83. Stop Reinventing Your Yoga Class Every Week: What Exercise Physiology Tells Us About Sequencing

If you've ever spent hours creating a brand-new yoga sequence every week, only to wonder if your students even noticed the difference, this episode is for you.

I spent over a decade coaching endurance athletes to age group world championships and podium finishes at ultramarathons. In all those years, I never once gave an athlete a completely different workout every single day. That's not how the body adapts. That's not how performance improves. And yet, that's exactly what many yoga teachers do in their classes—treating lesson plans like a Netflix queue of fresh content when what students actually need is a training plan.

In this episode, I'm breaking down two foundational principles from exercise physiology—progressive overload and diminishing returns—and showing you exactly how to apply them to your yoga teaching. You'll learn about the FITT variables (Frequency, Intensity, Time, and Type) and how tweaking just one variable at a time creates the progressive challenge your students' bodies need to adapt and grow. I'll also explain why pouring hours into a fresh lesson plan every Sunday night is costing you more than it's benefiting your students.

This episode builds on Episode 7—Consistency over Variety—with the exercise science to back up why your students need repetition with small, intentional increases over time. Your students' bodies are smarter than your boredom. Trust that. Trust the repetition. Trust the process.

If you want to dive deeper into the sequencing frameworks I describe—the chunk model, the capsule wardrobe approach, the FITT variables, and week-to-week progression—all of it is in my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing: Contemporary Approaches and Inclusive Practices for Teachers and Practitioners. Check the show notes for a direct link.

