how do i get better at cueing? why do some cues work and others don’t?

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered.

Our Response

It’s not you. It’s match. The right cue finds the right nervous system at the right time.

Internal and external cueing are widely studied—there’s real science here. Internal cues (“feel your shoulder blades”) work differently than external ones (“reach for the wall”). Same with metaphor, direction, rhythm. You need a big enough vocabulary that eventually one key fits the lock.

I love working with words to find what works. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a student: one cue—”chest up, elbows will go down”—did what a dozen previous attempts hadn’t. The capacity was always there. The language just finally matched.

If you want to get better at this, read Nick Winkelman’s The Language of Coaching. It’s great. Practical, research-backed, and it’ll give you more tools than you knew existed.