The two jobs of the core, five cues, and a full pantry of exercises for yoga teachers
If core work in your class means curling up and down until everyone’s neck aches, you’re training one muscle group out of an entire ensemble. You can teach a complete, strengthening core class without cueing a single crunch, and your students’ necks will be glad you did.
The two jobs of the core
Everything the core does falls into two jobs, and the crunch barely represents either one.
Job one is stabilization. All the muscles of the trunk co-contract to hold the spine and pelvis steady while the limbs move, or don’t. Plank, bird dog, and dead bug are all stabilization work, and so is standing on one leg while the other taps forward and back or rotates around. The spine doesn’t move, and that’s the point: the challenge comes from everything that’s trying to make it move, and resisting that pull is stabilization.
Job two is articulation. The muscles work in sequence to move the spine through its ranges, joint by joint: cat and cow forward and back, standing side bends left and right, twists round and round. A slow roll-down, one vertebra at a time, is articulation at its most refined.
Once you see those two jobs, you can look at any core exercise and tell which job it’s training. The crunch is one small articulation drill for one muscle, rectus abdominis (the six-pack), and the six-pack is one panel of a six-sided box: the diaphragm on top, the pelvic floor below, the abdominals wrapping the front and sides, and the low back behind. A box is only as strong as its weakest panel, and a class built on crunches reinforces one panel while five sit untouched. (I wrote more about this and a few other common misunderstandings about teaching core.)
Five cues to use instead
These are the tools from my own Core Strength for Real People classes.
1. Find the deep layer without Latin. The deepest abdominal, the transverse abdominis, wraps horizontally like a wide belt, and it responds to images better than anatomy terms. My favorite is to zip the jeans: ask students to imagine zipping up a snug pair of jeans fresh out of the dryer, and the belly draws gently in without gripping and without anyone holding their breath. Another is a pair of wiggling fingers heading for your ribs to tickle you: that instinctive brace is the deep layer engaging. And for your own knowledge, a tidbit I learned from my anatomy teacher, Leslie Kaminoff: hands in your hoodie pockets trace the external obliques, and hands passing through the midline into the opposite pockets trace the internal ones. You never need to say that in class, but it’s good to know behind the teaching.
2. Make breath the metronome. Pair every movement with a breath phase and the pacing of your class takes care of itself. In general, we exhale on the effort (the lift, the press, the reach), because the exhale is when the deep layer engages naturally. A student breathing rhythmically can’t rush, and a student holding their breath is handing you information: the dose of stress is too high.
3. Teach sensation versus strain, early and often. Sensation can feel like warmth, effort, or trembling muscles doing real work. Strain looks like a held breath, a set jaw, a gripping neck, and form collapsing. Give your students the self-check outright: shaking is fine; breath-holding is information. Then make the next rung down available with full dignity (“Choose the version of this exercise where you can keep breathing”) and never frame it as the beginner option. The student who takes the smaller shape and keeps their breath is doing the exercise better than the one who takes the big shape and grips.
4. Count the work, encourage the person. Core work usually has a cadence. “Eight more . . . four more . . . last two” gives students a container for their effort, and with the end in sight they can give it everything they have. Counting can also tip into drill-sergeant energy awfully fast, so let the numbers carry the structure and let your words add the warmth.
5. Use silence. This one takes nerve. Once your students are working and the rhythm is set, stop talking. A well-timed stretch of silence in the middle of a hard series tells them you trust them with this.
If you’ve ever worried about saying too much in class, the 3-cue rule pairs well with that last one.
What’s left in the pantry
No crunches still leaves you a full pantry. Think of the crunch as the instant noodles of core work: fast, familiar, and nobody’s idea of a nourishing meal. Cooking from scratch here means two moves crossed with four home bases.
In a lift, the hips stay grounded and something rises against gravity: locust from the belly, boat from the back, side boat from the side, bird dog from hands and knees. In a push, weight presses into the hands and knees or the feet, and the body rises as a unit: plank from the belly, bridge or reverse table from the back, side plank from the side. That’s eight families of exercises before you’ve added a single variation.
Then add a ladder. Any lift or push becomes new the moment a limb leaves the ground: one limb; two limbs, opposite or (much harder) same side; then both arms or both legs, the longest levers. A student who has plateaued in plank is standing on the first rung of a very tall ladder.
Cue all of it with the two jobs in mind: articulation to warm up, stabilization through the middle, and articulation again to close, the way you’d warm the ingredients before you cook them. Along the way your students will wind up training the whole box, moving their spines in every direction and working their balance, and they’ll never once lace their fingers behind their neck and yank.
A taste of the full course
Reading five cues is the easy part. Your teaching changes when you use them week after week with the students in front of you and get feedback on how they land, which is what the lesson-plan work in Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength is for. The course is twenty hours of CEU-eligible study covering the physiology of strength, the full cueing toolkit, a master recipe for sequencing core classes that last from 10 minutes to 60, and three lesson plans you’ll draft and refine with my feedback. It’s 20% off through Saturday, October 31, and everyone who enrolls this week also gets a 15-minute planning call with me.
For more background, read how learning to teach core makes you a more useful yoga teacher.