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? And it's going to come back around to yoga, so bear with me. If I had handed one of my athletes a completely different workout every single day, they would've fired me and they would've been right to. I spent over a decade coaching endurance athletes, runners, triathletes, mountain bikers, some of whom went on to compete at age group world championships in triathlon and duathlon. I coached athletes through 100 mile ultra marathons and 24 hour mountain bike races. I raced on team USA myself at the 2008 World Triathlon Championship. I hold coaching certifications from USA Triathlon USA Cycling and the Roadrunners Club of America. And in all of those years, across all of those athletes here is something I never once did. I never gave an athlete a brand new workout every day. That is not how the body adapts. That's not how performance improves. And yet that's exactly what many of us are doing in our yoga classes. We are treating our lesson plans like they need to be a Netflix cue of fresh content when what our students actually need is a training plan. I am Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential, where I share the secrets of becoming a great yoga teacher in episode seven of this show, consistency Over Variety. I made the case that your students need your class sequencing to be consistent week over week, not wildly different every time. That episode is one of our most downloaded and for good reason. It strikes a nerve. Teachers hear the title and think, wait, I'm allowed to repeat my class plan. Yes, you are. And today I want to go deeper into why you're allowed, grounded in two principles of exercise physiology that will change the way you think about your teaching, and hopefully take a whole lot of pressure off your Sunday night planning session. Let's start with the foundation we laid in episode seven. Training equals stress plus rest. Patanjali tells us in the yoga sutras that practice becomes deeply rooted when it's attended to consistently over time. Exercise physiology says the same thing in its own language. The body adapts when we apply a stress stimulus in the appropriate dosage and then allow recovery. This is also Steer Assum Asana, that balance of effort and ease, it's all saying the same thing. Now, when I was coaching triathletes and ultra-marathon runners, the way this played out was through a structure called periodization. Periodization just means organizing training into cycles and the basic cycle I used with nearly all of my athletes look like this. Three weeks of progressive build. Then one week of step back in a build week, we take a set of workouts, the athletes training week and repeat it. The next week we'd repeat it again, but with a small increase then again with another small increase. And then in week four we'd pull back. Reduce the volume. Let the body absorb and adapt, because recovery isn't a luxury in training. It's the other half of the stress plus rest equation. That's why I wrote my book, the Athlete's Guide to Recovery Now in its second edition, three weeks of build, one week of step back like waves on an incoming tide. That's the rhythm, not randomness. Repetition with intelligent progression. Here's the critical piece. When we progressed from one week to the next, we didn't change everything. We tweaked one variable in exercise physiology. The variables we can manipulate go by the acronym, FITT, frequency, intensity, time, and type. Sometimes people call these fit variables or joke about fitness, but they're powerful. Let me walk you through each one and show you how it translates to the yoga room. Frequency is how often your students encounter a particular sequence or pose in a training plan. This might mean running three times a week instead of two in the yoga room. It means your students see your warmup sequence every single week for a cycle of a month or more. They see your standing flow every single week. Their bodies learn the shapes, their nervous systems settle. They stop needing to think so hard about what comes next, and they start to actually practice to notice, to refine, to go inward. And frequency includes both how many repetitions you do in a session, five rounds of sun salutations, 10 breaths of cat and cow, and also how many sessions you do over time. Intensity is how deep we go in a training context. This might be pace or resistance. In yoga, it's what we do to make a pose more or less challenging. The arrangement of the body, the range of motion, the leverage of the shape. Time is duration, both how long you hold a pose and also how long the overall session is. You could extend a balance pose from three breaths to five. You could give the standing segment an extra couple of minutes this week while keeping the warmup and finishing poses consistent. Yin yoga in particular uses time or duration as a primary means of imposing the stress stimulus on the body and mind. That second T type is the kind of movement or pose. And here's the kicker, this is the variable. Most of us want to change every single class, and it's the one we should be changing least. If you are swapping out your entire sequence every week, you are not tweaking one variable. You are changing all of them at once. And in training terms, that's not progressive overload. That's chaos. Let me tell you what this looked like in practice when I was coaching an athlete, preparing for an age group world championship and triathlon, in addition to swim, work and other bike and run training. Their training week might include a key Tuesday track workout, say six repeats of 800 meters at a specific pace. Another key Thursday tempo ride on the bike and a Saturday brick A ride going right into a run. The next week, same three key sessions, but on Tuesday, maybe we do seven or eight repeats instead of six, or we'd increase the length of the interval, one variable. That's it. It would have been absolutely ridiculous to hand that athlete a completely new set of workouts every Monday. They wouldn't have been able to track their progress. They wouldn't have known whether they were getting faster or stronger, and honestly. They would've gotten hurt because their bodies never had the chance to adapt to a consistent stimulus before I yanked it away and replaced it with something else. Now, hold that thought because the same thing is happening in yoga rooms everywhere. We yank the stimulus away before our students' bodies have a chance to adapt to it, and then we wonder why they don't seem to be progressing and why they don't return to your class over time. Now let's talk about the flip side of progressive overload, because this is where it gets really interesting for us as yoga teachers. The principle of diminishing returns says that more is not always more. There's a point in any training progression where adding additional load doesn't produce proportional benefit. In fact, if you push past that point, you don't just plateau. You dig yourself into a hole. The body can't recover. Performance actually declines in endurance sports. We call this over training. The athlete does more and more work and gets slower and slower. They're confused, they're demoralized, and the only fix is to stop to rest sometimes for weeks or months. I write about this in the Art of Yoga sequencing with an analogy I love. Just because something is good in small doses does not mean more is better. Five rounds of sun salutations might be perfect. Well, 108 might be too many. One scoop of ice cream might be perfect. 