How to Create an Anatomy Lesson Plan for a Yoga Teacher Training

Summary: To create an effective anatomy lesson plan for yoga teacher training, you should teach small pieces at a time, set clear objectives, provide plenty of visuals, encourage embodiment, connect anatomy to yoga, add interactive activities, assess understanding, and keep lessons practical.

Designing anatomy for a 200 hour or 300 hour yoga teacher trainings often falls short. It can feel overwhelming to choose appropriate content, design lesson plans, create necessary visuals, and then deliver an effective experience. Often, teaching anatomy in a YTT gets outsourced to a local massage therapist or chiropractor. While they may have more subject matter expertise, often they are hired to teach in chunks that are way too long (like 8 hours straight) or they fail to apply the anatomy to yoga practice and teaching. Not to mention that expertise as a practitioner does not necessarily make you an engaging or effective educator. So what’s a conscientious teacher trainer to do?

First of all: take a deep breath! There are lots of options for you if you decide at the end of the day that you’d like support in either offering the anatomy (export it to an expert) or in purchasing ready made lesson plans designed specifically for teacher trainings.

But before we look at those options, let’s first take a look at how you can create well-structured YTT lesson plan to support a great anatomy experience.

Smart Ways To Create An Anatomy Lesson Plan For Your Yoga Teacher Training

Define your Learning Objectives

Before jumping into content creation, first decide what you want your students to be able to do at the end of your training. As an instructional designer, my first step is always to determine my learning objectives (measurable description of what students should be able to do as a result of learning). Start big picture. You may have something like:

• “When teaching a given yoga pose, trainees will describe how they are applying anatomical principles to the safe teaching of that asana.”
• “For a given posture, trainees will identify the key muscles that are concentrically and eccentrically contracting.”
• “For a given posture, students will identify how they would adapt the posture for common human variation (whether that variation is muscular, skeletal or related to connective tissue).”

You’ll note that all these learning objectives do more than test anatomy; they apply anatomy to the teaching of asana. After all, learning anatomy in a vacuum isn’t really relevant! You want your students to take some foundational common sense knowledge and integrate that information into their cuing and teaching.

Chunk Your Learning Topics

Once you have determined your learning objectives, it’s time to create some smaller chunks of learning topics. For example, for foundational information, I have lesson plans on “Introduction to Integral Anatomy,” “Language of Anatomy,” “Overview of Muscle Tissue,” “Overview of Connective Tissue,” and “Bones and Joints” (check out my free lesson plan on Bones and Joints HERE).

Resist the urge to include too much information in one lesson. I am a fan of creating 2-3 hour lesson plans for anatomy that are sprinkled into your training when they are most relevant to the asana topics at hand. For example, in my YTT, we learn the Anatomy of the Spine when students are learning backbends.

Design Your Lesson Plan

Each lesson topic now has its own set of learning objectives. For example, in my “Bones and Joints” lesson plan, my learning objectives are:

• List three functions of your bones
• Name and palpate the bones of the axial and appendicular skeleton
• Describe an idealized synovial joint
• Demonstrate the movement and function of the most common joint types
• Describe the purpose of cartilage
• Evaluate how human variation may affect asana functionality

While I include some basic content overview for the topic, there are also clear applications to movement and yoga.

Once you know what you need students to do, then it’s time to create the learning activities that will get them there. Generally this will begin with an introduction to new information (you must include visuals for anatomy, such as slides, videos, and models) and then – most importantly – the application to yoga practice. Make the anatomy relevant to students.

Include Embodiment

Book knowledge is not enough. In order for the anatomy to be relevant to your trainees, students need to embody the information. Ideally, they can experience the anatomy in their own body and also start to see it reflected in other people’s bodies as well. A well-crafted lesson plan will also get your students applying (and cuing with!) the information and applying it directly to practice and teaching.

Include Assessment and Review

You don’t need a complicated exam to find out whether your trainees have achieved their learning objectives: a short activity can tell you a lot. For each of your learning objectives in your lesson plan, consider how you may see your students demonstrating their understanding. For example, you might ask each trainee to choose a familiar yoga pose and explain which major joint movements are involved. You can also have students develop cuing strategies based on the anatomy they have just studied. Through this approach, you can identify misunderstandings and help trainees turn knowledge into teaching. Also, your assessment acts as a review for your students to help reinforce key information.

Keep the Lesson Practical and Relevant

Resist the desire to include everything you know when teaching anatomy! Anatomy (like many topics in a YTT) is a vast, vast well. For many students, this will be their first foray into anatomy. Rather than overload your trainees with a lot of information, keep it simple and repeat the fundamentals. Make it fun, engaging, and accessible. A strong anatomy lesson plan is not the one with the most information; it’s the one that helps students apply key concepts to their practice and teaching.

Final Thoughts

When I started creating my yoga teacher training curriculum, anatomy was the first subject that I tackled. I love anatomy and I love teaching it, and I wanted to help other yoga teacher trainers feel supported and confident in teaching the anatomy in their programs themselves (rather than outsourcing it to someone else). If you want to understand anatomy, the best way to learn it is to teach it yourself. If you want to uplevel your anatomy skills or outsource the work of creating lesson plans, check out my anatomy lesson plans. If you want to export classroom hours, then check out my online anatomy program (which you can buy and use in your own YTT) or I also recommend Leslie Kaminoff’s online anatomy modules.