6 Ways to Improve Your Yoga Cues if You’re a Teacher

When I started yoga teacher training, I assumed that learning how to cue poses would be the easy part. Talking seemed simple compared to learning alignment, memorizing anatomy, understanding sequencing, and conveying the history and philosophy of the practice. After all, I’d been listening to yoga teachers talk during class for years. How challenging could it be?

Very challenging, as it turns out. Standing in front of students while I was trying to recall the names of poses and share clear instructions on how to move their bodies was a struggle. Eventually, I learned helpful yoga cues for various poses as well as how to string them together during a fast-paced class. But I also learned that what teachers want to share with students isn’t always what students take away from the experience.

Yoga cues can literally determine the difference between someone leaving class feeling empowered or frustrated. So over the last decade, I’ve explored different ways to keep cues helpful—concise yet compelling, informative as well as interesting—in ways that help ensure what students hear tracks more closely with what you mean.

How to Exponentially Improve Your Yoga Cues

No matter what style of yoga you teach, the language you use affects your students’ experience. Here’s how to make your words even more supportive.

1. Don’t Share All the Cues

Just because you’ve memorized eight incredible cues for Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana II) doesn’t mean you need to share them each time you teach the pose. A less-is-more approach to instructing students provides them with time to understand and act on your instructions before you overwhelm them with even more information.

You want to make every word count. So start by cueing students from the ground up. Focus first on the foot position for standing poses, hand and shoulder placement for arm balances. Then share no more than two or three additional cues that incrementally work upward along the body.

Compared to rattling through a laundry list of instructions, this approach also leaves room for you to adjust your next cues in response to what you observe in students. It could be as simple as a gentle reminder to breathe when you see students pushing for a challenging balance, twist, or bind, or as detailed as using alternative language for a cue that hasn’t had its intended effect.

2. Make Every Word Count

When you’re moving students between poses vinyasa-style, there’s not a lot of time to get students into each pose. To do so efficiently, I use a simple structure in each of my cues that hones in on the most essential information: first cue the breath, then the body part, then the direction you want them to move. For example, “inhale, arms up” or “exhale, left foot between hands.”

Leaving out extraneous instructions, especially on the second or third time through a repeated flow, helps students focus on what matters and keep up with a one-breath-per-movement practice. It also creates space for the teacher to reconnect with your own breath so you can sound (and feel) steadier and more grounded.

3. Create Silence

It’s not always easy for teachers to remain quiet in between cues. If you’re used to providing running commentary from the start of class to Savasana, allowing for silence can feel abrupt, awkward, even cold.

But confidently holding silence is one of the most powerful things you can do as a yoga teacher. Anatomy and alignment tips, prop and position options, pose benefits, and references to yoga philosophy—it’s impossible to share them all each time you teach.

Instead, offer one or two insights relevant to your focus for today. Then provide the space that students need to take your words in and act upon them. This is what they need to make the practice their own. Sometimes the things that you leave out of class are what helps shape its meaning and takeaways.

4. Notice Your Filler Words

Notice if your habit is to pad your instructions with fillers such as “really,” “go ahead and,” “next,” “um,” “actually,” and “so.” We tend to use these all the time in casual conversation to fill delays between thought and speech. We sometimes also rely on them to make instructions feel less blunt. But if too many filler words creep into your teaching, they waste your breath and your student’s precious attention.

This verbal habit can also be unconscious to the point where it dilutes our message without our awareness. It’s worth periodically filming or recording your classes to learn which filler words or phrases repeatedly stand out.

5. Choose Active or Passive Words

When you change the way you communicate as your class builds heat versus when it slows down, you can use cues to help you curate the overall mood in the room.

So when the pace is slower and energy is lower, your language can encourage passiveness. That includes the beginning and end of vinyasa classes as well as in yin and restorative classes. In the faster-paced middle part of vinyasa classes, your language can reinforce an active approach.

For example, passive language can look like the following:

• “Allow,” “drop,” and “release” are words that suggest ease and lack of tension. Including these and other similar verbs can encourage relaxation by cueing minimal muscular effort.
• “Feel your breath ebb and flow” or “sense your shoulders melting down your back” and other sensory-based yoga cues help draw students’ attention inward so they can experience the pose differently.
• Create space for individual variety in what your students might experience with invitational language. For example, “Explore if you can find length along the back of your right leg” feels more inclusive than “Find a deep stretch in the back of your right leg.” This is the rare time where including additional words can help soften your instructions.
• In more relaxed or passive long-held postures, consider providing the basics of alignment and prop set-up. Then offer a question as a focal point for introspection. Depending on your class theme it could be as simple as, “What could you let go of here?” or “What happens when you stay here?” In the resulting quiet, your question creates an anchor for wandering minds. It also supports your class theme in a more personal way.

More active approaches to cueing include:

• Using language that encourages effort when a pose requires muscle engagement, such as “push,” “squeeze,” “reach,” “press,” “drive,” and “lift.”
• Relying on shorter, punchier imperatives, such as “reach,” rather than saying “you want to be reaching.”
• Focusing on external objects as directional cues. That includes “reach for the ceiling,” “press the floor away,” “push your lifted heel toward the wall behind you.” Similarly, using external references can make the action you want students to take clearer, such as “push the back wall away” instead of “engage your back leg.” Or “squeeze your legs together” instead of “activate your inner thighs.”

6. Expand Your Repertoire

It’s easy to rattle off the same cues each time you bring students into a pose. Although this approach demands less thought and effort from you, it also requires less attention from your regular students. The cues can become so well-known that they become background noise.

To keep your students’ minds attentive and bodies active, occasionally mix up your language. This can include more imaginative takes on basic movements. For example, in a class designed to boost motivation and discipline, you might spice up your cues with language that nods to the fieriness of tapas. Maybe you try “feel the fire in your legs,” “build some heat here,” or even “brighten your gaze.”

But clear, simple, and concise communication is still essential. Including the occasional creative cue isn’t about needing to create an elaborate script for your classes. It’s about delivering instructions in a way that they’ve heard hundreds of times before so that they pay attention rather than run through the motions.

So if you’re repeating the same cues you learned in teacher training, it’s time to acknowledge the power of learning to distinguish your own unique way with words.