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anatomy is important to Asana teachers, but not because Asana teachers should be teaching anatomy in their classes, but only because they are speaking about the body in their classes.
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So their anatomy study will be in the background informing what they say and informing how they put together an Asana sequence.
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Hey Libby, welcome back.
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Glad to be back.
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So you've been teaching anatomy for a long time, I have a good bit of experience teaching anatomy too, and through that we have learned some things that really work.
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So we have a plan for what we want to share with yoga teachers who are anatomy challenged but believe that it's important.
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And that's a lot of yoga teachers.
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Agree.
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So before we jump into those tips, let's ask the question for any yoga teacher who might be skeptical about, is this important? Do yoga teachers really need to learn anatomy? Yep, that is the first question on the list.
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And, from my perspective, the answer is yes.
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But, they don't need to learn a whole lot of very, very tedious, advanced anatomy concepts.
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They really just need to know the basics.
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And the reason being is that if they're teaching Asana at all, chances are they're speaking about the body.
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And without a really basic foundation of anatomy understanding, it's really hard to speak about the body accurately.
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So, that's it for this video.
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Even in just basic ways.
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And when we don't speak about the body accurately, then we risk being misleading to our students.
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And as we'll get into later, The basics take a while to learn.
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They take a while to become fluent in.
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So it's not like learning the basics of anatomy is a small project.
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Anatomy is a big project if you take on the whole thing.
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But to take on as much as a yoga teacher needs to learn, it's still a sizable project to understand it well enough to be accurate and to be useful for a yoga teacher.
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Yes.
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Absolutely.
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You know, when I say the basics.
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It's still a lot and it still takes a lot of time and repetition and really ongoing study to keep it fresh in your mind.
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You know, anatomy is like its own little world, its own language.
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And when we don't use it, we really lose it pretty quickly.
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So I think one of the big keys is to keep it consistent and keep it fresh on the mind.
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And a caveat to that is yoga is a big umbrella term.
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So if you only teach meditation and you are not guiding people through a physical practice where they're going to encounter physical limitations, you may not need to learn anatomy.
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If you are only teaching yoga philosophy, Probably you do not need to learn anatomy.
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You certainly can.
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It's a fascinating field of study, but we're really speaking to Asana teachers here.
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Yeah, definitely.
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And I think anatomy is important to Asana teachers, but not because Asana teachers should be teaching anatomy in their classes, but only because they are speaking about the body in their classes.
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So their anatomy study will be in the background informing what they say and informing how they put together an Asana sequence.
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So it's, it's really not to say that Asana teachers should be talking a whole lot about anatomy to their classes per se, but That they should be informed by some foundational anatomy understanding.
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And as much as anatomy informs what they do say, it can also inform what they don't say.
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Because one of the patterns for yoga teachers who are not super confident in understanding anatomy is they talk about the body a lot and maybe even too much because they're not sure what's important and what's not important.
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So this is a really common pattern for newer teachers or even teachers who've been teaching a long time, but there's this sense of anxiety in the background of like, I don't want to hurt my students.
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I don't want to, I really want to do the right thing by them.
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So I'm going to pack everything that I've ever heard about this posture and about the body into my instructions, where the better you understand anatomy, the better you can discern which cues, which instructions are actually useful and helpful and important for this group of students in this moment, versus all of this extra fluff.
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That is going to distract your students, overwhelm them, and not allow them to focus on what is important.
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Definitely, I'd say that might be the most important reason to study anatomy as a yoga teacher is so that you can know For sure that you don't need to say so much And you have a better understanding about why you might say a thing and feel free to leave it out if it's not important to you at the moment.
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But you're exactly right that without that basic foundation and that fluency, I would say, in in the basics, which again is a sizable project on its own.
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But without that fluency, yoga teachers tend to default to, as you said, probably saying too much kind of packing in every little bit they've ever heard about.
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This body part or this posture in a way that's a bit overwhelming, number one, but they also tend to default to safety oriented language.
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And I guess I would say nocebic language, which is a little bit fear based.
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So because they're coming at this from such a, a caring place of caring for their students and not wanting to say the wrong thing and not wanting anyone to get hurt and all those things, but because they don't really have a solid.
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Fluency and anatomy, they default to, well, just in case, I'm going to just say this is about safety, because I actually don't know if it or not.
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And that's a big, big problem.
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And we actually did a whole episode on nocebic language.
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If you're not familiar with the term, nocebic language is language that incites fear and concern.
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It is language with a negative bias.
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I'll add a link to that episode in the show notes in case you want to hear more about what is nocebic language, examples of nocebic language, and why it's important to strip nocebic language out of your teaching habits.
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And speaking of definitions, let's get clear on what we mean when we say the word anatomy The way that we're using anatomy today and the way that most yoga teachers use anatomy is not 100 percent accurate.
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So I just want to name that up front.
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We're using anatomy as a shorthand for knowledge, to mean knowledge about the body.
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But the technical definition of anatomy is the identification of body parts, which is actually, you know, of limited use on its own.
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Anatomy is one slice of knowledge about the body and it's an important slice because without being able to label body parts, we can't talk about the function in a way that we, where we can understand each other.
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We can't talk about the function in an accurate way without having these labels.
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But when we're talking about anatomy, we are also talking about of study such as physiology.
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how the body functions, we're talking about biomechanics, specifically how the musculoskeletal system functions.
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And I just want to be up front that, that we're using anatomy in a slightly inaccurate way before we kind of like go all in with it.
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Yes, good point.
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We are using the term anatomy in kind of a loose way, in a broader way, but you're right, technically anatomy kind of means to break things apart and study them in pieces about the body.
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And, that's part of what we're doing when we study.
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anatomy and biomechanics, but It's important that we put it back together and get to a place where we can kind of understand how the whole thing functions as a unit.
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And that's a little bit more, I would call it biomechanics, kind of the study of forces on the body and motion, almost like a bit of more physics, bringing physics into studying how the body moves and physiology.
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As well, so yeah, we'll kind of go with anatomy as a broad umbrella term for all of that.
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So tell me a little bit about how your relationship to the study of the human body that we're calling anatomy has evolved over time because you and I have both been teaching for about 20 years.
