Ep 134: How A Student's Neutral Alignment Should Affect The Cues You Use

Most of us inherited our cueing vocabulary from the teachers who trained us, and many of those cues have been repeated with so much confidence and so often that they feel like they're factually and anatomically correct. But when you actually examine the anatomy underneath the cues, a different picture begins to emerge. Neutral alignment is different in every student and is not a single position that every body can, or should, achieve. It is individual, shaped by each student's unique skeletal structure, movement history, and tissue patterns. This episode breaks down three of the most commonly used alignment cues in yoga classes, what the anatomy actually tells us about them, and what to cue instead.

• Where Yoga Cues Come From
• Why "Tuck Your Tailbone" Doesn't Work for Every Student's Pelvis
• Why "Square Your Hips" Depends on Hip Socket Anatomy & What It Actually Allows
• Why Asking Students to Create A "Flat Spine" Is Not Anatomically Correct
• What to Say Instead

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Monica facilitates anatomy trainings for yoga teachers and mentors teachers who want to build a practice grounded in real anatomical understanding. Book a strategy call to talk about what deeper anatomy education could look like for you.

Transcript

Monica 3:59

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here is where we talk about anatomy, injuries, the nervous system, and answer the questions you wish had been covered in your yoga teacher training. I'm a yoga teacher who specializes in helping teachers work confidently with students who have pain and injuries. A big part of what I do is anatomy education. I facilitate anatomy trainings for yoga teachers. And something that comes up every time I'm working with a teacher is this realization that a lot of the cues we use in yoga classes are ones that we inherited from someone else, maybe in our teacher trainings. And we inherited those cues without pausing to ask whether they actually make sense for the students we're actually teaching. So I want you to imagine that you are teaching Warrior I and you carry on cuing how you always cue. You say, "Turn your back foot out at an angle, stack your front knee over your ankle, and square your hips towards the front of the mat." These are just the lower body cues that we're gonna work with, okay? So you continue to use these cues confidently because this is how you were taught to create the foundation for Warrior I. These cues are what the teacher who trained you used and taught you to use. And I mean, it sounds right. It sounds anatomically correct. But the thing is, for a significant number of the students in your classes, those cues may not be helpful. Why? Because they're asking the student's body to do something that might not match the actual neutral anatomical alignment each student has. And a lot of teachers don't realize this because we didn't stop to ask whether the alignment cues are appropriate for students. It's kind of like we're trying to squeeze students into an alignment container, but that container needs some flexibility. And this is what we're gonna talk about in this episode. So I wanna meet you at the moment you realize, the moment where you understand that what you've been teaching for however long you've been teaching isn't attainable by your students. Maybe they complain that it hurts or it doesn't feel right, or maybe they say that they despise the pose. And what we've been taught to tell students is that means that you need to practice the pose more, or you need to learn to sit in discomfort, or how you respond to difficulty on the mat is how you learn to respond to difficulties off the mat. And my hope is that we stop telling students this because it's trite and it just isn't the complete story. The complete story is to take the student's neutral alignment and their movement, pain, and injury history into consideration. So today we're gonna take three specific cues that a lot of yoga teachers use regularly, and I'm gonna show you why they become problematic When you understand that neutral alignment is not the same for every student. Now, before we get into the specific cues, let's be clear. Many of the cues we use in our classes we learned the same way. We heard them from a teacher in our training or in classes that we were taking. That teacher heard them from another teacher, and somewhere along the way, they became part of the standard vocabulary of yoga instruction, repeated so often and so confidently that we believe they apply to everyone's neutral alignment. But hearing a cue repeated again and again is not the same as that cue being anatomically applicable for everyone. And I think one of the most important skills any yoga teacher can develop is the willingness to pause and ask, Does this cue actually make sense in the body? Does it make sense when I understand the anatomy underneath it? Is it asking every student in the class to try to practice the same thing when the anatomy of every person in the room is actually different?" that discernment is what separates a teacher who is passing on inherited cueing language from a teacher who is thinking about the actual student bodies in every class they teach. So let's look at three of the most common cues through that lens. Let's start with tuck your tailbone because this one is used constantly in standing poses and forward folds, sometimes even in seated positions. And on the surface it sounds like a reasonable postural correction, tuck it under, flatten the lower back and protect the spine. that's the idea behind it. But here is what the anatomy actually tells us. The pelvis sits differently in every body. Some students have a natural anterior pelvic tilt, my daughter does, where the front of the pelvis tips forward and the lower back has a more pronounced curve. Some students have a more neutral pelvis, and some students already have a posterior pelvic tilt where the pelvis is already tipped backward and the lower back is flatter than a natural curve that another student has. That last group is the one where tuck your tailbone becomes kind of an issue. When you tell a student who already has a posterior pelvic tilt or a more flat lower back to tuck their tailbone further, you're asking them to exaggerate a position that may already be contributing to discomfort or just taking a movement that they cannot possibly take. You're moving them further away from the natural lumbar curve that the spine is actually designed to have, And here's another piece. The tailbone, the coccyx, is a fused structure at the base of the sacrum. The sacrum itself has variation in its angle and orientation between different bodies. So saying, "Tuck your tailbone," is asking for a posterior pelvic tilt, but because every pelvis is positioned differently to begin with, that cue lands differently in every body. For some students, it might be appropriate as a small correction. For others, it over-corrects into a position that is not neutral for their anatomy. And for others still, the cue makes no real sense given how their pelvis is already situated. So what do you say instead? Try cueing awareness rather than a specific action, something like, Notice where your pelvis is right now and see if there's a position that feels stable and supportive for your low back." this gives the student permission to find their own neutral rather than adopting your definition of neutral. Or if you wanna use an action to help students find their neutral, this is what I