Teaching beginners is by far the most challenging teaching situation for yoga teachers. Combine that difficulty with the fact that it is often newer teachers who teach beginning classes, and it is easy to see why there can be difficulties.

With the growing popularity of yoga, more and more people with little yoga experience are flocking to studios. Many are middle-aged boomers with varying levels of physical fitness and greater degree of limitations, further adding to the challenge.

Helping new students build a practice from ground up is no easy task. Simple teaching phrases yoga teachers take for granted make little sense for beginning students. Teaching a new student proper alignment in a basic pose like Adho Mukha Svanasana takes time. However, many yoga teachers teach mixed levels classes, and can’t spend a lot of time explaining down the basics. The result can be that students develop wrong habits and never get a proper foundation of alignment in yoga poses.

At the same time, teaching beginners is one of the most important and rewarding teaching experiences there is. With a little planning, this is one area where it can be extremely rewarding to develop your teaching practice—and build an extremely loyal following of students.

What You Will Learn

• The key things to focus on when teaching beginners - it's not just about yoga asanas.
  What to focus on when creating a teaching plan for beginners
• How to use variations of most common yoga asanas to get students more comfortable with more simple version at first
• Yoga asanas sequencing principles of particular importance when working with beginners
• Yoga teacher rescue kit for those situations where you have to integrate a new student into a class with more experienced students
• When working with middle-aged or older students, how to spot beginning yoga students who are at greater risk for injury and what precautions to take

In this two part series, Judith will further discuss the philosophical and psychological aspects of working with beginners in an asana class. There will also be a discussion of practical techniques she has learned from more than 40 years of teaching. Real time questions are particularly encouraged and enjoyed.

Each session is approximately one hour long. No matter where you are in the world — and even if you cannot tune in at the time of the actual broadcast — you can still benefit from taking the webinar at a time that works best to you. Listen to it as many times as you like!