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We did our first teacher training together and we've talked about this before, so I know we were both super overwhelmed and pretty uninterested.
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in the way that anatomy was taught in that teacher training.
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It was taught really as this sort of separate thing from the Asana we were doing.
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It wasn't connected to it.
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It was like, Oh, you need to understand anatomy here.
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Go label these diagrams and But there was never the connection made back to, so then how will that inform the way that we practice Asana? That wasn't done.
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So I'd love to hear about how you made your way back there eventually.
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Yeah, you're right.
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It just in yoga teacher training, it did not seem relevant at all.
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It did seem tedious and overwhelming.
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You know, something we were just having to memorize, like a list of muscles and be able to label them on a diagram.
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I remember studying that list and.
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Drawing lines to muscles and all of that, but it was very separate from an embodied experience of.
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My own body and its parts and how they work together.
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It just was totally separate.
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So how did that change for me? When I, in the early years of teaching yoga, I took a lot of yoga workshops.
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And one of them that I took was with Paul Grilley on anatomy and I guess yin yoga.
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And that was really the weekend that really sparked my interest in anatomy, because I guess the way he taught it just was so intriguing.
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And 1 of the things that we were learning about was this concept of anatomical variation and the way that all of our bodies are slightly different, right? Their anatomies are similar, but, varied among humans and I just found that to be so fascinating and I'd never heard of that before and I thought how silly that we don't know this, you know, as standard yoga teachers and that really sparked my intrigue to learn a whole lot more about anatomy.
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So, I think a couple years later, I ended up in physical therapy school.
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And studied anatomy big time, obviously during that process.
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And I just absolutely loved it.
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And certainly in physical therapy school, it was completely overwhelming, but it was also completely relevant to all the other things I was learning in PT school about, you know, evaluating people and treating people's injuries and stuff like that.
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So it was very much integrated across the whole curriculum.
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So.
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I had a very good reason to stay interested in it and to learn about it.
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And it was very experiential too.
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I mean, I spent a year in the cadaver lab, dissecting a human cadaver in order to learn anatomy.
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So that was very awe inspiring.
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I think that's a big part of it.
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You know, that's when I discovered that the study of anatomy is, well, has the potential to be so much more powerful than, than sterile.
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I mean, obviously if we think about a cadaver lab, it is.
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It's literally sterile, but, holding an actual human's heart in your hands, for example, or, you know, actually investigating the inside of someone's body really inspires a level of reverence about the human body that I had never experienced before.
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And so I think anytime we study.
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Anatomy, that's really what we're doing, you know, when we observe our students in a class, we're like, observing these bodies that have stories that someone lives inside of, their body really tells us their whole life story.
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So, it kind of brought all those layers of relevance and reverence to my experience of anatomy.
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That's beautiful.
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So for the yoga teacher listening who is eager to learn and has maybe tried several times and just nothing's stuck, let's dive into those tips.
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well, the 1st tip Is put on your curiosity goggles, so I like.
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Thinking about curiosity goggles, like, we could actually put on a pair of glasses or goggles that help us see things with an attitude of interest, curiosity, and almost playfulness, because sometimes when we approach the subject of anatomy, it can just feel overwhelming and very intimidating for people and just know that as a yoga teacher, who may have not that much experience with anatomy, You are like most other yoga teachers who also feel intimidated and overwhelmed by it.
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So I think if we can just all come at it with a bit of playfulness and curiosity and, an attitude of, well, let's just see what happens, you know, then it can be a lot more fun.
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Take ourselves a bit less seriously.
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I think that's a really good goal for all of us as humans, but certainly as yoga teachers, we tend towards a little bit of taking ourselves too seriously.
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And, uh, it sort of kills the fun of stuff.
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And I find that working with human bodies is really, it can be really fun.
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They're weird, you know, bodies do really weird stuff.
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They're all of our bodies are different and we get to learn about all their nuances and their quirks and things like that.
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So, taking yourself a bit less seriously, take the pressure off.
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It doesn't have to feel like a huge deal.
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It can actually feel like just a fun project, an investigation, basically.
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think it's important to have the right teacher for that.
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I think it's so, so helpful to have a teacher that takes themselves lightly and that has their own curiosity goggles that they are teaching through maybe part of why so many yoga teachers don't have a great experience learning anatomy is if they are learning from somebody who is like very serious and packing information into a small amount of time without bothering to make it relevant, like that whole piece.
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And we're going to circle back around to again and again, this concept of relevance, All the information in the world is meaningless when it's not relevant.
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So if your teacher doesn't know how to pick and choose which pieces to start with, which pieces to spend time on, and how to approach the exploration of anatomy, then you've been sort of handicapped already.
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Because anatomy is something that does benefit from having a teacher because of the vastness of the information.
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If you try to learn anatomy on your own, the problem is that you're going to be faced with this huge anatomy textbook or this huge body of information and you're not going to know where to start and you're not going to know, when to go back and when to repeat and all of that stuff.
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You really do need some guidance and it's so helpful if your teacher can have that same attitude.
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Definitely.
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You know, it points to a bit of a conundrum in yoga teacher trainings, which is the difficulty of finding a teacher who's actually qualified to teach anatomy and who can really sift through the tedium, all the overwhelming details that aren't actually relevant to a yoga teacher and really hone in on the aspects that are relevant.
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It's hard to find.
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So, the next tip is take the pressure off of yourself as you embark on studying anatomy because learning anatomy does not mean that all of a sudden you're expected to know everything about the body and that all of a sudden you're going to be expected to answer your students little questions after class about why their shoulder hurts.
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These are completely different things and it's really important to know that your study of anatomy is not at all related to your learning how to diagnose and treat anything.
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Those are totally different things.
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So just go ahead and take that completely off the table and I think you'll feel less stress about it.
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the study of anatomy does not prepare you to understand why something hurts in your student's body.
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And then the third tip is to break it into smaller chunks.
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Try to just learn about one part of the body at a time.
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Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to learn every muscle in the body, for example, at the same time.
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Just like, let's take the shoulder, for example.
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Let's just study the shoulder for a while, okay? And learn about the key muscles of the shoulder, the shoulder joint, the ranges of motion that it has available to it, typically.
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What bones form the shoulder joint, all those things, just small chunks, so that it's not overwhelming.
