Questions Answered Here

1. What are the most common reasons for injuries in yoga?
2. How can you help to prevent injury among students?
3. Why is it important to teach new students how to listen to their body?
4. Give five ways you can help to teach students how to listen to their body.
5. What is important to teach beginners regarding sensation?
6. Describe healthy sensation in asana.
7. In addition to physical sensation, what else may yoga practice bring up in students?
8. What is the fundamental teaching regarding unhealthy sensation and danger?
9. While the signals listed in Unhealthy Sensation / Pain may be considered a baseline teaching, extra considerations and cautions are required in what types of cases?

Promote Student Safety

An international survey of 33,000 yoga teachers, therapists, and other clinicians from 35 countries published in 2009 found that respondents most commonly blamed these five reasons for yoga injuries:

1. Excessive student effort (81%)
2. Inadequate teacher training (68%)
3. More people doing yoga overall (65%)
4. Unknown pre-existing conditions (60%)
5. Larger classes (47%)

Source: Angela Pirisi

Injury prevention is accomplished through promoting student safety in practice.

• To promote student safety involves such tasks as fostering a noncompetitive environment, teaching students to take responsibility for themselves, and referring students with particular conditions to an expert. For more on this topic, see Art of Teaching: Promoting Student Safety.
• Of course, properly teaching pose alignment and accommodations, and appropriate breath practices, is fundamental to keeping students safe. To help you in these areas, we go deep on teaching support for each pose and breath practice. See the Study Library for an organized way to delve into these topics.

See more: About Injuries & Conditions in Yoga

Teach Students HOW To Be Responsible

Why This is Important

Those new to asana may have little to no experience with listening to their body and distinguishing among sensations.

• Many new students may simply not understand the value of learning to listen inwardly.
• And some may have learned specifically to override messages from their body as part of practicing or competing in gymnastics, football or dance, for instance.

Encourage Inner Awareness

The primary foundation of personal responsibility is inner awareness.

• Rather than telling students what to expect in poses, invite them to take note of effects in their breath and mind and what they feel in their body.
• This can begin to transfer any expectations for responsibility and awareness from an external guide to the student herself.
• While our focus here is on encouraging student autonomy, this tactic offers other benefits. It can give students time and space to work with the teachings. And it can help to avoid potential alienation from setting up expectations for a certain experience when the student’s experience may be different.