than a practice. Take the class you already teach, hold everything five times longer, dim the lights, and there's your yin class. Same shapes, different timer. I understand where that idea comes from because hold it longer is the only instruction many of us ever got, and it isn't wrong so much as it's about 4% of the story. Paul Grilley, one of the three teachers who built modern yin yoga, and someone I have studied with, explains the rest with orthodontics. If you want to straighten your teeth, you don't wiggle them hard and shove them where you want them to go. Instead, you wear braces, applying a very low-grade stress held over a very long stretch of time until the tissue reorganizes around it. Yin yoga seeks to do that to the yin tissues in the body, the fascia, the ligaments, the joint capsules, and even the bone, which are less elastic and less vascular than muscle, and which respond to time in a way they will never respond to force. You don't just push your teeth where you want them to go. So yin isn't running on separate physiology from your active yoga classes. It's running on the same principles you already use, the principle of specificity, the principle of progressive overload, and the principle of diminishing returns, but you have the dials of these principles set slightly differently. In episode 83 of this show, I unpacked what exercise physiology has to teach us about sequencing, and the dials there we discussed were the FITT, F-I-T-T variables, frequency, intensity, time, and type. I mentioned in passing in that episode that yin yoga uses time as its primary way of applying a stress stimulus to the body, and then I moved on because that episode was about your regular weekly class. Today, let's unpack that sentence and go a little bit deeper. Watch what happens when you set the same dials three ways. In a gentle yoga class, frequency is high because you revisit a shape again and again. Time in each shape is short. Intensity stays light. It's gentle. In yin yoga, frequency is low because each shape typically shows up exactly once. The time for each hold runs two to six minutes. That's quite long. And intensity is the one dial you as the teacher do not set at all because setup and time will bring it to the student. In restorative yoga, time stretches to 10 or 20 or 30 minutes per shape, and intensity drops to nothing because we aren't even after tissue adaptation in restorative yoga. Instead, we are at, going after the nervous system, which is the whole of episode 90 of this podcast if restorative is the class you are interested in teaching. But let's sit with that middle one, yin yoga, to fix the second misconception. The second thing teachers get wrong is find your edge. It's the phrase students hear most in yin, and I fear that they understand least, and it usually arrives as though it were just a complete instruction and students will simply get it. If intensity climbs on its own over the five minutes of a yin yoga pose hold, then the edge a student wants in the first 30 seconds of the hold is almost nothing. It's just the very first intimation that something is happening or could potentially happen. When I cue an entry to a yin shape, then I would say some version of this: time is going to intensify the shape, so look for the faintest edge you can find and trust that it will come to you. The other half of cueing the edge is helping students understand why their shape looks nothing like the shape on the next mat over. Paul Grilley's frame here changed my teaching in every style, not only in yin. Your range of motion, your ability in any pose is limited by either tension or compression. Tension is soft tissue lengthening, and it can change. Compression is bone meeting bone, and it cannot change. You can feel both in about 20 seconds. Extend one arm and press gently on the back of that upper arm just above the elbow, and the joint simply stops. No amount of breathing into it, no assist, no pulsing changes that, and your work there is to recognize it and accept it. Now, take an arm out to the side and draw it back. The tug you feel across your chest is tension, and if you waited there or if you pulsed back and forth a few times, your nervous system would probably let it go, and your range of motion visibly increases. I have personal evidence on the compression side. I broke my left elbow when I was 11, and I had it surgically repaired, and to this day, it carries a different angle than my right, and if you're watching the video version of this podcast on YouTube or Spotify, you can see it on screen right now. That's how you change a bone, slowly with braces or Invisalign or all at once with surgery. Everything else in the skeleton is just the body you were issued. This is why I stopped describing what a pose should look like and started describing where it works. So for sphinx pose, I'll say we're applying stress to the low back, maybe opening across the front of the hips and the chest, and if in sphinx pose you like to let your head hang down, the back of the neck. That gives a student a target instead of a picture, and it lets 20 different skeletons in the room all be, quote-unquote, "correct" at the same time now that sounds tidy in a sentence in a podcast. In the yoga room, it's a judgment call that you will make as the teacher 20 times or more each hour, and you can learn per body variability the way I did by trial and error in front of paying students over a couple of years. It works. It's a slow and it's a fairly public way to go about it, though. The framework is always the easy part for me to hand you. What takes reps is applying it to actual humans and knowing what to do when a shape doesn't work for someone. One more piece belongs in this section. It's a boundary and a definition. Discomfort is normal in yin yoga and pain is not. Shooting or nervy sensations or the feeling pins and needles of a limb going to sleep is information. Students should move and reposition, and they need to hear that from you out loud so that doing that reposition doesn't feel like quitting The third misconception I see is that yoga teachers might think that a yin class is just a chance for a pose list. Choose five shapes you like in an order that feels nice, and honestly, this is the one I'm most sympathetic to because yin has no governing body and no alignment dogma. That's genuinely one of the best things about yin yoga. The practice is malleable, it's adaptable. We could even call it open source. Structure is what makes that freedom usable. So I structure by planning my yin yoga classes with the very same 6-4-2 framework I use everywhere else, but tuned for the yin yoga format.