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And, you know, that's essentially how we learn best.
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Any topic we're trying to study is little bits at a time done very frequently.
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And the next tip I would offer is to start with the basics.
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And in some ways, I would stay, say, start with the basics and also stick with the basics.
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Because the basics are a lot, okay? And don't be in a rush to move on from that basic foundation, right? So by basics, I mean knowing what these bones are called, right? The skeletal system, knowing what the bones are called, knowing about the major joints in the body and about how much they generally move and the key muscles in those areas, but those types of basics, which again, that's a lot.
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But we shouldn't be in a rush to move on to something more quote unquote advanced.
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And what I see happen a lot in yoga spaces is this push to get a little bit almost esoteric with anatomy and very way beyond the basics, but without an actual foundation to understand why we would be talking about that.
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You know, it's just, it's got nothing to rest on.
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And what's most important is to come back to the basics.
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So that takes time to really understand.
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And it's important to keep refreshing that because again, if you don't use the concepts or talk about them really frequently, you'll forget them.
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That's how that is.
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And so you just go back and you keep reviewing and refreshing over and over and over.
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And this includes learning the language of anatomy, you know, what movements are called so that you can speak to other people who know about the body and have that shared anatomical language.
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I think it's really important to understand the difference between anatomy as a body of knowledge and yoga as a body of knowledge.
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Because anatomy as a body of knowledge is is Consistent.
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So every medical school is teaching the exact same term for the exact same body part, the exact same section of the bone, And yoga, some people call this pose.
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Chakrasana, and some people call it Urdhva Dhanurasana, right? There's different names, different interpretations, different perspectives.
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And so I think as yoga teachers, we're not used to that when we dive into learning anatomy to understand that, no, actually when we learn an anatomical term, it is going to be consistent across the board.
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So you might, talk to a yoga teacher who took a different teacher training, who practices in a different style.
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And you might try to talk about a certain pose and realize what like, whoa, we're, we have different language for this.
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Even though in theory, we're both speaking yoga.
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That is not the case in anatomy.
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When you learn an anatomical term, you should be able to talk to a surgeon, and they will use the same term for that body part or that type of movement.
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You should be able to talk to a physical therapist.
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They will also use that exact same term.
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So anybody who studies anatomy is going to have a true shared language to talk about the body in a way that's very different from how yoga is taught.
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It's true and it's really refreshing in a way in the yoga sphere to have something like that because we don't need to hold on to, you know, opinions about anatomy.
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Let's say the way that we might hold on to opinions about.
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Approaches to yoga practice or traditions of yoga, right? That are more or less authentic, or whatever the squabble might be.
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Anatomy just is, and it's not personal.
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It's not opinion driven, which is really awesome in my mind.
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And as we continue to study anatomy, we just, that's one reason when we get to stay curious about it, we're just always going to learn more and more.
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And, again, it's not personal, you know, we just, we understand it better as we learn it better.
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All of us are on that same trajectory.
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So I think it makes it more fun.
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Absolutely.
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And I love this next tip is actually that it, is personal.
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Some contradictions in Well, you have a personal version of it, which is your own home, your own body, you happen to be walking around there.
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or wheeling around or however you get around.
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Um, but you happen to be living inside of an anatomy laboratory, anatomy laboratory, you are that.
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And so, anatomy is really self study.
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You get to learn about your own embodied experience and use the anatomy lab of your own self.
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So, that makes it really interesting and then you get to compare that to the experience of other bodies and learn about their similarities and learn about their differences.
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you get to embody the information that you're learning.
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The concepts you're learning, if you don't put those inside your own body and feel them, it's really hard to get it.
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It's really hard for it to seem relevant to you.
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And if it doesn't seem relevant to you, it's hard to care about it.
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So this is actually the overarching theme of this entire episode.
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the main strategy for learning anatomy is context.
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That's right.
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Context is the key.
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If you don't understand why a concept matters, then it's really hard to learn it.
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And again, it loses its meaning in a way.
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So, for everything you're trying to learn in anatomy, you need to make sure you understand why.
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And this hits reality as a yoga teacher when you are in your class and you're speaking about the body, or you're saying something about a posture and telling your students to do it in a certain way to put their body in a certain way.
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And if a student asks, well, why do you want me to do that with my shoulder blades? For example, you gotta have a good answer for them.
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Otherwise.
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You probably shouldn't say it, you know, an anatomical verbal cue that you deliver in class.
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If you're just repeating what someone else has said, and you really don't understand why you're saying it, then it's going to require a little bit more digging.
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It's not to say that you should throw it out forever, but it is to say you should figure out why you might say it.
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And then if that kind of makes sense to you still, then go ahead and use it.
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But now you've got a reason to use it.
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I was just with a group this past weekend, and someone asked me about a really common cue that they have heard.
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This was a teacher training group, so these are people on their way to becoming teachers, and someone asked me, Well, why do I hear this cue whenever my arms are overhead in a yoga posture? And it was a cue about Taking your shoulder blades down and together.
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And I said, well, that's a question that, you know, you need to investigate as you learn a bit more about it, about the body and about how the shoulder blades just move.
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Like, what do they just do when you take your arms overhead? And do we need to overthink that? Do we need a cue about that? I don't know.
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That's a curious question.
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I hope that you'll just ponder it, you know, from now on.
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And be curious about those whys.
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That was the perfect question.
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You know, why, would I say this? we need to figure that out.
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Yeah.
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And until you understand why, don't say it.
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Correct.
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Correct.
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In speaking about context in terms of learning anatomy, I think this is a point where making the comparison to learning a foreign language is really relevant.
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Americans tend to have a, a very difficult time learning foreign languages.
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We can travel a lot and everybody speaks English.
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Why am I doing this? What use is this going to be to me? And if you can find that why, Those are the people who are successful at learning another language.
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But so many Americans struggle to learn another language because they don't see the relevance.
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If you try to learn anatomy without the context baked into your studies, it will not stick.
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Exactly, and all it will seem is, is overwhelming and tedious and you're like, why should I waste my time studying that? But.
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It's not a difficult leap to make, right? That anatomy is relevant if you have a body and you get on your mat with your body.
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So just got to bring the anatomy study there.
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I get it to the mat somehow.