18 would be too. Eating ice cream once a week might be perfect. Eating it once or twice a day might be too much, and I can tell you that from personal experience. My first job at 16 was as an ice cream scooper, and I ate ice cream three times a day. Who knew it was possible to burn out on ice cream? The point is there is a right enough amount of stimulus to induce change in your students' unique bodies. Adding more beyond that quickly loses its value, and if you continue to pile on more poses, more novelty, more complexity, you are not serving your students, you are overloading them, you, you're creating confusion, not adaptation. Here's how diminishing returns applies to your class planning. If you are a teacher who pours hours into crafting a completely new sequence every single week, if you're what I would call the mad genius, like Carmi from the TV show, the bear designing a new menu every single night, reinventing the wheel, every class, at some point, the return on that investment starts to shrink. You're spending enormous energy on novelty that your students don't actually want or need. That energy has a cost. It's time you could spend being present in the room. It's mental bandwidth that you could use to actually see your students instead of running through your choreography in your head. And here's the part that might sting a little. Your students don't need all that variety nearly as much as you think they do. In fact, they might not notice it at all. This is something I hear over and over from teachers who come through the zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, through my Prep Station membership, through my Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, mentorship, membership, and from listeners of this show, they come to me nervous. They say, I can't repeat my lesson plan. My students will notice, they'll get bored, they'll think I'm lazy, and then they try it. They teach the same basic sequence for a few weeks in a row, tweaking one variable at a time, maybe extending a hold here, adding a transition there, and they come back laughing every single time they come back laughing."They didn't even notice!" As my mentee Lana pointed out, whole branded systems of yoga were named after men who wrote a single sequence and taught it week in and week out. What makes us as female yoga teachers think we need to go so far in the other direction. Of course your students didn't complain about the repetition. They literally didn't even notice it because here's what your students actually notice. They notice whether they feel good in class. They notice whether you seem present and confident. They notice whether the flow makes sense in their bodies. They notice whether they can breathe comfortably. They notice how connected they feel. Connection is my favorite definition of yoga.. Your students are not sitting there with a clipboard comparing this week's sequence to last week's. In fact, students who practice within a consistent framework like practitioners of Ashtanga yoga or the hot 26 sequence, they often say that while the prescribed practice is the same every time, their body's minds and energies vary enough day to day to yield something new. In each experience, the consistency becomes the container for noticing change. When the sequence is a fixed variable, students get to observe the variation in themselves. That's profound. Listen to that again. When the sequence stays the same, students notice what's changing in them. When you change something every week, your students can't isolate their own growth. They are too busy processing new information to go inward. They're back to being beginners every class and not in a good way. You are the only person who has ever been in every class you've taught, who has ever listened to every single word you have ever said. Your students are not. People need repetition to learn. They often need to hear your message several times before it clicks How do you actually put this into practice? Here's what I recommend, first. Commit to a class plan for a chunk of time. In my book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing, I suggest a three to eight week period teach the same basic sequence, the same warmup, the same standing segment, the same floor work, the same finishing, and change something subtle each week. In week one, maybe you're moving slowly from pose to pose. In week two, you add a flowing on the breath layer. In week three, you reverse the breath cues for a familiar movement. In week four, you give students the option to move spontaneously. Same sequence, different seasoning. This is exactly the model of periodization from endurance sports. Your students' bodies get a chance to adapt, absorb, and integrate, and you get a break from the hamster wheel of novelty. Second, use the fit variables intentionally. When you sit down to plan, ask yourself, which one variable am I tweaking this week? Not all of them, one. Maybe you're extending the hold on a balance pose a few more breaths. Maybe you're adding a transition between two poses that your students already know individually. Maybe you're bumping the standing segment by a couple of minutes and shortening the warmup slightly. One variable. That's your progressive overload. Third, change the type last and least remember type. The actual poses and sequences is the variable we're most tempted to swap out. Resist that temptation. If you use the chunking or crea model, I describe in the art of yoga sequencing, warm up, standing floor finishing, try changing out. No more than one chunk per week. In the book, I called this flipping one page of the Create Your Own Monster book. Over the course of several weeks, you wind up with a different creature and you have some fun combinations along the way, but your students have been with you for the whole journey. They are not lost. Fourth, trust the 80- 20 rule. Keep your class 80% consistent from week to week and change out only about 20%. I've talked about this as building a capsule wardrobe. You've got your jeans and t-shirts, and you swap out a jacket or a scarf or accessories. The uniform stays the same. The personality comes through in the details. And fifth know when the returns are diminishing on your current plan. This is the other half of the equation. After several weeks of the same basic sequence, your students will start to plateau. You'll feel it. They'll feel it. The body is a clever machine. With regular practice, it finds ways to get efficient at doing the things you ask it to do. These become habitual patterns, samskara, and at their worst, they tempt us toward mindlessness and stagnation. That's your cue to introduce a new cycle. Refresh the menu, start a new three to eight week block, but do it intentionally, not reactively. Here's what I want you to take away from today. The science is on your side. Progressive overload tells us that your students need repetition with small, intentional increases over time, not a brand new sequence every week. Diminishing returns tells us that more novelty doesn't equal more growth, and that pouring hours into a fresh lesson plan every Sunday night is costing you more than its benefiting your students. Your students' bodies are smarter than your boredom. Trust that, trust the repetition, trust the process. If you want to go deeper into the sequencing frameworks I've been describing, the chunk model, the capsule wardrobe approach, the fit variables, the week to week progression. All of it is in my 2024 book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing, contemporary Approaches and Inclusive Practices for Teachers and Practitioners. It's available wherever books are sold in print and ebook. Check the show notes for a direct link. I think of that book as my brain on paper. It's the sequencing framework. I've developed over more than 20 years of teaching grounded in exercise physiology and designed to take the stress out of class planning so you can focus on what truly matters being present with your students. Thank you so much for listening to Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time.