Ep 125: Sequencing: Why Less Is More

If you think you need to have creative sequences that are wildly different every week to retain students, or that the creative demonstrates a teaching skill, then this episode is for you! In this episode, I will directly challenge this belief. If you have ever felt anxious about being too repetitive or wondered whether your regular students are getting bored, this conversation is going to give you a different way to think about what your sequencing is actually doing for the students in your classes.

What I'll cover:

• Why Cognitive Load Matters in Yoga Class
• What I've Observed Teaching Mixed-Level Classes
• Why Students Come to Yoga 
• Three Alternatives to Consider Instead of Writing New Sequences Week After Week

Resources Mentioned:

Sequencing Made Easy - a clear, practical framework for building classes that are accessible and well-structured.  

Transcript

Monica 3:59

welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system insights, plus all the real life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. Tell me if you have ever taught a class and watched your students as they move through your sequence and you thought, Hmm. Not that a student is about to hurt themselves. Not that your cues were confusing, but the thought that your class is too predictable, that your students know what's coming next without you queuing the next pose, or maybe that they think that your sequences are boring. have you ever thought that? The students who have been coming to your classes for months or years are going to leave one day and never come back because you keep teaching the same poses in the same order. I think this is a real thought that teachers are having, and I wanna talk about it because I think it's driving a lot of decisions when it comes to yoga sequencing that are actually working against the students that we care most about serving in this episode. I wanna make a case that creative complex, constantly changing sequences are not what most of your students need or even want. I wanna talk about what happens in a student's body and their nervous system when a sequence becomes. Too demanding to follow, and I wanna share a little bit of what I witnessed teaching group classes early in my career that completely changed how I approach sequencing. And I wanna give you some practical alternatives to the constant creativity cycle that will actually serve your students better and probably keep them coming back to your classes and you won't have to worry about them being bored at all. If you are a new teacher who feels this pressure to prove yourself through clever sequencing week after week, this episode is for you. And if you are an experienced teacher who has been teaching for years and has slowly built sequences, so elaborate that only your most athletic longtime students can actually follow them. Then this episode is also for you. First, there's nothing wrong with being creative or having thoughtful, well-designed sequences that build intelligently from one pose to the next. You see the problem is not creativity. Alone. The problem is what we are actually doing when we change sequences constantly and layer in complex transitions and what that is asking of the students in our classes, when a student comes to your class, there's already a significant cognitive demand In your yoga room. They're listening to you cue. They're orienting their body in space. They are trying to understand where one pose ends and another pose begins. They are managing their breath. They are noticing how their body feels in a position that most of their daily life. Does not ask of them. So they've got a lot going on now. Add a transition that requires four steps for them to complete. Or a creative transition between poses that has no obvious logic to it, or an unusual way into a standing posture that even an experienced student would have to think about What you have just done is dramatically increased the cognitive load in your students And the moment their cognitive load gets high enough, their mindfulness disappears. The student is no longer in their body. They are in their head trying to figure out what you want them to do next. Their breath shortens, their nervous system kind of feels like it's bracing and what brought them to yoga, that desire to. Settle in to land somewhere safe. Doesn't feel like it's happening. Now, this is not about dumbing down your teaching or oversimplifying your sequences. This is about understanding the why behind what we teach in yoga. So early in my teaching career, probably about 12 years ago, I was teaching a group class at a gym, and the students in those classes ranged from the ages of about 18 to 80 years old. Same class, but wildly different bodies, different histories, different relationships to movement. And one of the things I started noticing while I was observing their facial movements and how they move their bodies Was what was happening to my older students during the transitions I was teaching. I could see it. One student in her seventies who had been doing yoga for years would be right there with me through the first few poses, and then I would cue something with an extra step or sequence into a pose in an unexpected way. And I could watch her pause, not pause, because she was experiencing some kind of pain or some kind of movement limitation, but she was pausing to think Her gaze would go slightly inward. Her body would still for a moment, and she was working so hard to figure out what I was asking of her. I could see it in her body language. She was no longer in the practice. She was trying to solve this puzzle that I unfortunately created for her. And to be clear, this was not a sign of her cognitive decline. This is just how the brain works at any age under a high enough cognitive load. But what I understood in watching her was that my creativity, my need to be interesting and varied and stimulating was costing her. Her practice. That realization made me think about my sequencing. I started asking myself, what am I actually trying to offer these students in this class? What is the purpose of this class? And what I realized was that it wasn't that I wanted to have creative transitions. I wanted my students to have a mindful practice, but I felt pressured to keep making it different week to week. I also started looking more carefully at why I was. Sequencing the way I was when a transition felt clunky, I realized I had a couple of choices I could add in a preparatory pose to build a clearer bridge between poses, Or I could simplify the transition itself by changing what came next. Both of those options served my students better than asking them to just keep up with the ideas that I had in my mind for my sequencing and them trying to figure them out Doing that was serving no one. most of the students who