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When you're thinking about the whole of anatomy and what's most relevant for yoga teachers, I would say muscular anatomy is going to be the most relevant for yoga.
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That's what people are often asking about.
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Like what muscle are we contracting in X, Y, Z pose? Or what muscles are we stretching? Those types of questions.
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And that's a great place to start.
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So if you're going to focus on something, focus on muscular anatomy.
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Learn about key muscles in the body.
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Not every single muscle.
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That would be way overwhelming.
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But the key muscles in each, surrounding each joint, let's say, learn about where it attaches, the direction of its fibers.
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If you know those two things, by the way, you can figure out what a muscle does.
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Because when a muscle contracts, its attachment sites move closer together along the direction of its fibers.
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So it kind of gives you the, the building blocks to know the action of a muscle.
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And of course, muscles always work as a team no muscle in the body is on its own and it always has help.
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we can think about it more as like an orchestra, and each muscle being like one instrument in that orchestra and the other piece.
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That's often missing in yoga teachers understanding of the body is orientation to gravity and the way that a muscle works depends on its orientation to gravity.
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We could be in a position, for example, of hip flexion, but our hip flexors are not active in that pose, for example.
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So position and action are very different things and it has everything to do with gravity.
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so the next tip would be to learn in layers.
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Okay, so you can focus on bones, like I mentioned before, naming those some of the key bony landmarks, like this little rough spot, you know, on the tibia where something attaches those bony landmarks and bony prominences serve as muscular attachment sites, usually.
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If we're going to build to muscular.
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anatomy understanding.
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We really have to start with bones and know the parts of the bones because that's where muscles are going to end up attaching.
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So, joints, basically where two bones meet and movement occurs.
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We need to understand how the major joints in the body work, how much They should be expected to move in each direction.
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You know, that's a huge missing piece too, actually, is that many times yoga teachers don't really learn, well, how much rotation is.
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reasonable to expect out of a human hip.
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For example, how much do human hips rotate internally? How much do they rotate externally? How much do they flex? How much do they extend? Et cetera.
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And when we don't know that, we don't know if what we're seeing in our students bodies Is typical, is excessive, is limited.
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We don't know kind of where they're landing and that really impacts how we cue postures.
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So, just a standard classic example of this would be if we're cuing the pigeon pose, or we're observing our students in the pigeon pose and we might say, hey, place your front shin parallel to the top of your mat.
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And if we do that and our pelvis is on the ground, which certainly some people can do that, you well, that is a lot of external rotation in that front hip, and it's actually more than is normal, and we should not expect human hips to rotate that much.
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Now, not to say there aren't outliers who have excess mobility in their hips who can do that, but if I didn't know how much a normal hip rotates, I wouldn't know.
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That it's not reasonable to expect that out of my students, and that's a big gap that we need to close with our anatomy training, I think.
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So, bones, bony landmarks, joints, and how they move, and roughly how much they move, and then, of course, the muscles.
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that cross those joints and create the movements that you just learned about.
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So those would be some layers to focus on.
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You're going to build your knowledge in parts, but over time, the whole picture is going to become integrated.
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And this is a long game.
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It's not going to happen overnight, but it's going to happen over time.
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So just trust that learning things in parts is going to get you to that sense of integration and organization and a broader understanding about the whole, how the whole thing works together.
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And be patient with that.
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And resist the urge to turn anatomy into something esoteric.
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there is a tendency to kind of overlay subtle anatomy or subtle, almost energetic or spiritual concepts onto, Biomechanical reality, and I would resist doing that.
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anatomy is not esoteric, but it is where we live, and it's where our thoughts and our feelings live.
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So, but I, I think it's problematic when we overlay esoteric concepts on actual anatomical structures.
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my recommendation would be to resist the urge to do that, and that also to know that there are many things that we don't know about the body.
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So embrace the not knowing, I always talk about the gap and minding the gap and the gap is the thing that stands between what we know and what we could know.
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And for all of us, there's a huge gap there and, uh, we don't always know how big that gap is, but we know it's there.
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Hopefully we know it's there, you don't know what you don't know.
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So just embrace the fact that.
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nobody knows a whole lot about this body, there's some people who know more than others, but I do think there's some mystery about the human body.
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And so we can all just embrace that mystery and that not knowing and we can just say out loud, I don't know, when someone asks a question that I don't know, I just say, gosh, that's a good question.
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I don't know.
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And I think this attitude towards learning anatomy, where We don't have to have all the answers and it's okay that there is mystery.
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Mystery is acceptable.
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Not knowing is acceptable is very aligned with the philosophy of yoga You're never going to know everything.
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You're never going to be perfect.
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That's not what we're seeking here.
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We are seeking to be present with our embodiment.
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That's right, and embrace the imperfection so the next tip is going to be grab some friends and make this a group effort because learning anatomy is definitely going to be more fun with friends.
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all your group of friends, they have different bodies.
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They have similar bodies, but different nuances, different quirks.
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And so that's going to make it all the more fun as a process to learn.
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And then lastly, repeat the information over and over and over.
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You will definitely forget.
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The anatomy, unless you repeat it over and over again.
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It is all about repetition.
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People often ask me, well, I have such a hard time memorizing things.
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What are some strategies? And I just say, you repeat them over and over and over again.
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There isn't another way around it, but we can make it stick, of course, by getting it in our felt embodied experience on the mat.
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That's the key.
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That will help it stick, but as far as what things are called, you just have to repeat it and go back and refresh it.
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And if you forget something, go back and learn it again.
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And as you do that, it'll connect to the fact that you've learned it before and it'll get easier and easier over time.
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We all have to do that.
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When I.
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Have let's say a patient or get a question about a body part that I don't work with that much.
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I have to go back and refresh as well.
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It's just how it is.
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So don't be discouraged if you keep forgetting things.
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It's a very normal part of the learning process And just keep going back and refreshing over and over and you'll do that as many times as it takes.
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That's just the way it is.
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Exactly.
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and some people do have an easier time memorizing concepts and other people have a more difficult time memorizing concepts, but other skill sets that are still incredibly valuable and important even in learning anatomy.
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For example, if one person is good at remembering the names of things, somebody else might be much better at applying anatomy to their body and the bodies of their students.
