Sooner or later, a student stops you on the way out the door with three words: “More core, please.” And for a long time I answered that request badly. I tacked three rounds of bicycles into the middle of an otherwise unrelated class, everybody groaned on cue, and I called it giving the people what they wanted.
This is the case I wish someone had made to me early on: learning to teach core well makes you a more useful yoga teacher. Useful in the room, useful to your students’ actual lives, and useful to your own career. Below are the two jobs the core does, so you can see core work hiding inside every class you already teach, and a small piece of homework for this week’s lesson plan.
What “more core” actually means
By useful, I mean the teacher who can answer the request. When a student says “more core,” they’re almost never asking for crunches, even if they think they are. Popular culture has done its work, and the word core arrives wrapped in a picture of a flat stomach. Listen for the word underneath the word, though, and what you’ll hear is a request to feel capable: strong through the middle, able to trust their body, able to get through the day without something in the low back or the neck picking up slack it would rather not carry. A teacher who can hear that request and answer it with skill is useful in a way that goes well past the hour on the mat.
The strength-coaching line that reorganized my thinking on this is the whole argument in eight words: you can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. Every push, pull, reach, and step your students take transmits force through the center of the body, the canoe in this analogy. When the center is steady, the limbs are free to move with power and precision. When it isn’t, when it’s a rocking canoe, something else does the job, and that something is usually a structure that wasn’t built to transmit that force.
I watched this play out for a decade while I was coaching endurance athletes, and one of my athletes gave me the best image for it I have ever heard. Ruffin Powell told me that late in her long runs, and late in races, she would start shrimping (this is her wonderful word): curling in on herself, shoulders rolling forward, chin jutting, the whole torso folding like a cooked shrimp. Her legs were fine. The platform that supported them from above was giving out, and once the platform went, every stride cost more energy than it should. The antidote to shrimping is not more running. It’s back extension, and it’s neck strength, which almost nobody files under core work until they watch someone else’s head lead the collapse.
Your students don’t have to be marathoners for this to matter. Core strength supports posture, and posture supports breath: there’s a reason nobody takes a full, satisfying inhale while slumped over a phone. Core strength and awareness underpin balance, which becomes the headline concern as students get older. Getting up off the floor is core work (I’ve built a whole short practice out of nothing but ways to get up off the floor, and it’s humbling every single time). Carrying groceries up the stairs while turning to answer a question is core work. Teaching core well is teaching people to organize their whole body around its center, and that is a skill with a very long shelf life.
Why thoughtful teachers hand core work off
In my experience the reason so many thoughtful teachers hand core work off to someone else, to the Pilates studio down the street or to the personal trainer at the gym, is that they have never been given an easy way to see it. Core work can look like a pile of unrelated exercises: a plank here, a boat there, something with a ball that somebody saw on Instagram. Without a way to sort the pile, every core class becomes a fresh act of invention, and fresh invention every week is exhausting. It’s the same first-draft-forever problem I talk about with sequencing: if you change the plan every time, nothing ever gets polished.
The two jobs of the core
The sorting tool is small enough to fit on a napkin: everything the core does falls into two jobs. It’s the 2 in my 6–4–2 formula, which you can hear about across many episodes of this podcast and in my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing.
Job one is stabilization. All the muscles of the trunk co-contract to hold the spine and pelvis steady while the limbs move, or even while they don’t. Plank is stabilization. Bird dog is stabilization. Standing on one leg while the other taps front and back is stabilization. The spine and pelvis are not supposed to move; the challenge comes from everything that is trying to make them.
Job two is articulation. The muscles work in turn to move the joints of the spine, one segment after another. Cat and cow are articulation, forward and back. Moving in and out of a standing side bend is articulation, left and right. A gentle twist, a roll down through the spine one vertebra at a time: articulation. If you already teach with my six moves of the spine (flexion, extension, side bending both ways, and twisting both ways, the 6 in 6–4–2), you carry this recipe without even knowing it, and in core work it earns its keep twice over, because a spine that only ever braces is missing half its movement vocabulary. It’s an imbalanced movement diet.
