HOW TO CUE YOGA POSES: Internal vs. External Cueing

Transcript

if you're a yoga teacher that struggles with cueing for anatomy and alignment and maybe the reason your students have a hard time following directions is because your cues are confusing i get it you start studying anatomy and you want to tell everybody all the cool things that you know the trick is that you need to know those cool things about anatomy and biomechanics but you need to teach it to your students in a way that they can perform the action without even knowing what's going on like magic so if your cueing sounds like this now class as you reach forward and up i want you to upwardly rotate the scapula into the axillary space and externally rotate the upper humerus in the glenos humeral joint as you extend through the spine and maybe you go on to sound like this and once you're here i want you to engage the gluteus maximus to turn on the external rotation of the femoroacetabular joint and engage a posterior pelvic tilt so we can avoid dumping into the low back and lift through the heart well that is confusing as hell to your students they have no idea what any of that means and they can't even perform the action also as far as yoga is concerned it totally takes them out of the practice now they're not thinking about the meditative state that they've gotten into as a result of practicing and breathing and being mindful now they just don't even know what's going on and they're probably stressed out so here's a slide from one of my anatomy courses and in that course i talk about internal versus external queuing and that slide references some research where we looked at coaches using internal versus external cueing so internal versus external cueing is internal is a cue that focuses on my own body whereas external cueing is a focus on the environment around me so one requires you to understand a lot about your own body and focus inward whereas the other one is a task oriented cue now i know in yoga a lot of times we like that internal focus but it's actually very hard to follow directions with internal cueing here's two examples so let's say we want to do a forward fold okay we're standing up and we want to get to this forward fold position so i could say something like anteriorly tilt the pelvis and lift the tailbone as you send the weight into the heels and keep the heart lifted so you extend through the spine and make your way towards the ground so that was a pretty internal cue it was a lot of focus on my own bone structure and joint alignment and it's pretty hard cue to follow unless you already know what an anterior tilt of the pelvis is and all of these kinds of things but here's a way to make it fun and easy so take a block and we can put this block down on the floor and we just want to say okay let's step forward and all i want you to do is bend over and pick up the block and then stand back up now maybe you're thinking well but that doesn't get the flat spine that i wanted and i wanted more of a hip hinge and less of a bending through the spine okay okay but let's figure out a way to do it with inter or without internal cueing let's do it with external cueing okay so internal cueing another example would be that we're trying to lengthen the spine out and forward okay well how do you lengthen your spine we don't actually have any muscles that truly lengthen the spine we can extend or flex or bend the spine but we can't actually lengthen the spine so again that's confusing but here's a way now if you happen to have props this is a cool way to do it you can take a pole and you can say all right take the pole and hold it behind your back so that the pole is touching your head your middle back between the shoulder blades and your tailbone or if we want to say this another way head back crack so we've got three points of contact and now it's a goal-oriented cue which is can you bend over and pick up the block in a way that you remain in contact with all three of those points on the pole so head back crack can you pick up the pole pick up the block and not lose contact with any of those three locations right if you're if the pole lifts off of your butt or if your head moves away from it then you fail the task right so now you can make it task oriented and that's kind of fun but i realize that not everybody has those kinds of props available to them so here's a cue that requires zero props and gets the same point across and uses external cueing so here we could say all right class i want you to imagine that you've just stepped up to a long table and that table is about the same height as your waist now you've stepped up to this table and there's a block way out as far as you can reach now you can't bend your knees and you can't move your hips forward you have to reach as far as you can forward in order to grab that block and then pull it closer to you again and then we want to put the block back so we got to bend over the table and reach as far as you possibly can and place the block there and then stand back up well cool you've just taught them how to hinge at the hip joints you've taught them how to isolate their hip joints from their spine and teach them you've taught them how to anteriorly tip the pelvis you've taught them how to accomplish this task that you know is involves some level of anatomy and biomechanics that you think is advantageous to their movement but you've done it without confusing them and by giving them a simple task-oriented cue let's check out another example okay so what about downward facing dog what are some common cues for downward facing dog one that i've heard is widen the sitting bones which by the way that not only does that not make sense because your sitting bones are firmly attached and do not move they do they don't move i don't care what anybody says about there's a little bit of movement at the pubis and the si joints yeah so little you cannot willingly widen your sitting bones okay it's not possible so not only is it impossible but it doesn't make sense how do you even accomplish that task well here's another cue that you could use instead okay come into downward facing dog now imagine that your feet are glued to your mat completely glued to your mat and now you're going to try to pull them away from each other so much that you could rip your mat in half like two buns of a hot dog so this is going to create a spreading action in the feet now really i like that cue a lot more when we're doing something like a squat or in yoga we might do utkatasana so that would be a useful cue there okay let's say we're in downward facing dog and we're trying to get the students to really press into the floor so that we can get good upward rotation of the scapula and create good space in the glenohumeral joint the shoulder joint so that we can avoid pinching sensations in the shoulder joint great idea but how are you going to cue that if you were internal cueing you might say oh upwardly rotate the scapula and externally rotate the upper arm bones and you know etc but that's confusing so if we use external cueing then we can come into downward facing dog and i want to say all right look at your elbows and bend your elbows and see where they go did your elbows go out to the side well now i want you to bend your elbows i want you to rotate your arms in such a way that if you bent your elbows they'd go back towards your feet that's how it should feel in your arms is that if you bent your elbows they would go back towards your feet and another external cue here would be push the floor further away from you so really push the floor away from you all of those things are going to accomplish good upward rotation of the shoulder blade and external rotation of the humerus okay one more so we got an x so we have an internal cue of okay come into downward facing dog and i want you to lengthen the tailbone you can't lengthen the tailbone it doesn't go anywhere it doesn't move it's a fused joint what are you gonna do that doesn't make any sense here's an external cue to accomplish what i think those people are going for so what we're trying to avoid here is the rounding of the spine endower facing dog so we're trying to get them to anterior tilt the pelvis so the tailbone points more up towards the sky well what's a simpler way of doing that so one i like a lot in class is okay we're in downward facing dog imagine that you had tail feathers and those tail feathers i want you to aim your tail feathers straight up towards the sky or if you're kind of a lighthearted teacher and you don't take yourself yourself too seriously another good external cue in downward facing dog here we are okay now imagine that you've been holding a fart in the entire class and now that everybody's in downward facing dog i want you to fart above their heads so they don't smell it so aim your fart up not back towards your classmates up up up there are a lot of ways that we can use external cueing you know pick your poison but the more that you go into detail about describing anatomy we are going to have worse performance so our students are going to have a harder time they're going to perform worse so when we describe anatomy to people and there is a study that i showed you in that slide earlier from my anatomy demystified course on my website and that study looked at internal queuing where they basically said during sprinting they were telling these the runners to squeeze the glutes as hard as they could and that's an internal cue and it led to worse performance compared to the group who was told to push off of the ground as hard as they could as they were sprinting so pushing off the ground is an external cue and those people had better sprinting times they were better at doing the movement when they were given the instruction to push off the ground compared to people who were told to squeeze their glutes as they were running so the external cue just did better so if you want your students to actually have a better time be less confused be able to stay in the zone with that yogic meditation meditative state during class then consider using external cueing more often and i think you and your students are going to have a better time i'm dr davis motion is lotion movement is medicine i'll see you in another video you