Teaching beginners is by far the most challenging teaching situation for yoga teachers. Combine that difficulty with the fact that it is often newer teachers who teach beginning classes, and it is easy to see why there can be difficulties.
With the growing popularity of yoga, more and more people with little yoga experience are flocking to studios. Many are middle-aged boomers with varying levels of physical fitness and greater degree of limitations, further adding to the challenge.
Helping new students build a practice from ground up is no easy task. Simple teaching phrases yoga teachers take for granted make little sense for beginning students. Teaching a new student proper alignment in a basic pose like Adho Mukha Svanasana takes time. However, many yoga teachers teach mixed levels classes, and can’t spend a lot of time explaining down the basics. The result can be that students develop wrong habits and never get a proper foundation of alignment in yoga poses.
At the same time, teaching beginners is one of the most important and rewarding teaching experiences there is. With a little planning, this is one area where it can be extremely rewarding to develop your teaching practice—and build an extremely loyal following of students.
What You Will Learn
- The key things to focus on when teaching beginners – it’s not just about yoga asanas
- What to focus on when creating a teaching plan for beginners
- How to use variations of most common yoga asanas to get students more comfortable with more simple version at first
- Yoga asanas sequencing principles of particular importance when working with beginners
- Yoga teacher rescue kit for those situations where you have to integrate a new student into a class with more experienced
students - When working with middle-aged or older students, how to spot beginning yoga students who are at greater risk for injury
and what precautions to take
In this two part audio series, Judith discusses the philosophical and psychological aspects of working with beginners in an asana class, including a discussion of practical techniques she has learned from more than 40 years of teaching.
This Course Includes:
- Recordings of Both Teleclass Sessions – Yours to keep. It’s generally acknowledged that many people only retain 10-20 percent of what they learn in a workshop. You will get the recordings of both teleclass sessions, enabling you to go back and listen to the workshop as many times as you like.
- Transcripts of Both Sessions – Ever wanted to refer to a certain part of a course? Even the best note takers miss a point every so often. With the transcripts of the sessions, you can go back and refer to particularly important passages or clarify sections you were in doubt about.