Once you can see those two jobs, you can look at any core exercise ever invented, every mat Pilates classic, every yoga pose, every gym-floor drill, everything you see on Instagram, and know in a breath what it’s doing. That is the moment a pile of exercises turns into craft. It changes how you read the bodies in front of you, too, because you stop watching the moving limb and start watching the box that is supposed to hold still under it. I say this out loud in class: “While your left hip is working to move, your right hip is working to stay.” Students stop chasing the leg in the air, or whatever looks showy, and start feeling the center, and you get to teach the thing that was always actually happening.
Where core already lives in your class
Surprise: it’s already in there, and you don’t have to import anything. If you’re teaching a well-balanced class, any request is really something you’ve already baked into your lesson plan, and you can just point to it as you move through the journey you’d already plotted. A 60-minute flow that goes hands-and-knees warmup, sun salutations, standing poses, floor work, backbends, rest has core hiding in at least four places: the hands-and-knees moment before you get up for your sun salutations, where a rung of bird dog fits; the plank in every vinyasa, which is an eccentric lower to the belly with stabilization, and which becomes real core work the moment you hold the top, the middle, or the bottom for three breaths; the balance chunk, which is stabilization with a story attached about arms and legs; and the bridge series, where bridge already lived.
And there is one more place, the one almost nobody teaches on purpose: the transition from the floor to standing and back again. Most classes have several. Give them shape. A rock up to the feet, a press up without using the hands, a squat that becomes a stand. Slow it down, cue it, point out that it’s core, and let it take four breaths instead of one. Your students use that exact movement every day of their lives, and you’re already asking them to do it. The transitions are the curriculum, and they’ve been there the whole time.
I teach a lot of those movements for several weeks at a time, and my students always remark on their own progress. It’s really gratifying, and it shows me my class is doing what I mean it to: serving my students both in the hour it’s happening and in the other twenty-three hours of their day.
The career case
That is the usefulness in the room. Usefulness to your career is the one I think yoga teachers undersell, out of modesty. “More core” is not a niche request. It comes from the runner and from the retiree, from the 25-year-old and the 70-year-old, in the gym and in the boutique studio and on Zoom. The teacher who can answer it well, without the room turning into boot camp and without anybody’s neck paying for it, is the teacher who gets asked to build the Saturday core workshop series, who gets handed the lunchtime slot the studio has been trying to fill, and whose Tuesday class holds together in February when everyone else’s has thinned out by the end of January. Usefulness is what fills a class. Charisma gets people in the door once; being useful is why they come back.
Homework for this week’s plan
This is a skill, and skills are built by getting in the reps.
First, take one class plan you already teach and mark every core-relevant moment with an S or an A: S for stabilization, where the spine is holding steady; A for articulation, where the spine is moving. Most of us skew one way or the other without knowing it, and the marks will tell you which. A class of all planks is a stability seminar. A class of all cat-cows feels fantastic but never builds the steadiness students came for. Both jobs, every class: there’s your gold standard.
Second, pick one transition in that same plan and slow it down on purpose. You don’t even have to announce it. Give the floor-to-standing moment four or five breaths, and then listen to what people say on the way out. “Great class” is a passing grade. “Great class, plus there was core for some reason” means the seam was showing, and that tells you something too.
Third, the next time a student asks you for more core, pause for a second and ask, “What exactly are you hoping for?” Then listen for what comes out. The answer will inform your next month of teaching better than any sequence I could hand you, and setting a precedent of listening to your students is a great thing in itself.
Those three steps give you a way to see core work and a way to start. What they don’t give you is the order to learn things in, the progressions and regressions sitting side by side so you can serve both the 70-year-old and the triathlete in the same room, the cueing language that makes effort feel like care instead of punishment, or complete class plans you can teach this week. You can assemble all of that yourself, by trial and error, in front of paying students, over a couple of years. That’s what I did, and I’d love to save you the years. That is what my new 20-CEU course, Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength, is for, and it opens to everyone at 20% off on Monday, October 26, for the last week of October. I’ll say more about it in episode 109, where I take on what most yoga teachers get wrong about core.
For today, the free door is the one to walk through first. The full call I taught on October 8, the Teaching Core Strength call of the month, is waiting as a replay in the Zone, my free community of more than 3,300 yoga teachers, and on YouTube. Watch me walk the bird dog up all of the rungs, then go mark up your plan with an S for stabilization and an A for articulation, and find one transition you can unpack and slow down. Grab the ladder as a free one-page printable while you’re at it. I make the whole case on episode 107 of Yoga Teacher Confidential.
