85. How to Teach Balance for Every Body

Have you ever had a student freeze in tree pose and apologize for wobbling? In this episode, I'm rethinking how we teach balance so every body in the room—regardless of age, injury history, or experience—can work the skill without feeling like they're failing.

I walk through the four systems that keep us upright (vestibular, proprioception, vision, and musculoskeletal), why the brain's plasticity means balance can improve at any age, and why fear has a mechanical effect on your students' ability to stabilize.

Then I share five concrete shifts you can make in your very next class: weaving balance through every quarter of class, using the 6–4–2 to teach across all three planes, offering a sweeter-to-spicier spectrum instead of one "right" pose, cueing the system (not just the shape), and changing the language that surrounds wobbling so students stay with the practice.

If you want to go deeper, I'm hosting a free Comfort Zone Conversation on Thursday, May 21, called Balance for Every Body. And the full self-paced course, Fundamentals of Teaching Balance, is open for enrollment now.

Listen now!

Join the waitlist for the July cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing: A Mentorship Membership (MMM): sagerountree.com/mentorship

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

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Transcript

0:00

Can I tell you something? A few years ago, I was at the doctor's office for an x-ray on my sprained ankle. That was slow to heal as an ultra runner, I kept rolling my ankles on the trails and the doctor not knowing I was a yoga teacher who had specialized in balance for years, very kindly suggested that I try standing on one leg. He offered to watch me do it. Easy peasy. Okay, now close your eyes. Done. Now turn your head side to side. Also done for longer than he did too. And I remember thinking, how can I have textbook balance in this fluorescent lit clinic and still be rolling my ankles every other week out on the trails? The answer is that balance is not one thing. Balance is a whole system of things, and what holds you up on a linoleum floor is different from what holds you up on roots and rocks and dappled light. Your students know this in their bodies, even if they can't name it, because balance changes on them all the time. From day to day, from room to room, from the mat to the grocery store to the stairs at their kids' school. Which means when we teach balance as if it's just T tree pose on the right, T tree pose on the left and maybe eagle pose if we're feeling fancy, we are selling it short. We are selling them short. I am Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential, the podcast where we talk about confidence sequencing, cueing, and the craft of teaching yoga to real humans. Today I'm doing a preview episode for my next Comfort Zone conversation, which is Thursday, May 21st, two to 3:00 PM Eastern. It's free inside the Zone, and it's called Balance for Everybody. I'll give you the RSVP link in a minute, and because I'm me, I'm not going to spend a full episode on, come to this free call. Maybe you're listening to this after the call has already happened, in which case it will be up on my YouTube channel. But I want to actually teach you something useful because if you leave this episode with a better way to understand, to sequence and to cue balance whether or not you ever click a single link, I have done my job. So here's what I want to cover today. Why balance is the most honest moment in your class. What is actually happening physiologically when your student is wobbling? The four systems, the brain, and most importantly, the mind. How balance belongs in every part of class, not just the balance pose slot, and what it means practically to make your classroom a place where students can operate without fear of failure. Then I'll tell you what we're doing in the live call and where the full training lives. If you want to go deeper, let's get into it. Here's the thing I have noticed in 20 plus years of training yoga teachers, most of us were taught to teach balance the same way. You get your students upright, you pick a standing balance pose, you cue fix your gaze, gauge your core root down through the standing foot, and then you hope. And the thing is, those cues are not wrong. They're just incomplete. They're written for a specific kind of body on a specific kind of day in a specific kind of room, which is to say not everybody, not every day, not every room. So what happens? Half the class wobbles and grabs the wall. The other half stands perfectly still and looks bored. The teacher, you feels like you're failing both groups at once. So balance becomes the most awkward. Two minutes of class. Check the box tree on the right, tree on the left. Maybe that fancy eagle pose. If you're brave and move on. I want to offer a reframe. Balance is not a genre of pose. A balance is a skill and not a single skill either. It's a whole conversation between the body, the brain, the mind, and the environment, which is actually good news for us as yoga teachers because that means there are many, many more places to meet a student than just hold the shape longer. Here's another thing I want to name because it's in the room, whether we do talk about it or not. When a student wobbles, they usually feel embarrassed. They read it as failure. And if we as teachers don't actively reshape that, if we just keep queuing as if the wobble is a mistake, we reinforce the shame. We train them to avoid balance. And the highest correlated indicator of a future fall is a previous fall, which means that fear matters. Avoidance matters. How you talk about balance in your classroom matters because you're either expanding your students' relationship with balance or you're quietly shrinking it. So let's do better than that. let's do the physiology in the most useful possible way. The version I teach inside my fundamentals of teaching balance course, because once you understand this, your queuing gets dramatically more precise. When your student is standing on one foot, four systems are running in the background in real time. One, the vestibular system. This is your inner ear. It's basically your internal gyroscope detecting where your head is in space. That's why that doctor wanted me to turn my head from side to side. If you've ever had vertigo, you have met your vestibular system. I had about once where bending over to check the flame on my stove would send me reeling. Classic vestibular, misfiring, and happily, it was when I was able to reset with the EPLI maneuver, which looks a lot like moving into an out of rabbit pose and the threading the needle shape. You'll find it on YouTube or ask your physical therapist. It's good to know as a teacher that not all dizziness is a metaphor. It can be real and physiological. The second system is proprioception. The sixth sense the receptors in your muscles, tendons, and joints that tell your brain where your body parts are without you having to look. This is why you can touch your nose with your eyes closed. It's also why when a student has had an old ankle spr. Their proprioception on that foot is fuzzier than on the other side, and their balance is uneven in a way they can't quite name. That was me, and it turned out from that visit that my ankle wasn't sprained. It has been fractured many times, and not all of those fractures were fresh. System number three, vision. This is why the doctor wanted me to close my eyes. Your eyes aren't just giving you drishti. They're giving you depth movement in the room, lines, in the floor, all of which your brain uses to keep you upright. Close your eyes in a balance pose and notice how loudly your other systems have to shout to compensate. And system Number four is the musculoskeletal system. The bones, joints, muscles, connective