come to your yoga class have already. Had a full day. By the time they arrive, they have navigated relationships, decisions, screen time, traffic, deadlines, noise, and the constant hum of this world that asks them to process more information than any of our nervous systems were designed to handle effectively. They are not coming to your classes for more challenge or complexity. They are coming to you to release that for a little while So when you write a sequence that is predictable enough for a student's body to relax into when they know more or less what's coming next, when the sequence follows a logic, their nervous system can trust, you're actually giving them a gift. You give them permission to stop focusing on. What is next and actually be in what's happening right now. This is exactly what the yoga practice is designed to do. Repetition is often how students find a deeper level of awareness when a student has practiced a sequence Enough times that they are not tracking for each transition with their analytical mind. They can go somewhere else in the practice. They can soften into it. I like to call it a moving meditation. They can feel the difference between how Warrior One felt last week and how it feels today. They can notice how their breath moves through downward facing dog. They can begin to develop proprioceptive awareness of where their bodies are moving in space because they're not using all of their mental bandwidth to follow your instructions. It's important to understand the students who are in your classes. Unless you are teaching a highly specialized level specific class, you have students at very different stages of their practice practicing next to each other. You have people who have been doing yoga for 20 years and people who are just maybe in their. Third class ever. You have students who move easily into deep range of motion and students That are still learning how to organize a simple lunge in their bodies. You have students who are young and students who are older, and students whose capacity to process new information in real time is. Different from one another. Not because anything's wrong with them, but because that is how human cognition works across a person's lifespan. A complex, constantly changing sequence with elaborate transitions serves the experience. Mobile students who have been with you long enough to read your teaching mind, it leaves everyone else working so hard. To keep up that they never actually practice mindfulness, But a clear, accessible, well designed sequence, one with a coherent arc, logical transitions, and enough familiarity that a student can eventually stop thinking and start feeling will serve the entire class. It gives your experienced students depth because depth comes from sustained attention. So what do you do when you feel like you wanna be more creative or that you worry that your regular students are getting bored? First, get curious about where the challenge actually is. If you feel like your sequences need more interest, Ask yourself whether you are looking forward in the right place. Complexity and sequencing is one way to create challenge, But challenge can also be created in maybe the precision of your alignment cues in longer static holds that invite breath awareness alongside the practice in deliberate pauses between poses, where you ask students to notice what's happening. A well cued chair pose held for five breaths With precise instruction about where they should place their weight in the soles of their feet, Or holding chair pose long enough so that they can actually assess how their low back feels. This can be more demanding than practicing more chair poses throughout the sequence. The challenge here shifts from cognitive thinking to experiential feeling, and this is how you can add challenges without doing. A, a whole lot more in your sequences or a bunch of different stuff in your sequences. Second, Let repetition be one of your go-to tools. Don't make it about a failure of your imagination and creativity. If students are coming back to the same sequence week after week, that's information. It means the sequence has something in it that is working for them. You can help them go deeper into a sequence that is. Already serving them. You can introduce a variation at the edges, a slightly different opening to your sequence, a new closing or ending to your sequence, a single new pose that builds on something familiar. And you can do this without rewriting an entire sequence every week. Third, remember that your students are not staying in your classes or leaving based on whether your sequence is. New they are staying, because of how they feel when they leave your classes. They keep coming back to your classes because of how they feel when they leave each class. They are staying because your class feels like a place where they feel held or supported. They're continuing to come back because they trust you, and that trust is often built through consistency, through being seen through a teacher who knows what. Their students need and builds towards that with intention. Think about it this way. Students will forgive a simple sequence. They might think, Hmm, okay, that was cool, but they will not forgive a sequence that makes them feel lost, inadequate, or defeated at the end of class. If you are rethinking how you approach sequencing after listening to this and you want a concrete starting point, I have a free resource called Sequencing Made Easy, that helps you think through how to build a sequence that's clear, accessible, and well structured, and it's your sequence, not mine. I've linked it in the show notes and you can download it and use it and let it give you a framework that you can return to whenever you feel unsure about your sequencing intentions. Sequencing takes skill. it's just not the skill. Most of us were taught to think. We were taught that sequencing has to change often or that it's gotta be different in order to keep students coming back, and that's just not true. Think about set sequence classes. Those classes are really popular, and students know what they're getting every single time they come to those classes. the skill in sequencing is not in how many ideas you can fit into your class. It's in knowing what your students need and creating a sequence that actually gives it to them. All right. I hope that this episode helped you think about your sequencing, how you approach it, and if you're really serving your students with the choices you're making. if you're enjoying these episodes, leave a review and share it with another yoga teacher. Okay. Thank you so much for being here. I want you to think about your sequencing and the whys behind it and your intentions when you're writing them and teaching them, and maybe make some tweaks along the way. Alright, I'll see you next week. Okay, bye.