Stop writing a new yoga sequencing lesson plan every week. One good plan, built on a balanced framework and taught with small variations over a month, will get your students further than four different plans ever could.
I’m Sage Rountree, and I’ve been writing yoga lesson plans for more than twenty years of weekly classes, trainings, and mentorship calls. I’ve also read hundreds of other teachers’ plans, so I know exactly where they tend to fall apart, usually in week two, when the plan gets thrown out and a brand new one takes its place.
The five parts every plan needs
A lesson plan is a recipe card, and a good one has the same parts every time, whether you’re teaching a gentle Tuesday class or a ninety-minute workshop. It opens and closes the same consistent way. The chunks come in a set order: centering, warmup, standing work, mat work, finishing poses. Somewhere in the middle there’s a balance check, six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions, the S.E.R.V.E. Method and 6–4–2 framework that tells you whether the class is well-rounded or just a string of poses you happen to like. There’s a short bank of variations for whoever actually shows up: the student with the cranky knee, the athlete, the first-timer standing in the back looking nervous. And at the bottom, one line about what you noticed. That last line is the one almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that turns a plan into an actual practice of teaching.
The yoga class plan template, row by row
Here’s the template I actually use. It is one page, and every row on it does a specific job.
Two bookends. An opening and a closing that stay the same from week to week. A recognizable start tells the nervous system it can settle; a recognizable finish makes the landing feel trustworthy. These are the two rows you write once and then leave alone for months.
Four quarters, in order. Warmup to prepare the body, standing work as the main course, mat work to go deeper, finishing to carry everyone into savasana. Write those four words down the left side of a page and you have a yoga lesson plan template that will outlast every trend in your feed.
The balance check, run across the middle two quarters. Six moves of the spine: flexion, extension, side bending left and right, twisting left and right. Four lines of the legs: front, back, inner, outer. Two core actions: stabilization, which is static strength and control, and articulation, which is dynamic movement and mobility. My planning mantra, which I will cheerfully admit sounds like a fridge magnet: if it hits 6–4–2, it is balanced, and if it is balanced, I can teach it with confidence.
The variation bank. A short list of what to offer the student with the cranky knee, the athlete, and the first-timer standing at the back looking nervous.
One line about what you noticed. This is the row almost everyone skips in a hurry after class, and it’s the important one that turns a plan into a practice of teaching.
That’s the whole template. It takes five minutes to fill in, and you can hand it to your future self, who will be standing in front of real humans in your class on Tuesday.
Filling it in for a real Tuesday class
Say you teach a mixed-level 60-minute class.
Opening and closing stay as written—you settled those weeks ago. Warmup gets cat and cow on all fours and a standing cat-cow with hands on the thighs, which covers flexion, extension, and articulation before anyone has done anything strenuous. Standing work gets warrior II, extended side angle, reverse warrior, and triangle on each side, which covers the outer line of the legs and side bending. Mat work gets a revolved lunge for rotation and the front line, pyramid for the back line, and plank for stabilization. Finishing gets a wide-legged seated fold for the inner line, a supine twist, and savasana.
Now run the check. Flexion, extension, side bending both ways, twisting both ways: all present. Front, back, inner, outer: all present. Stabilization and articulation: both there. The gaps are closed, and the whole thing took about as long to plan as it took you to read.
That is what using the template buys you. Not creativity—you already have plenty of that—but the certainty that the class is well-rounded instead of a laundry list of poses you happen to like.
You don’t need a new recipe every week
Here’s the part that took me years to believe: teaching a different sequence every single week doesn’t make you a better teacher. It just means you’re always serving your students a first draft. A chef doesn’t rewrite the menu every night; he tests a dish for months before it earns a permanent spot. A musician plays the same handful of pieces for a season before a performance, not a new one each rehearsal. Neither treats novelty as the mark of skill (I spent my first few years of teaching convinced that repetition meant I was being lazy, which is its own kind of expensive mistake). Your students, it turns out, want the repetition more than they want the novelty—it’s what lets them feel the small ways they’re getting stronger.
So build the plan once and run it on a cycle. Teach it as written the first week, since you’re still learning it yourself even though you wrote it. Vary the standing sequence the second week. Change the opening or the closing the third. By the fourth week, either respond to whatever you noticed in the room or go back to week one and start over. Small, deliberate changes on a stable base keep the class consistent without going stale, and your students build real skill because the ground under them isn’t shifting every seven days.
“I like that I have something that I can use for 4 weeks. This has definitely helped with saving time!!” That’s Mary White, describing exactly what happens once you stop starting over.
Using it as a yoga class planner for the month
The template is a single class. The planner is what you do with it for the next four weeks.
Week one, teach the base sequence as written. You are still learning it yourself, even though you wrote it. Weeks two, three, and four, change one thing each week, and let your students choose what: ask what they want more of, and write their answer in as that week’s highlight. Necks and shoulders, hips, low backs, and stress relief are the four requests I have heard most often in twenty+ years, and every one of them can be served inside a base sequence you have already built, by lengthening a hold, adding a variation, or spending the mat-work quarter somewhere different.
That is a month of classes from one page, and it is also a month of your students building real skill, because the ground under them is not shifting every seven days.
The worksheet gets you started. It doesn’t replace the feedback.
You can build a plan like this from scratch, and I’d recommend every teacher do it by hand a few times, since writing it out is what installs the framework in your body. But the worksheet alone won’t tell you when your transitions are clunky or your timing is off. One of my mentorship members, Peggy, owned my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing and still spent 150 minutes planning each class until the mentorship cut that down to 45.
Grab the free 6–4–2 worksheet and build your next plan on it: get the worksheet. Once the recipe is written, how to plan a yoga class becomes a fifteen-minute question instead of a three-hour one.
Start from a finished plan instead
If you would rather not start from a blank template this week, start from a finished one.
My Greatest Hits Lesson Plan is a complete, balanced class built on this same framework, written out the way I would write it for myself, and designed to be repeated with purpose rather than replaced. Take it, teach it, and then use the blank template to build your next one.
Grab it here: the Greatest Hits Lesson Plan.