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So even if the memorizing part is hard for you, you have a phone in your pocket, almost at all times, where as long as you can understand the basic concepts of how the human body works, when you need to know a specific term and you forget it, you can look it up.
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you know, we're actually quite, privileged.
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as anatomy students that we don't have to lug a huge textbook around with us to help us in those moments that we forget.
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Yeah, that's true.
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It's a good point.
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It's not a big deal to go back and review.
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Exactly.
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With this understanding of how to learn anatomy, any yoga teacher is capable of becoming an anatomy nerd, of becoming somebody who studies anatomy, is fascinated by anatomy, and has anatomy in their back pocket as they teach.
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You have an anatomy education course specifically based around the principles you talked about today.
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Do you want to share more about that right now? Sure, I Do have an anatomy course that is an online membership program specifically designed for yoga teachers, and it's called Anatomy Bites.
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And what that entails is, one anatomy lesson delivered to members each month that they get to study through.
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Pre recorded kind of lecture tutorials, as well as a bunch of embodied practices on the mat to really help integrate those concepts and just one topic per month.
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The whole program consists of 36 different modules and I've designed those.
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Thinking through what are the concepts and the topics that are the most relevant for yogas and the teachers.
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And so that's what I designed the program around and what's really cool about it is that it also includes a community platform where members can talk with each other off of social media and connect and ask questions.
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And and then I do a couple of live Q and a sessions with the members each month so that people can ask any anatomy question they want and have another place to connect with others as well.
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So you can find out more about that at AnatomyBytes.
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com.
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And then for yoga teacher trainings, I also have an anatomy education program that can be delivered inside of teacher trainings, and that's called Embodied Anatomy.
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And you can find out more about that as well at AnatomyBytes.
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com slash Embodied hyphen Anatomy.
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there is an option for both 200 hour trainings and 300 hour trainings on that.
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Each module for the trainer, delivering the program, they have trainer cheat sheets and answers to the quizzes and all of that.
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And certainly direct access to me.
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But.
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it's hard to deliver the anatomy education piece of a yoga teacher training specifically and be able to field all the nuanced questions that come up from trainees.
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And so that's where sometimes people can get a little stumped and then I can support them and they can learn about that nuance.
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So it's a really cool way to not only deliver high quality Anatomy in your training, but also become a better anatomy teacher yourself.
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Yeah.
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If listeners want to find out more about the rest of your work, other than Anatomy Bites, where should they go? My website is libbyheinsley.
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com.
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And you can also find me on Instagram at Libby Heinzli PT.
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Perfect.
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Thanks so much, Libby.
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Thanks for having me.
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anatomy is important to Asana teachers, but not because Asana teachers should be teaching anatomy in their classes, but only because they are speaking about the body in their classes.
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So their anatomy study will be in the background informing what they say and informing how they put together an Asana sequence.
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Hey Libby, welcome back.
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Glad to be back.
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So you've been teaching anatomy for a long time, I have a good bit of experience teaching anatomy too, and through that we have learned some things that really work.
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So we have a plan for what we want to share with yoga teachers who are anatomy challenged but believe that it's important.
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And that's a lot of yoga teachers.
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Agree.
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So before we jump into those tips, let's ask the question for any yoga teacher who might be skeptical about, is this important? Do yoga teachers really need to learn anatomy? Yep, that is the first question on the list.
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And, from my perspective, the answer is yes.
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But, they don't need to learn a whole lot of very, very tedious, advanced anatomy concepts.
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They really just need to know the basics.
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And the reason being is that if they're teaching Asana at all, chances are they're speaking about the body.
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And without a really basic foundation of anatomy understanding, it's really hard to speak about the body accurately.
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So, that's it for this video.
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Even in just basic ways.
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And when we don't speak about the body accurately, then we risk being misleading to our students.
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And as we'll get into later, The basics take a while to learn.
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They take a while to become fluent in.
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So it's not like learning the basics of anatomy is a small project.
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Anatomy is a big project if you take on the whole thing.
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But to take on as much as a yoga teacher needs to learn, it's still a sizable project to understand it well enough to be accurate and to be useful for a yoga teacher.
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Yes.
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Absolutely.
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You know, when I say the basics.
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It's still a lot and it still takes a lot of time and repetition and really ongoing study to keep it fresh in your mind.
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You know, anatomy is like its own little world, its own language.
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And when we don't use it, we really lose it pretty quickly.
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So I think one of the big keys is to keep it consistent and keep it fresh on the mind.
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And a caveat to that is yoga is a big umbrella term.
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So if you only teach meditation and you are not guiding people through a physical practice where they're going to encounter physical limitations, you may not need to learn anatomy.
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If you are only teaching yoga philosophy, Probably you do not need to learn anatomy.
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You certainly can.
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It's a fascinating field of study, but we're really speaking to Asana teachers here.
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Yeah, definitely.
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And I think anatomy is important to Asana teachers, but not because Asana teachers should be teaching anatomy in their classes, but only because they are speaking about the body in their classes.
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So their anatomy study will be in the background informing what they say and informing how they put together an Asana sequence.
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So it's, it's really not to say that Asana teachers should be talking a whole lot about anatomy to their classes per se, but That they should be informed by some foundational anatomy understanding.
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And as much as anatomy informs what they do say, it can also inform what they don't say.
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Because one of the patterns for yoga teachers who are not super confident in understanding anatomy is they talk about the body a lot and maybe even too much because they're not sure what's important and what's not important.
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So this is a really common pattern for newer teachers or even teachers who've been teaching a long time, but there's this sense of anxiety in the background of like, I don't want to hurt my students.
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I don't want to, I really want to do the right thing by them.
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So I'm going to pack everything that I've ever heard about this posture and about the body into my instructions, where the better you understand anatomy, the better you can discern which cues, which instructions are actually useful and helpful and important for this group of students in this moment, versus all of this extra fluff.
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That is going to distract your students, overwhelm them, and not allow them to focus on what is important.
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Definitely, I'd say that might be the most important reason to study anatomy as a yoga teacher is so that you can know For sure that you don't need to say so much And you have a better understanding about why you might say a thing and feel free to leave it out if it's not important to you at the moment.
