Week 7: Adjustments

This week, we learnt how to safely adjust students to help them into proper alignment while in poses. I would have to say this is by far the most challenging part of teaching to me. It’s easy to process what to do when watching a demonstration, but when it’s time to do it myself, I fumble and feel so unsure. I do hope with more practice and visualisation, this would come more naturally to me. Even though we were paired up, I was kiasu and practised on another friend when there was any extra time xD Analyzing a different body type in a split second is really challenging and also needs practice and experience.

We’ve also been layering our teaching more and more – on top of walking around while giving cues now, we also have to start observing what students are actually doing and give customised verbal and physical adjustments when necessary. That’s the end goal and a necessary skill that a teacher needs. While it is helpful that we are taught how to adjust for each individual pose as a beginner level of adjustment, I think I would need to identify patterns (e.g. the push-pull effect, at least 2 points of contact etc.) that could help me ‘formulate’ how to adjust each pose naturally, since I’m bad at memorizing steps. Furthermore, there would be many other poses that we would need to form our own safe adjustment methods too. There should be similarities depending on the shape of the poses, which was apparent across the standing postures that we were taught adjustments for.

Going through the adjustments also made me worry a little because my friends coming for my first community class are mostly beginners. Not being able to give physical adjustments due to COVID restrictions also means that we have to be extra precise on instructions and also give personalised cues to those who need them, while keeping count and not losing track of the sequence and time. Teaching yoga is really the most multitasking job ever!