One of the most challenging aspects of learning how to teach yoga is navigating the need to expertly move students from one pose to another. It's one thing to memorize the anatomical theory and litany of alignment cues for each pose during your yoga teacher training. It's quite another to take that static theory and translate it to actual cues in a way that's concise enough to synchronize movement with breath.
Teachers are typically taught to cue yoga poses as static shapes. That means there are yoga cues for the position of a foot, knee, hip, spine, and arm as well as a drishti (gaze point). When you begin to add to this already lengthy list of cues the instructions for breath and movement, you end up cramming too much information into the brief space between an inhalation and an exhalation.
The rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness cueing that can result creates an erratic rhythm that's based on the length of your cues and not the length of students' breath. And that can feel overwhelming—especially for those who turn to the practice as a respite from the headlong rush of life.
Several years into teaching yoga, I took a training that taught a simple structure for cueing movement felt revelatory: Breath + Body Part + Direction. . Because you have only seconds to cue with each phase of the breath and leave time to breathe yourself, this means prioritizing only essential cues.
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