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But you're exactly right that without that basic foundation and that fluency, I would say, in in the basics, which again is a sizable project on its own.
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But without that fluency, yoga teachers tend to default to, as you said, probably saying too much kind of packing in every little bit they've ever heard about.
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This body part or this posture in a way that's a bit overwhelming, number one, but they also tend to default to safety oriented language.
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And I guess I would say nocebic language, which is a little bit fear based.
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So because they're coming at this from such a, a caring place of caring for their students and not wanting to say the wrong thing and not wanting anyone to get hurt and all those things, but because they don't really have a solid.
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Fluency and anatomy, they default to, well, just in case, I'm going to just say this is about safety, because I actually don't know if it or not.
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And that's a big, big problem.
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And we actually did a whole episode on nocebic language.
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If you're not familiar with the term, nocebic language is language that incites fear and concern.
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It is language with a negative bias.
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I'll add a link to that episode in the show notes in case you want to hear more about what is nocebic language, examples of nocebic language, and why it's important to strip nocebic language out of your teaching habits.
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And speaking of definitions, let's get clear on what we mean when we say the word anatomy The way that we're using anatomy today and the way that most yoga teachers use anatomy is not 100 percent accurate.
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So I just want to name that up front.
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We're using anatomy as a shorthand for knowledge, to mean knowledge about the body.
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But the technical definition of anatomy is the identification of body parts, which is actually, you know, of limited use on its own.
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Anatomy is one slice of knowledge about the body and it's an important slice because without being able to label body parts, we can't talk about the function in a way that we, where we can understand each other.
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We can't talk about the function in an accurate way without having these labels.
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But when we're talking about anatomy, we are also talking about of study such as physiology.
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how the body functions, we're talking about biomechanics, specifically how the musculoskeletal system functions.
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And I just want to be up front that, that we're using anatomy in a slightly inaccurate way before we kind of like go all in with it.
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Yes, good point.
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We are using the term anatomy in kind of a loose way, in a broader way, but you're right, technically anatomy kind of means to break things apart and study them in pieces about the body.
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And, that's part of what we're doing when we study.
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anatomy and biomechanics, but It's important that we put it back together and get to a place where we can kind of understand how the whole thing functions as a unit.
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And that's a little bit more, I would call it biomechanics, kind of the study of forces on the body and motion, almost like a bit of more physics, bringing physics into studying how the body moves and physiology.
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As well, so yeah, we'll kind of go with anatomy as a broad umbrella term for all of that.
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So tell me a little bit about how your relationship to the study of the human body that we're calling anatomy has evolved over time because you and I have both been teaching for about 20 years.
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We did our first teacher training together and we've talked about this before, so I know we were both super overwhelmed and pretty uninterested.
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in the way that anatomy was taught in that teacher training.
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It was taught really as this sort of separate thing from the Asana we were doing.
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It wasn't connected to it.
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It was like, Oh, you need to understand anatomy here.
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Go label these diagrams and But there was never the connection made back to, so then how will that inform the way that we practice Asana? That wasn't done.
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So I'd love to hear about how you made your way back there eventually.
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Yeah, you're right.
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It just in yoga teacher training, it did not seem relevant at all.
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It did seem tedious and overwhelming.
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You know, something we were just having to memorize, like a list of muscles and be able to label them on a diagram.
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I remember studying that list and.
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Drawing lines to muscles and all of that, but it was very separate from an embodied experience of.
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My own body and its parts and how they work together.
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It just was totally separate.
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So how did that change for me? When I, in the early years of teaching yoga, I took a lot of yoga workshops.
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And one of them that I took was with Paul Grilley on anatomy and I guess yin yoga.
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And that was really the weekend that really sparked my interest in anatomy, because I guess the way he taught it just was so intriguing.
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And 1 of the things that we were learning about was this concept of anatomical variation and the way that all of our bodies are slightly different, right? Their anatomies are similar, but, varied among humans and I just found that to be so fascinating and I'd never heard of that before and I thought how silly that we don't know this, you know, as standard yoga teachers and that really sparked my intrigue to learn a whole lot more about anatomy.
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So, I think a couple years later, I ended up in physical therapy school.
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And studied anatomy big time, obviously during that process.
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And I just absolutely loved it.
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And certainly in physical therapy school, it was completely overwhelming, but it was also completely relevant to all the other things I was learning in PT school about, you know, evaluating people and treating people's injuries and stuff like that.
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So it was very much integrated across the whole curriculum.
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So.
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I had a very good reason to stay interested in it and to learn about it.
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And it was very experiential too.
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I mean, I spent a year in the cadaver lab, dissecting a human cadaver in order to learn anatomy.
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So that was very awe inspiring.
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I think that's a big part of it.
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You know, that's when I discovered that the study of anatomy is, well, has the potential to be so much more powerful than, than sterile.
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I mean, obviously if we think about a cadaver lab, it is.
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It's literally sterile, but, holding an actual human's heart in your hands, for example, or, you know, actually investigating the inside of someone's body really inspires a level of reverence about the human body that I had never experienced before.
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And so I think anytime we study.
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Anatomy, that's really what we're doing, you know, when we observe our students in a class, we're like, observing these bodies that have stories that someone lives inside of, their body really tells us their whole life story.
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So, it kind of brought all those layers of relevance and reverence to my experience of anatomy.
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That's beautiful.
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So for the yoga teacher listening who is eager to learn and has maybe tried several times and just nothing's stuck, let's dive into those tips.
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well, the 1st tip Is put on your curiosity goggles, so I like.
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Thinking about curiosity goggles, like, we could actually put on a pair of glasses or goggles that help us see things with an attitude of interest, curiosity, and almost playfulness, because sometimes when we approach the subject of anatomy, it can just feel overwhelming and very intimidating for people and just know that as a yoga teacher, who may have not that much experience with anatomy, You are like most other yoga teachers who also feel intimidated and overwhelmed by it.
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So I think if we can just all come at it with a bit of playfulness and curiosity and, an attitude of, well, let's just see what happens, you know, then it can be a lot more fun.
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Take ourselves a bit less seriously.
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I think that's a really good goal for all of us as humans, but certainly as yoga teachers, we tend towards a little bit of taking ourselves too seriously.
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And, uh, it sort of kills the fun of stuff.
