For fifteen years, I co-owned a studio in Carrboro/Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and in all that time I learned exactly one reliable thing about attendance: the weather decides everything.
The first beautiful spring day? No one showed up. People wanted patios and porches and long walks with the dog. I would teach to a couple of devoted regulars, stare at the empty mats, and wonder what I had done wrong.
Then July would hit. Ninety-five degrees, thick humidity, the kind of heat that sticks to your skin. And suddenly the studio filled up again. Air conditioning is a powerful draw.
If you teach in any climate with real seasons, you have felt this. Summer is unpredictable. Attendance dips. Outdoor classes pop up. Subs get called in more. Your own schedule starts to feel like a hot mess by mid-June.
After twenty-plus years of teaching, I no longer take any of it personally. Summer is not a problem to solve. It is a season to work with.
What’s actually happening in summer
You start the year strong. Spring is a wonderful time to teach yoga—students come back from winter, energy is rising, classes are full, and you feel like a real yoga teacher again.
Then late May hits. School lets out. Families travel. Your Tuesday class drops from twelve to six to four. By July, the unpredictability is the only thing you can predict. You don’t know who is coming. You don’t know if it is going to be a small intimate group or a packed AC-seeking crowd. Studios start cutting classes or talking about it. Outdoor classes appear on the schedule, and now you are hauling speakers and blocks across a park lawn at eight in the morning.
On top of all that, you might want time off yourself.
A lot of teachers fight all of this. They take the dip personally. They double down on planning, theme every class around something fresh, post more on Instagram, and burn out by the Fourth of July. I have done it. The first few summers I taught, I treated every empty seat like a referendum on my teaching. I made fancier playlists. I sweated through outdoor classes, smiling, pretending it was fine.
It was not fine.
The season is not personal. The weather is not personal. Your students still love you. They are at the lake. They are at their kid’s swim meet. They are sitting on a porch with a glass of something cold. It is just summer doing what summer does.
Why this matters for the rest of your year
The way we treat summer shapes the rest of our year. If you spend May through August white-knuckling it—planning every class from scratch, taking every sub request, refusing to rest—you drag yourself into the fall depleted. And fall is when teaching tends to pick back up. New students arrive. Studios run promotions. Your regulars come back from their travels. September was typically even bigger than January at my studio. You want to meet that wave with energy, not the exhausted shell of someone who refused to slow down in July.
There is also something deeper. As yoga teachers, we are constantly modeling a way of life for our students. If we are frantic, over-scheduled, and martyring through the heat, we are not modeling the practice. We are modeling burnout.
A lighter summer is not a smaller career. Often it is the most professional thing you can do.
Four moves to summer-proof your teaching
1. Build a small repertoire of go-to classes. Stop trying to invent something brand new every week. In summer especially, you want a handful of sequences that are reliable, scalable, and physiologically sound. They should work whether you have three students or thirty, indoors or out.
I have one I literally call my Greatest Hits Lesson Plan. It is built on the 6–4–2 framework—six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions—so it covers everything a body needs without any guesswork. I can teach it to a brand-new student or to a teacher with twenty years of experience and have it land for both. It is free inside The Zone, my community for yoga teachers.
2. Sequence for the heat. When it is ninety-five degrees and your students walk in already wilted, the worst thing you can do is march them through forty minutes of sun salutations. Their nervous systems are taxed. Their core temperatures are up. They have had ENOUGH with the sun.
What they need is less up-and-down and more hands-free work. Cut the chaturangas. Spend more time on the floor. Use side-body openers, gentle twists, supported backbends, and long-held shapes that let the heart rate settle. Restorative bookends—a long opening and a generous savasana—do beautiful work on hot days. In the Prep Station this June, I share a legs-up-the-wall sequence that is a hit on very hot days.
3. Treat small classes like the gift they are. When only three students show up, you have a choice. You can mourn the missing twelve, teach a flat version of your usual class, and feel a little defeated. Or you can lean in.
A small class is a gift. You can use names. You can ask people what they want. You can teach more conversationally, more responsively. The students who showed up get the best version of you, and they remember. I went deep on this in episode 24, “What If No One Shows Up?” Three real humans with mats unrolled is a real class. Treat it like one.
4. Take real time off without guilt. Plan it. Look at June, July, and August and decide now where your breaks are. A full week. A weekend away. A Tuesday in July when you are not teaching anything. Put it on the calendar before the season fills up around you.
Then communicate. Tell your students at least two weeks before you go. Find a sub you trust—or better, build relationships with two or three subs over the year so it is not a panic call in June. Let the studio know early. Come back.
And consider condensing. If you teach two thinly attended classes back to back, talk to the studio about combining them for the season. Two small classes become one well-attended class. Students get a fuller room. You get one prep instead of two. The studio gets healthier numbers. That is good business, not failure.
A lighter summer, a steadier fall
Summer is going to do what summer does. The weather will pull your students outside. The schedule will get weird. Your own energy will ebb and flow. None of that is a referendum on your teaching.
Your job is to work with the season, not against it. Build a small set of go-to classes you trust. Sequence for the heat. Treat small classes like the gift they are. Take real time off. Condense where it makes sense.
If you want a full month of summer-themed material—lesson plans, sequences, the legs-up-the-wall class, and tips for summer-proofing your teaching—it is all waiting for you in the Prep Station in June. And if you want a community to navigate the season alongside, come join us in The Zone.
A lighter summer is not a smaller career. It is the foundation for a steady fall.
