If you’re like me and were teaching digitally a whole lot over the last few years, you’ve probably gotten into a “Zoom groove” with your teaching. This groove means lots of great digital habits like demonstrating your sequence, connecting with students through a camera, and tidying up your space, but it could also mean you’ve lost some good in-person teaching habits.

Now that I’m back to teaching more in-person yoga, I’ve noticed that some of my good in-person habits have atrophied and it’s a bit of a jolt of awareness to get them back!

The two biggest in-person skills I’ve been rewiring are:

• Hands-on assists and
• Observation

Many students, especially lately, love a good hands-on assist. Observation, on the other hand, is a skill that’s a bit more nuanced – typically, teachers aren’t really seeing their yoga students. Often, teachers land an agenda and sequence on their classes but do not watch to see if their instructions are being followed or understood. As a result, students are not getting much feedback on their practice.

Great observation includes really seeing students, noticing general trends in the group, noticing if students are following instructions, and then responding accordingly. Digitally, we could look at the screen to see our students. In-person, we need to find good observation perches, work the room, and pay attention.

This feedback loop of observation and hands-on assists from the teacher, to reception of the students, to response from the teacher creates safety and offers a path of progression for the students’ practices. After all, hands-on assists and having the bar raised for your individual practice are the best parts of going to an in-person class!

Here are three tips for prioritizing and remembering good in-person teaching habits:

1. Get to your yoga class early
What does getting to class early have to do with your ability to observe your students or to give them better hands-on assists?

When you arrive early, you can set up the room on your terms, welcoming students and helping them place their mats in such a way that supports your teaching:

• Ensure there’s a wide-enough corridor around the circumference of the room to have a vantage point and make eye contact vs. being so up close that you have no perspective or can’t get in front of them at all
• Organize the mats into clear rows so that when you’re observing, the students are lined up evenly which allows you to see them all more clearly.

When your students don’t have guidance, they’ll tend to plop their mats down on the sidelines, really close to the walls. This leaves only a thin sliver of space for the teacher to walk around the students. It will be much harder to see what improvements could be made in their postures or spot someone doing something unsafe or harmful to their body!

And if it’s a packed room, students are often forced to place their mats all the way up to the front wall with no space in front for you to walk, or worse, no way to make eye contact if you need to give them a verbal or physical assist. (If you give the assist from behind without eye contact, you can easily startle them.)

2. Work the room
Before the new norm of digital yoga in 2020, most yoga teachers walked around the room while teaching.

Zoom teaching got us into a pattern of being on our mats to teach, since it was helpful for students to have the visual of the teacher on the screen demonstrating the practice.

If you’re back to teaching in person and find yourself habitually still hovering in one spot or even doing your practice on your mat in the front, force yourself to get off your mat and into the rows of students who have been waiting to be seen, touched, and instructed!

3. Find your vantage point to help the most students
While you’re making your way around the room, find a vantage point where you can see as many students as possible at once.

From your vantage point, take stock of what’s needed in the group, and then swiftly and systematically get to as many of them as possible to help enhance their poses, rather than plunking down near one or two students to refine their postures.

Teaching digitally has been a great blessing for yoga students and teachers alike, but it has also made us relax into not assisting our students, since, well, there haven’t been actual humans in front of us or we’ve been socially distancing.

Particularly since people are craving hands-on assists and being truly seen more than ever, yoga teachers will benefit from getting back into the rhythm of efficiently moving around to as many students as they can with effective hands-on assists and individualized verbal instructions.

If you’re interested in refining your teaching, observation, and hands-on assisting skills, you’re in luck! We’re offering two in-person trainings this summer in Boulder, CO! Hands-On Assists, August 4-7th and Yoga Therapeutics, September 1-4th!

About the author

Amy Ippoliti is known for bringing yoga to modern-day life in a genuine way through her intelligent sequencing, clear instruction, and engaging sense of humor. She shares her passion for yoga, health, soil advocacy, marine conservation, and sustainability through her teachings and writings for Yoga Journal, Organic Life, Prevention, Mantra, Origin, Mind Body Green, and Elephant Journal. She’s appeared on the covers of Yoga Journal, Boulder Lifestyle, and Fit Yoga Magazine and has been featured in Self Magazine, New York Magazine, Allure (Korea), and Newsweek. As lead educator for Vesselify.com, she’s a pioneer of advanced yoga education, co-founding Vesselify (formerly 90 Monkeys), an online school that has enhanced the skills of yoga teachers and studios in 65+ countries. She is a Kiss the Ground Soil Advocate, and an ambassador for The Rodale Institute, and co-author of The Art and Business of Teaching Yoga. Learn more at amyippoliti.com