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And I find that working with human bodies is really, it can be really fun.
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They're weird, you know, bodies do really weird stuff.
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They're all of our bodies are different and we get to learn about all their nuances and their quirks and things like that.
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So, taking yourself a bit less seriously, take the pressure off.
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It doesn't have to feel like a huge deal.
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It can actually feel like just a fun project, an investigation, basically.
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think it's important to have the right teacher for that.
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I think it's so, so helpful to have a teacher that takes themselves lightly and that has their own curiosity goggles that they are teaching through maybe part of why so many yoga teachers don't have a great experience learning anatomy is if they are learning from somebody who is like very serious and packing information into a small amount of time without bothering to make it relevant, like that whole piece.
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And we're going to circle back around to again and again, this concept of relevance, All the information in the world is meaningless when it's not relevant.
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So if your teacher doesn't know how to pick and choose which pieces to start with, which pieces to spend time on, and how to approach the exploration of anatomy, then you've been sort of handicapped already.
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Because anatomy is something that does benefit from having a teacher because of the vastness of the information.
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If you try to learn anatomy on your own, the problem is that you're going to be faced with this huge anatomy textbook or this huge body of information and you're not going to know where to start and you're not going to know, when to go back and when to repeat and all of that stuff.
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You really do need some guidance and it's so helpful if your teacher can have that same attitude.
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Definitely.
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You know, it points to a bit of a conundrum in yoga teacher trainings, which is the difficulty of finding a teacher who's actually qualified to teach anatomy and who can really sift through the tedium, all the overwhelming details that aren't actually relevant to a yoga teacher and really hone in on the aspects that are relevant.
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It's hard to find.
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So, the next tip is take the pressure off of yourself as you embark on studying anatomy because learning anatomy does not mean that all of a sudden you're expected to know everything about the body and that all of a sudden you're going to be expected to answer your students little questions after class about why their shoulder hurts.
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These are completely different things and it's really important to know that your study of anatomy is not at all related to your learning how to diagnose and treat anything.
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Those are totally different things.
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So just go ahead and take that completely off the table and I think you'll feel less stress about it.
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the study of anatomy does not prepare you to understand why something hurts in your student's body.
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And then the third tip is to break it into smaller chunks.
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Try to just learn about one part of the body at a time.
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Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to learn every muscle in the body, for example, at the same time.
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Just like, let's take the shoulder, for example.
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Let's just study the shoulder for a while, okay? And learn about the key muscles of the shoulder, the shoulder joint, the ranges of motion that it has available to it, typically.
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What bones form the shoulder joint, all those things, just small chunks, so that it's not overwhelming.
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And, you know, that's essentially how we learn best.
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Any topic we're trying to study is little bits at a time done very frequently.
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And the next tip I would offer is to start with the basics.
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And in some ways, I would stay, say, start with the basics and also stick with the basics.
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Because the basics are a lot, okay? And don't be in a rush to move on from that basic foundation, right? So by basics, I mean knowing what these bones are called, right? The skeletal system, knowing what the bones are called, knowing about the major joints in the body and about how much they generally move and the key muscles in those areas, but those types of basics, which again, that's a lot.
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But we shouldn't be in a rush to move on to something more quote unquote advanced.
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And what I see happen a lot in yoga spaces is this push to get a little bit almost esoteric with anatomy and very way beyond the basics, but without an actual foundation to understand why we would be talking about that.
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You know, it's just, it's got nothing to rest on.
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And what's most important is to come back to the basics.
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So that takes time to really understand.
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And it's important to keep refreshing that because again, if you don't use the concepts or talk about them really frequently, you'll forget them.
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That's how that is.
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And so you just go back and you keep reviewing and refreshing over and over and over.
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And this includes learning the language of anatomy, you know, what movements are called so that you can speak to other people who know about the body and have that shared anatomical language.
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I think it's really important to understand the difference between anatomy as a body of knowledge and yoga as a body of knowledge.
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Because anatomy as a body of knowledge is is Consistent.
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So every medical school is teaching the exact same term for the exact same body part, the exact same section of the bone, And yoga, some people call this pose.
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Chakrasana, and some people call it Urdhva Dhanurasana, right? There's different names, different interpretations, different perspectives.
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And so I think as yoga teachers, we're not used to that when we dive into learning anatomy to understand that, no, actually when we learn an anatomical term, it is going to be consistent across the board.
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So you might, talk to a yoga teacher who took a different teacher training, who practices in a different style.
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And you might try to talk about a certain pose and realize what like, whoa, we're, we have different language for this.
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Even though in theory, we're both speaking yoga.
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That is not the case in anatomy.
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When you learn an anatomical term, you should be able to talk to a surgeon, and they will use the same term for that body part or that type of movement.
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You should be able to talk to a physical therapist.
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They will also use that exact same term.
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So anybody who studies anatomy is going to have a true shared language to talk about the body in a way that's very different from how yoga is taught.
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It's true and it's really refreshing in a way in the yoga sphere to have something like that because we don't need to hold on to, you know, opinions about anatomy.
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Let's say the way that we might hold on to opinions about.
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Approaches to yoga practice or traditions of yoga, right? That are more or less authentic, or whatever the squabble might be.
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Anatomy just is, and it's not personal.
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It's not opinion driven, which is really awesome in my mind.
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And as we continue to study anatomy, we just, that's one reason when we get to stay curious about it, we're just always going to learn more and more.
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And, again, it's not personal, you know, we just, we understand it better as we learn it better.
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All of us are on that same trajectory.
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So I think it makes it more fun.
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Absolutely.
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And I love this next tip is actually that it, is personal.
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Some contradictions in Well, you have a personal version of it, which is your own home, your own body, you happen to be walking around there.
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or wheeling around or however you get around.
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Um, but you happen to be living inside of an anatomy laboratory, anatomy laboratory, you are that.
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And so, anatomy is really self study.
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You get to learn about your own embodied experience and use the anatomy lab of your own self.
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So, that makes it really interesting and then you get to compare that to the experience of other bodies and learn about their similarities and learn about their differences.
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you get to embody the information that you're learning.
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The concepts you're learning, if you don't put those inside your own body and feel them, it's really hard to get it.
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It's really hard for it to seem relevant to you.
