Last updated on July 30th, 2026 at 08:56 pm

7 Tips to Be a Better Yoga Teacher

After two decades of practice and over a decade of teaching and training teachers, these are the observations that come up most consistently. Some are technical. Some are behavioural. All of them matter more than most teachers realise.

Very few teachers actively receive feedback from their students. Constructive feedback is not easy for a student to give: most feel unqualified to critique the person leading the room. If you value your role, ask for it directly. Invite honest comments after class, listen without defending, and treat what you hear as material for your own development. It is the fastest way to grow, and almost nobody does it.

1. Watch Your Students

This sounds obvious. It is not practised often enough.

Too many teachers use class time to run their own practice alongside their students, heads down in poses, eyes closed at inconvenient moments. Teaching yoga is not a personal practice session with an audience. It is an act of service that requires your full attention on the people in front of you.

Constant observation allows you to offer relevant cues, spot alignment issues before they become injuries, gauge the energy of the room, and genuinely hold space. Students feel seen when their teacher is actually watching them. That feeling creates safety. Safety is the foundation of a good practice.

You have a duty of care as a yoga teacher. The only time your eyes should be closed in class is during meditation or perhaps savasana, while you hold space for your students. Watching the room is what makes a space feel safe: students relax when they know someone is quietly keeping track of them.

As your experience grows, you will rely less on demonstration and more on verbal guidance. But that shift only happens when you have spent enough time truly watching and responding to what you see.

2. Make Your Cues Count

Your instructions should be precise enough that a student could follow them with their eyes closed.

Long, rambling cues dilute attention and create confusion. Short, specific cues create clarity and safety. “Press the outer edge of your back foot into the mat” is more useful than “think about grounding through the earth beneath you.” Both have a place, but one produces a measurable physical response.

Cue to what you actually observe. Walk the room. Adjust what needs adjusting. When you teach beginners, be detailed and demonstrate freely. When you teach more experienced students, deepen the experience through the breath, anatomy, and philosophy. Serve who is actually in front of you.

Your voice matters as much as your words. Project so the student at the back of the room hears every instruction without strain, and check this regularly: room acoustics change with student numbers, fans and music.

3. Be Still When Stillness Is Called For

Pacing during savasana is one of the most common ways teachers unknowingly disrupt their own class. Unless you are offering adjustments or smudging the space, sit at the front of the room and be still. Hold the container.

The same applies during meditation and yoga nidra. Moving around is a distraction. Walking in front of students during standing balance poses is a distraction. The spatial stability of the teacher directly influences the students’ ability to find internal stability.

If you must move, walk to the side of the room, not across the visual field of a student searching for their drishti.

4. Learn to Walk Softly

The sound of heavy footsteps registers in the nervous system as disturbance, even when students cannot consciously identify the source of their restlessness. Every footfall on a timber floor resonates.

Walking with your feet slightly supinated, allowing the outer edge to make contact first before the rest of the foot settles, produces significantly less impact sound than a heel-to-toe gait. It takes practice and some awareness of your body mechanics, but it is a skill that directly improves the quality of your students’ experience.

Tiptoeing also works, though many teachers find it hard on balance and heavy on the calves and achilles tendon over a full class. The supinated roll is easier to sustain. Try both on a wooden floor and listen to the difference.

We teach this explicitly during our 200-Hour YTT in Bali. It sounds like a small thing. Students notice.

5. Enforce a No-Phone Policy

The shala is one of the last genuinely phone-free environments most students have access to. Protect it.

A phone alarm cutting through a carefully held savasana is not recoverable. A student checking messages while waiting for class to begin is already partially disconnected before the practice starts. The brief discomfort of separating from devices for ninety minutes produces exactly the kind of mental reset students are coming to yoga for.

Hold the line firmly and warmly. In years of enforcing this policy, the response from students has been consistent: gratitude.

Frame the policy positively: the studio is a chance to disconnect from the online world and reconnect with the body. The world will still be there waiting after savasana. The break does everyone good.

6. Turn the Music Off at the Edges of Class

Not for the whole class, though silence in practice is always worth exploring. Specifically at the opening and closing.

Music during the setting of intention or the chanting of Om creates interference. It colours the atmosphere before the student has had a chance to arrive in their own internal landscape. At the close of practice, it pulls students out of the integration that savasana and closing meditation provide.

Silence at the opening and closing is a simple, high-impact change. It creates more space for genuine practice than almost anything else you can adjust structurally.

7. Teach as Yourself

The slower voice, the softer tone, the performance of calm: students detect inauthenticity immediately, even when they cannot name it. It reads as insecurity dressed up as serenity.

Your actual voice, speaking clearly and with genuine care, is more effective than any teacher persona you might adopt. Keep the volume appropriate for the moment, yes. Bring students out of savasana quietly, yes. But do not manufacture a version of yourself that does not exist outside the shala.

People return to teachers they trust. They trust teachers who are real.

If you want structured feedback and practice in all of these areas, this is what teacher training is for. Our 200-Hour YTT includes teaching workshops, practical observation sessions, and honest feedback from experienced trainers.

What Actually Changes in Your First Year

Nobody tells you that the first year of teaching is mostly about your own nervous system rather than your sequencing. You will over-prepare, talk too much, and fill silences that did not need filling, and all three of those settle on their own once you stop being frightened of the room.

The shift usually arrives somewhere around your fortieth class. Before that you are teaching the plan you wrote. After that you start teaching the people who turned up, which is a different job and the one you were actually trained for.

What speeds this up is repetition with the same group. A weekly class you hold for six months will teach you more than 20 covers at 20 studios, because you get to watch the same bodies change and you find out which of your cues land twice.