teach a lot. You can say, "Rock your pelvis back and forth." You can ask them to rock towards the extreme. Let's say while we're teaching chair pose as an example, and then after they rock, ask them to find their own neutral somewhere between those extremes. This has been so helpful for many of my students, so you are welcome to take this idea and try it in your classes, and I would love to hear what you notice when you do. All right, the next cue is to square your hips. This one is probably the cue I think about most when it comes to the gap between what we ask students to do and what is actually possible in their body. So square your hips to the front is something that we all hear constantly in poses like warrior one, in lunges, and even pigeon poses. Or square your hips to the side of the mat in poses like warrior two, triangle, or standing open hip balances like half moon, Ardha Chandrasana, or Chapasana. And what we're using the cue for is trying to squeeze students' bodies into one specific container again. And not all students' hip skeletal positioning can accomplish this. These cues are also trying to create the conditions for evenness, symmetry, and a sense of alignment in their pelvis. But the anatomy of the hip joint makes this cue complicated for a large portion of students. The acetabulum, which is the socket of the hip joint, varies significantly between individuals in its depth, its angle, and its orientation. The femoral neck, which is the angle at which the top of the thigh bone meets the hip socket, also varies. Some people have femoral anteversion where the hip is naturally oriented more inward. Others have retroversion where it is naturally turned outward. these differences are structural and no amount of muscular effort or intentional positioning is going to change them. What this means is that when you tell all of your students to square their hips, you're asking everyone to attempt to achieve the same positioning regardless of the different bony structures underneath. For students with significant variation in their hip anatomy, truly squaring their pelvis in a pose like warrior one is not actually possible without creating compensation somewhere else in the body, often in the knee or in their lower back. The pelvis rotates as far as the hip joint will allow it, and then the torque has to go somewhere else. I see this pattern a lot when I'm working with teachers in anatomy trainings. When they understand hip socket variation, the cue square your hips and the following action from students becomes something they can never unsee. Because once you know that one student's anatomy physically cannot achieve what another student's can, cueing everyone toward the same position stops being your priority A more useful approach is to observe what is actually happening in your students' bodies before you cue anything. If a student's pelvis is rotating significantly, ask yourself whether that rotation is coming from a place of compensation that needs addressing or whether it is simply where their anatomy naturally takes them. And rather than cueing them toward a standard one-size-fits-all position, cue them towards sensation and stability. You can say something like, "Find a position in your hips where you feel strong and your knee feels comfortable," instead because now you realize that saying square your hips isn't a helpful cue for some, maybe even most of the students in your classes. All right, the third cue I want to address is referencing a flat spine or a flat back, which you hear most often in half lifts after forward folds in a tabletop position or sometimes in standing and supine poses. And this cue I think is the most straightforward to unpack because the spine is literally not designed to be flat. the spine has natural curves. The cervical spine, your neck, curves inward. It's a lordotic curve. The thoracic spine, your mid and upper back, curves slightly outward. That's a kyphotic curve. And the lumbar spine, your lower back, curves inward again into another lordotic curve. These curves are not postural problems that need to be corrected. So when we cue a flat back in a forward fold, we are often unintentionally asking students to work against the natural architecture of their own spine. Also, the degree of natural curvature varies between students. Some students have a more pronounced lumbar curve and a more pronounced thoracic curve. Others are flatter through one region and more curved in another. None of these curves are wrong. They're just different spines. So I'm not talking spinal abnormalities here such as scoliosis. That could be an entire episode on its own. But these natural curvatures are the architecture of a spine that is designed to absorb load, distribute force, and support the weight of the body efficiently. A truly flat spine would actually be less functional, not more. A more accurate and more useful cue is to talk about maybe extending the spine Extending in the sense of lengthening or about maintaining the natural curves of the spine rather than eliminating them. You could say find length through the spine from the crown of your head to your tailbone. This gives students something that they could actually envision and work with rather than asking them to achieve a shape that contradicts their natural neutral anatomy. You can even cue them to take a neutral spine, which would be using cues that are more anatomically correct than cuing a flat spine. I wanna bring all three of these examples together because the cues themselves are kind of besides the point. What matters is the principle underneath them. Going forward, before you use a cue, ask yourself, where did this cue come from? Did I hear it from another teacher? And am I repeating it without examining it? Does it make sense when I think about the actual anatomy it's referring to? And am I asking every student in class to try to achieve the same position when I know the bodies in my classes are anatomically different? This is discernment, and it's a skill. And like any skill, it takes time to develop, and it develops with education, with practice, and with the willingness to question what you're doing now and whether it deserves to be questioned. The teachers who go through anatomy training with me consistently describe this as one of the most significant shifts in how they teach. Not because they suddenly know more poses or have a bigger cuing vocabulary, but because they start to see and look at their students' bodies differently. They stop trying to fit students into a container and start helping students create their own containers based off of their own neutral alignment. Now, if this is making you want to get more curious or you are ready to go deeper into anatomy studies to really understand the human body underneath the cues you're using and build a teaching practice grounded in that knowledge, I would love for you to book a strategy call with me. We will talk about where you are in your teaching, what you want to understand more deeply, and what the right next step looks like for you. That might be the mentorship, it might be anatomy training, and it might just be the conversation that helps you get clear on the direction you want to go in with regards to your continuing education. The link to book that call is in the show notes, and I really do mean it when I say this conversation has the potential to change how you teach. So book that call. I would love to talk to you. And thank you so much for being here and being a part of the conversation that we deserve to have as yoga teachers. Okay, bye.