Yoga is one of the most favorite go-to attributes that modern lifestyle keeps shout about louder and louder. Over the years we all have noticed the enormous growth of its popularity. Whether people preach or stay quiet about its benefits, no one mentions how to expose an untrustworthy guide. A person who may lead you if not in the wrong direction, but in direction of an excessively long way. In order to not get lost on the road to the final destination, let’s review how to interpret the signs correctly.
1. The training tempo is too high
Yoga is a combination of specific, peculiar poses (asanas) that are aimed to exercise our body, as well as heightening our tolerance for the simple, static yet overtime difficult positions. On the contrary, such high tempo field of a workout as fitness has a lot less to do with this level of patience. Because one of the main and very distinctive focuses of fitness program is dedicated to the amount of reps. So, if during the practice you change asanas too often and your bpm increases the same way as if you were running or sprinting – your instructor has picked the wrong group people to work with.
2. The teacher is not fluent in the anatomic terminology
The instructor has to understand the physiological process of what your body goes through during performing of every asasna.
• Red flag yoga teacher: “this asana develops your hip muscles”
• Excellent yoga Teacher: “do you feel the stretching in the side of your hip? These are your tensor fascia late and iliotibial tract. They allow you to bend your knees and rotate your hips. Do this exercise correctly, and lateral muscles of your knees will be less likely to bother you in the future”
Some may think it is not that insignificant point. But try to think of it as choosing between a chef teacher who knows the chemistry and the one who doesn’t. If you want to be successful at cooking and know how to calculate the exact amount of your ingredients and spice to make food nutritious and tasty, you will undoubtedly pick the second chef. The same level of requirement should be applied to choosing a yoga teacher if you want to succeed. Otherwise, you will have very little understandings of precise casual relationship within your body. As a result, all of the physical work will remain a mystical algorithm, since you won’t have a teacher who will explain to you how to trace and understand it.
3. Too much “how to live” bullshit
Any teacher shouldn’t pester everyone with a charade of nonsense. His duties of an educator oblige him to provide you with an authentic knowledge, to motivate you to learn more and in case of yoga – make sure everybody’s comfortable.
• Red flag yoga teacher: “let your butt chakra absorb the spirit of the ball-ticklish gracefulness and fly all the way to the back of your third eye. Let your mind relax and breathe in the depth of the oceans of the enlightenment. Let your mind be grateful as you hold this asana as peacefully as a newborn baby of our consciousness”
• Excellent yoga Teacher: “here is how you do the next pose. Don’t beat yourself up if it’s too difficult. Just have a good time”
4. Pseudo biologist
Most, if not all yoga teachers have a good physicality. Nevertheless, many of them also want to make sure that they look to you not only sexy as hell, but smart as well. For that reason, they tend to use, or even overuse an anatomic and physiological terminology. It helps to create an image of the person that knows a lot more than how to do a Downward Facing Dog.
These are the popular words that might help you to expose one of those teachers: blood vessels, blood flow, tocsins, central nervous system, neural connections, endorphins.
If you hear these words without even slight deepening in biology, or without unfamiliar to most people words (like myofibrils or muscle mitochondria) – you might’ve met an illusionist instead of a good yoga teacher.
5. He never fixes anyone in the group
Some asanas are easy and require no explanations. But a good teacher should be able to not only demonstrate a proper way of doing a certain asana. One of his missions is to prevent his students from getting used to the technical mistakes. If during the session teacher makes no corrections, he is not a good yoga teacher. If you believe that that’s not that case than you and all the people around you are so good at yoga that there is no need to visit these classes.
Author Bio
Zack Hargrove is a professional editor-in-chief at cheapwritingservice.com. Many of his topics are dedicated to music, education and ways of strengthening your scientific curiosity. You can find him on Twitter @zackhargrovejr.
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Yoga is the practice of accepting the consequences of being oneself.