tissue, doing the actual structural work, strong feet available ankles, engaged hips, a spine that can move. These four systems don't work in isolation. They're constantly talking to each other through the brain, which is basically the group project manager. And the brain, by the way, has some specialists on the team. The cerebellum, that walnut sized region at the back of the brain coordinates movement and fine tunes motor control. Think of it as quality control. The brain stem handles reflexive action when you trip in, your body adjusts before you've even noticed. That's the brainstem. The parietal lobes give you spatial awareness, your sense of where your body is in relation to the room. And there's a little reflex called the vestibular ocular reflex, or VOR that stabilizes your gaze when your head moves. It's what lets you read a sign while you're walking? Here's the hopeful part. The brain is plastic. I'm not calling you Barbie brain. I mean, your brain can adapt. It rewires in response to practice. So when you teach balance well, you are literally helping your students lay down new neural pathways. Neuroplasticity is not just a buzzword, it is the whole reason balance improves with practice at. Any age. Now, here's the part, many yoga teacher trainings, skip balance is not only physiological, balance is also psychological. Fear changes the answer. When a student is afraid of falling because they've fallen before or because a friend broke a hip last year, or because they don't trust their knee, their body tenses. That tension actively interferes with the micro adjustments. That good balance requires fear, makes balance harder Mechanically. The antidote to fear is not bravado, it's self-efficacy. The belief that you can adapt and recover and self-efficacy is built in small specific winds holding a pose, one breath longer, trying a new variation, stepping down on purpose instead of falling out by accident. Those micro successes are not fluff. They are the nervous system, learning that it is safe to try. Which means your job as the teacher is not to prevent wobbling. Your job is to build the classroom where wobbling is allowed. That connects to something I care deeply about so deeply that I named my whole virtual studio after it. And you can go back a few episodes and listen to that episode, why I named it Comfort Zone Yoga. People like to say, life begins beyond your comfort zone. And sure, no stress, no growth, no challenge, no change. But there's another definition of comfort zone that I love. Much more. The comfort zone is the place where you can operate without fear of failure. That is exactly what I want your yoga classroom to be. That is exactly what I want my yoga classroom and my entire virtual studio to be. A place where students and teachers can take risks, can wobble, can fall out with a sense of humor and can come back in. That's where expansion actually happens from the inside out. Let's make all of that practical. Here are five shifts you can make in your very next class shift. Number one, put balance in every quarter of class, not just in the balance Slot. Balance is not a peak pose moment, it's a thread it, the teaching balance course. I map this across the full arc of class, and here's the short version. In the warmup, there are small weight shifts. Slow transitions from the floor up to standing. I actually call this the sense of humor warmup, 'cause it should be a little silly. The earlier students could laugh at themselves in a low stakes way, the easier it is to be wobbly in a higher stakes pose later In the standing segment of class, you've got your classic single leg work. Yes, tree eagle dancer Warrior three, but also balance in motion Pulse from Warrior two into tree pose on the back. Leg rock from Warrior one into Warrior three and back again. Pyramid into hand to knee or hand to toes. Real world balance is almost never static. Your sequencing should reflect that. In the floor section of class, there are balance poses that don't look like balance poses. Bird dog, half moon on the knee, eagle crunches boat. The core work and the balance work are not separate. They're the same work in just a different orientation of gravity. In the cool down or finishing portion of class, give the feet, calves, thighs, and hips, some love. They earned it. That's bringing balance within the body to compliment the balance of the body and space. Point number three of five, use the 6 4 2 to make sure your teaching balance in all three planes. If you've read the art of yoga sequencing, you know the 6, 4, 2, 6 moves of the spine. Four lines of the legs, two core actions In a balance focused class, you want to make sure you are offering balance in all three planes of motion, not just up and down. The sagittal plane forward and back Warrior three chair on your tiptoes crane, the frontal plane side to side tree, half moon standing splits to the side, the transverse plane or rotation. A figure four, a curtsy lunge, a twisted chair, a twist toward the raised leg. In crane. Your students don't live on a flat mat. Teach them to balance in the directions. Life actually asks of them. Move along the sweeter spicier spectrum instead of giving one right version. This is one of the biggest voice shifts I teach. Point four, move along the sweeter spicier spectrum instead of giving one right version. This is one of the biggest voice shifts that I teach. Instead of one pose with one cue, try to offer a continuum. Sweeter options. Lower the threshold spicier options, raise it for tree pose. The spectrum might go something like hand at the wall, hand on a chair, foot to the ankle, foot to the inner calf, foot to the inner thigh. Arms, low arms wide, arms up, soft gaze, closed eyes, toes of the standing foot lifted. As I sometimes tell my class, there is always a next level, even if the next level is just lifting your standing leg toes for three breaths. You don't have to hand the whole spectrum to every student in every class, but you do need to know it's there so you can meet the room where it is. And point 5, cue the system, not just the shape. Once you know the four systems, your troubleshooting gets so much easier. When a student is really shaky, ask yourself silently what system might be fuzzy right now? If they're hyper-focused on their gaze and frozen in place, they're probably overlying on vision. Try softening the gaze or adding a slow head turn. If their standing foot looks dead, you might cue the foot itself. Spread the toes, lift and lower the toes. Press through the mounds of the big and little toes. That's proprioception work. If the hip is collapsing or the knee is caving, that's a musculoskeletal conversation. Less about engage your core and more about strength and stacking. If they're tense and holding their breath, that's the fear channel and the cue is permission. Step down, reset, try again. Wobbling means your nervous system is getting new information. This is what it means to teach balance as a craft instead of reading the same three cues louder. And the last point, change your language so that wobbling is sold as a feature, not a bug. This one is free. It costs nothing. It changes the whole room. Some phrases I use that you are welcome to steal. Wobbling means you found an edge. Every wobble is your body recalibrating and getting stronger. You might have heard this one. Trees that can bend in the wind are the ones that grow and thrive. This is practice, not performance. You can always step down and step back up. That counts. There is always a next level and today you get to pick it. That last one matters a lot because the moment you hand agency back to the student, balance stops being a test, you're giving them and starts being an experiment. They are running. That is a totally different thing. Okay, that's the teaching. Here's the information about the live call on Thursday, May