Six, six moves of the spine: 10:26

flexion, extension, side bending each way, and twisting each way.

Four, four lines of the leg: 10:33

the front, the back, the inner, and the outer. Then in place of the two core actions that I'd hit in an active class, that is stabilization of the core and articulation of the core, I sprinkle in a little seasoning for the shoulders because your students have been at a desk all day. Mine have, too, and so have I. Balance symmetrical shapes against asymmetrical shapes, a symmetrical shape and then an asymmetrical one on each side, then another symmetrical shape, and you have built yourself a really useful timing lever because the symmetrical holds are the ones you can shorten when the clock gets away from you. Remember, ending your class on time is a form of deep respect for your students. They have places to be. The arc I love most when I sequence a yin yoga class is modeled on a palindrome or a rainbow. Start symmetrical, work out through two or three asymmetrical shapes on one side, arrive at a symmetrical shape at the turn, then retrace the same poses on the second side in reverse order. My deconstructed cow face flow runs exactly that way, and students feel the symmetry even when they couldn't tell you what you did. We will go over that sequence in the live call. You can RSVP at the link in the show notes. You can also see it in my book, The Art of Yoga Sequencing, available wherever you get your books. And the shortcut I would give any teacher subbing a yin yoga class next week, take a balanced warm-up sequence from a class you already teach well and teach it low and slow. You already know how to build a balanced hour. Yin doesn't ask you to throw that away, and it gives back. I made the case in episode 56 of this show that learning to teach yin yoga and restorative yoga improves every other format on your schedule, and teaching yin yoga is what convinced me of it. The teacher who can sit with a five-minute silence stops being afraid of a ten-second silence in a flow class. So what do you do with this on Tuesday night? First, set expectations before anyone gets on a mat. This starts in the class description, and it continues in the doorway to the yoga room. When I meet someone new to yin yoga, I say something like, "We are on the floor the whole time, props are your friends, and this can be as sweet as restorative yoga or as spicy as you want it because you hold the cards. You are like Dorothy with her ruby slippers. Everything I offer is a suggestion. It is never a personal challenge." Second, front-load your words in your yin yoga class, and then get out of the way. You will use the most language at the top of class and at the start of each shape, then progressively less as the hold and the class go on. When you feel the urge to say something, take three slow breaths first and run two questions. Wait, why am I talking? And waste, why am I still talking? Silence is doing really important work for your students that you can't do when you're just filling time with the sound of your voice. Third, honor the rebound, the time when you're not in a shape, and give it its own real estate. That crescendo of sensation after you leave a shape is part of the practice, and I ask students to stay still and watch it rise and fade before they wiggle. Paul Grilley's line on this is perfect. He says, with his very dry sense of humor, so far as he knows, no one has ever died from the experience of exiting a yin yoga shape, which doesn't mean it's fun. I have come down out of deep spinal flexion in a snail pose feeling like I had been stabbed energetically in the back. But I can tell you, it fades, and watching it fade sometimes teaches more than the pose did. Fourth, stay out of the room for the most part. In an active class, you walk and assist. In yin yoga, students have put themselves in a vulnerable position, some of them right at the edge of what they can hold, and a teacher circulating behind them is a distraction at best. When I teach yin, I typically stay put unless someone waves me over or if I can see that a well-placed prop would change everything, and even then, I hand the prop over and let the student find their own angle with it. That doesn't mean demoing if your face is going to be turning away from your students. Generally, I demo half. That is to say, I take some, but not all of the pose. For example, in shoelace, which looks like cow face pose, I'll sit upright with my legs crossed. It gives a sense of all being in this together, but I don't take a deep forward fold. In both yin yoga and in core, I think it's annoying when the teacher blithely says, "Just a little longer here," without doing it herself. Fifth, expect the whole range of human reaction from this is win yoga to this is when is it going to be over yoga, and take none of it personally. Grealy sorts students into Black Knights and panda bears. The Black Knight is a reference to the Monty Python character who keeps fighting after he's been hacked to pieces, insisting, "It's only a flesh wound." That's the student trying to win at yin, and yes, that was Wes. The panda bear stays so far inside her comfort zone that she barely feels a thing. The panda bear, though, is not a problem to be fixed. Given the state of the world, a student who comes to yoga wanting reassurance and who gets exactly that has not wasted her time. The comfort zone is a fine place to be, and it's also a place we can expand gently from the inside out over months. Sixth, and this one is about your authority rather than your teaching, you don't have to oversell or justify yin yoga. We know that the yoga room is full of claims that wouldn't survive even glancing contact with a peer-reviewed study, and yin yoga attracts more than its share. I will simply tell students that gentle, sustained stress appears to support tissue hydration and joint health, and that long holds shift the nervous system toward rest, and then I stop because that's what I can stand behind. A healthy dose of skepticism will serve you and your students better than a confident story about meridians. Let the practice make the case. We are going much deeper on all of this in the August Comfort Zone Conversation. These are free calls I host at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on yoga teacher development, and this month's is called Yin