Keep a short note after each class: one thing that worked, one thing that did not, and nothing else. Long reflective journals get abandoned by week three. Two lines survive, and two lines a week for a year is a genuine record of how you are changing.

If you are still deciding whether to teach at all, our honest account of what working in the yoga industry is really like is worth reading before you commit.

Keeping Your Own Practice Alive Once Teaching Is Work

The most common thing to lose in your first two years is your own practice. Teaching six classes a week feels like practising, and it is not. You are on your feet, talking, watching, and managing a room, and your body gets almost nothing from it.

Practising in the classes you teach also quietly costs your students, because a teacher who is deep in their own sensation is not looking at anyone. Demonstrate briefly, then get up and walk.

Protect two sessions a week that are yours and that nobody watches. They do not have to be long or impressive. Forty minutes of unremarkable practice you actually do beats a 90-minute ideal you keep postponing.

The other thing worth protecting is being taught by someone else. Once you are the one at the front every day, being a student again is where your teaching gets restocked, and it is usually the first expense that gets cut.

Getting Feedback That Is Worth Having

Asking a class how it was will get you a kind answer and nothing usable. People do not want to hurt your feelings, and they are also poor reporters of their own experience five seconds after savasana.

Ask narrower questions instead. Was there a moment you did not know what I wanted you to do. Which instruction did you have to think about. Where did you feel most steady. Specific questions get specific answers.

Record the audio of one class a month and listen back on a walk. It is unpleasant for about three minutes and then it becomes the single most efficient thing you can do for your cueing, because you will hear your filler words, your pace, and the instructions you assumed you gave and did not.

Trade classes with another teacher and agree in advance to be honest. A peer who is also mid-career will notice things a student cannot name.

Structured mentoring is the accelerated version of all of this, and it is the part of a residential programme that is hardest to replicate alone. Our 200-hour YTT in Bali runs practicums with direct faculty feedback for that reason, and our guide to making a living as a yoga teacher covers the business side that mentoring rarely touches.

The Part of the Job That Is Not Teaching

Nobody warns you how much of a teaching life happens outside the room. Messages at 10pm, a studio changing your slot with two days’ notice, invoices nobody has paid, and the quiet arithmetic of whether a 7am class across town is worth the petrol.

Decide your rates and your boundaries once, in writing, when you are not under pressure. Everything gets negotiated at the worst possible moment otherwise, usually by text, usually when you are tired and inclined to agree.

Keep a record of who came, when, and to what. Two years of attendance data is what tells you which class to drop and which to protect, and it is the difference between running a practice and reacting to a timetable.

Answer messages inside set hours. Students are not being unreasonable when they write at midnight, and you are not obliged to be available then. A teacher who is reachable at all hours is a teacher who burns out in the second year, and it happens quietly enough that most people blame themselves for it.

Finally, decide what you will not teach. A clear no to the workshop you are not qualified for is more professional than a yes you spend a fortnight dreading, and students can tell the difference between a teacher working at the edge of their competence and one working past it.

When a Class Does Not Go to Plan

Every teacher has the class where nothing lands. Nobody laughs, the room feels heavy, and the sequence you were pleased with in the car park falls flat. The instinct is to work harder, talk more, and try to win the room back.

Do the opposite. Slow the pace, cut the number of cues, and let a posture run longer than you planned. A flat room is usually a tired room, and tired people cannot follow a busy class. Very often the energy returns in the last quarter of an hour on its own.

Injuries need a different reflex. Stop teaching to the room and go to the person quietly, without announcing it. Ask what they felt rather than what happened, get them out of the position, and give the rest of the class something simple to hold while you deal with it. Write it down that evening, while you still remember the sequence and what was said.

The disruptive student is almost always handled before or after class rather than during it. Naming behaviour in front of the group turns a small problem into a public one and costs you the room’s trust, which is the same reason the boundaries you set quietly tend to hold better than the ones you announce. A short, friendly word at the door does more work than anything you can say from the front.

Then there is the class where you simply teach badly. It happens to everyone, and the useful response is to write down the one thing you would change and leave the rest alone. Teachers who replay a bad class in full for three days are not learning anything, they are rehearsing.

The measure of a teacher is not the good classes. It is whether the difficult ones leave the students safe and the teacher still willing to come back next week.

Keep Growing as a Teacher

Turning teaching into a living? Read how to make a living as a yoga teacher.

Our 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training builds these skills from the ground up, with real practicum feedback.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I improve as a yoga teacher after my initial training?

Seek feedback actively from your students and peers. Continue your own practice rigorously. Take advanced trainings or specialist courses. Observe other teachers with genuine curiosity. The teachers who improve most consistently are the ones who remain students throughout their careers.

How important is cueing in yoga teaching?

Extremely. Clear, precise verbal cues create safety, enable effective practice without constant demonstration, and allow you to teach to what you actually observe in the room rather than delivering a scripted performance.

Should yoga teachers use music in class?

Music can support certain class contexts and styles. The recommendation to turn it off applies specifically at the opening and closing of practice, where silence creates space for genuine intention-setting and integration. Within the practice, this is a matter of style and student preference.

What is drishti and why does it matter?

Drishti is a focused gaze point used in yoga practice to support concentration and balance. It is particularly important in standing balance postures. Teachers should avoid walking through a student’s gaze line when they are working to find and hold their drishti.

How do I build confidence as a new yoga teacher?

Teach as often as possible, in as many different contexts as you can access. Confidence comes from accumulated experience, not from preparation alone. Ask for feedback, keep a teaching journal, and accept that early classes will be imperfect. That is not failure. It is the process.