21st, two to 3: 16:44

00 PM Eastern. I'm hosting a free comfort zone conversation. I do these monthly. This one is called Balance for Everybody. It's inside the Zone, the free space at Comfort Zone Yoga. It's a one hour. Teacher to teacher working session. Bring your notebook. Here's what we'll cover. Why traditional balance cues leave some students behind and what to say when fixed your gaze isn't doing the work. Practical modifications that build confidence instead of wall dependence, the sweeter to spicier spectrum apply to the balance poses you actually teach. How to sequence balance poses so students can feel successful at every level from the warmup to the cool down, with balance woven through every quarter of class. Ways to talk about balance that normalize wobbling instead of treating it as something to fix, so students will keep showing up to try. It's teacher focused, it's practical and it's free. Think of it as a live version of this very podcast to RSVP. Come to comfort zone yoga.com. I'll also drop the full link to register in the show notes. Now if you want the whole thing, you really want to get better at teaching balance, which is a way to. Get better at teaching yoga in general. I have a course called Fundamentals of Teaching Balance. The Comfort Zone conversation is the taste. If you want the full meal. The whole training lives in the course. Here's what's inside a full lecture series covering everything we touched on today, the physiology, the brain, the psychology of balance. Yoga philosophy as it relates to balance sequencing. A balance focused class, supporting students through balance practices and adapting balance for specific populations, athletes, older adults, beginners and advanced students. A workbook with reflection prompts and teaching templates, so you're not just consuming lectures, you're integrating follow along practices so you can experience the sequencing in your own body before you teach it. Because as I always say, you've got to experience the sequence before you serve it. Shared lesson plans that you can teach this week. A private podcast feed. I know you like podcasts, so you can learn while you walk or walk the dog or fold your laundry. Lifetime access, including updates and 20 Yoga Alliance CEUs continuing education units, or 20 hours of credit toward my 300 hour yoga teacher training at Comfort Zone Yoga. The investment is $500, which you can split into two payments of two 50. That's about five to 10 classes worth of teaching income, and the training will outlast any one class by decades. The course lives at comfortzoneyoga.com/balance. Link is in the show notes. One last thing before I let you go. If balance has been the part of your teaching you a void because you don't want anyone to fall or because you feel like you don't have enough ideas or because you're not sure what to say when fix your gaze doesn't work, let this be your permission. Balance is a skill. Skills can be taught. And when you teach balance well, you're not just helping somebody hold repos a little longer. You are helping them trust their body in the world. You are helping them step off curves, climb stairs, pick up grandkids, walk on trails, run on trails age with agency. That is a gift. You as a yoga teacher, are very qualified to give. Please come to the call on May 21st or take the course or just steal the phrases from this episode and try them out in Thursday night's class. All of those count. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you in the zone.