Yoga: 17:24

What Most Teachers Get Wrong. Everything I've given you today is the diagnosis of what most teachers get wrong. On the call, let's do the work. I will build yin sequences in front of you start to finish, and you'll watch me make the calls I can't narrate in an episode, like which shape to swap when half the room can't get into your original planned shape, where the shoulder work might fit in, and when a hold has gone on long enough. You will leave that call with sequences you can teach that week. Bring me the class you've been asked to sub or the description you haven't written yet, and we'll have a little time to work on it live. That is Thursday, August 27th, from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern. It is free inside the Zone, my community for yoga teachers, at comfortzoneyoga.com. If you can't make it live, RSVP anyway, and I will send you the recording. If you're hearing this much later, you can find that recording on my YouTube channel. You'll also leave that hour seeing how much territory yin yoga actually covers, the pose-by-pose variability, the cueing library, the judgment calls about who needs what. An hour is going to be just enough for me to show you the map and not to walk through it, but walking it is exactly what my Fundamentals of Teaching Yin Yoga course is built for. This is a self-paced course. It comes with a pose database, done-for-you lesson plans, a swipe file of language for entering and holding and exiting every shape, my personal review of your yin yoga lesson plans, and 20 Yoga Alliance CEUs or credit toward the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. You'll find it at comfortzoneyoga.com/yin and in the show notes. Yin yoga has its own physiology, its own vocabulary, and its own structural logic, and every one of these is learnable. What separates a yin class that students come back to is a teacher who can tell them what to look for, who can hold the room in silence without flinching, and who can build an hour or 75 minutes or 90 minutes that covers the whole body rather than just covering her five favorite shapes. Come hang out with us Thursday, August 27th from 2:00 to 3:00 Eastern. RSVP is free inside the Zone at comfortzoneyoga.com. And if you can't make it live, remember, RSVP anyway, and the recording will be yours. If this episode was useful, I would love it if you'd share it with a teacher friend, and a rating or a review on your podcast app of choice helps other teachers find the show. Thank you so much for joining me today for Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time