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And if it doesn't seem relevant to you, it's hard to care about it.
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So this is actually the overarching theme of this entire episode.
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the main strategy for learning anatomy is context.
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That's right.
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Context is the key.
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If you don't understand why a concept matters, then it's really hard to learn it.
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And again, it loses its meaning in a way.
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So, for everything you're trying to learn in anatomy, you need to make sure you understand why.
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And this hits reality as a yoga teacher when you are in your class and you're speaking about the body, or you're saying something about a posture and telling your students to do it in a certain way to put their body in a certain way.
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And if a student asks, well, why do you want me to do that with my shoulder blades? For example, you gotta have a good answer for them.
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Otherwise.
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You probably shouldn't say it, you know, an anatomical verbal cue that you deliver in class.
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If you're just repeating what someone else has said, and you really don't understand why you're saying it, then it's going to require a little bit more digging.
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It's not to say that you should throw it out forever, but it is to say you should figure out why you might say it.
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And then if that kind of makes sense to you still, then go ahead and use it.
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But now you've got a reason to use it.
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I was just with a group this past weekend, and someone asked me about a really common cue that they have heard.
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This was a teacher training group, so these are people on their way to becoming teachers, and someone asked me, Well, why do I hear this cue whenever my arms are overhead in a yoga posture? And it was a cue about Taking your shoulder blades down and together.
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And I said, well, that's a question that, you know, you need to investigate as you learn a bit more about it, about the body and about how the shoulder blades just move.
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Like, what do they just do when you take your arms overhead? And do we need to overthink that? Do we need a cue about that? I don't know.
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That's a curious question.
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I hope that you'll just ponder it, you know, from now on.
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And be curious about those whys.
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That was the perfect question.
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You know, why, would I say this? we need to figure that out.
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Yeah.
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And until you understand why, don't say it.
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Correct.
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Correct.
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In speaking about context in terms of learning anatomy, I think this is a point where making the comparison to learning a foreign language is really relevant.
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Americans tend to have a, a very difficult time learning foreign languages.
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We can travel a lot and everybody speaks English.
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Why am I doing this? What use is this going to be to me? And if you can find that why, Those are the people who are successful at learning another language.
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But so many Americans struggle to learn another language because they don't see the relevance.
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If you try to learn anatomy without the context baked into your studies, it will not stick.
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Exactly, and all it will seem is, is overwhelming and tedious and you're like, why should I waste my time studying that? But.
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It's not a difficult leap to make, right? That anatomy is relevant if you have a body and you get on your mat with your body.
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So just got to bring the anatomy study there.
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I get it to the mat somehow.
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When you're thinking about the whole of anatomy and what's most relevant for yoga teachers, I would say muscular anatomy is going to be the most relevant for yoga.
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That's what people are often asking about.
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Like what muscle are we contracting in X, Y, Z pose? Or what muscles are we stretching? Those types of questions.
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And that's a great place to start.
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So if you're going to focus on something, focus on muscular anatomy.
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Learn about key muscles in the body.
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Not every single muscle.
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That would be way overwhelming.
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But the key muscles in each, surrounding each joint, let's say, learn about where it attaches, the direction of its fibers.
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If you know those two things, by the way, you can figure out what a muscle does.
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Because when a muscle contracts, its attachment sites move closer together along the direction of its fibers.
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So it kind of gives you the, the building blocks to know the action of a muscle.
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And of course, muscles always work as a team no muscle in the body is on its own and it always has help.
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we can think about it more as like an orchestra, and each muscle being like one instrument in that orchestra and the other piece.
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That's often missing in yoga teachers understanding of the body is orientation to gravity and the way that a muscle works depends on its orientation to gravity.
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We could be in a position, for example, of hip flexion, but our hip flexors are not active in that pose, for example.
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So position and action are very different things and it has everything to do with gravity.
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so the next tip would be to learn in layers.
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Okay, so you can focus on bones, like I mentioned before, naming those some of the key bony landmarks, like this little rough spot, you know, on the tibia where something attaches those bony landmarks and bony prominences serve as muscular attachment sites, usually.
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If we're going to build to muscular.
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anatomy understanding.
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We really have to start with bones and know the parts of the bones because that's where muscles are going to end up attaching.
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So, joints, basically where two bones meet and movement occurs.
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We need to understand how the major joints in the body work, how much They should be expected to move in each direction.
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You know, that's a huge missing piece too, actually, is that many times yoga teachers don't really learn, well, how much rotation is.
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reasonable to expect out of a human hip.
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For example, how much do human hips rotate internally? How much do they rotate externally? How much do they flex? How much do they extend? Et cetera.
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And when we don't know that, we don't know if what we're seeing in our students bodies Is typical, is excessive, is limited.
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We don't know kind of where they're landing and that really impacts how we cue postures.
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So, just a standard classic example of this would be if we're cuing the pigeon pose, or we're observing our students in the pigeon pose and we might say, hey, place your front shin parallel to the top of your mat.
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And if we do that and our pelvis is on the ground, which certainly some people can do that, you well, that is a lot of external rotation in that front hip, and it's actually more than is normal, and we should not expect human hips to rotate that much.
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Now, not to say there aren't outliers who have excess mobility in their hips who can do that, but if I didn't know how much a normal hip rotates, I wouldn't know.
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That it's not reasonable to expect that out of my students, and that's a big gap that we need to close with our anatomy training, I think.
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So, bones, bony landmarks, joints, and how they move, and roughly how much they move, and then, of course, the muscles.
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that cross those joints and create the movements that you just learned about.
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So those would be some layers to focus on.
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You're going to build your knowledge in parts, but over time, the whole picture is going to become integrated.
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And this is a long game.
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It's not going to happen overnight, but it's going to happen over time.
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So just trust that learning things in parts is going to get you to that sense of integration and organization and a broader understanding about the whole, how the whole thing works together.
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And be patient with that.
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And resist the urge to turn anatomy into something esoteric.
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there is a tendency to kind of overlay subtle anatomy or subtle, almost energetic or spiritual concepts onto, Biomechanical reality, and I would resist doing that.
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anatomy is not esoteric, but it is where we live, and it's where our thoughts and our feelings live.
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So, but I, I think it's problematic when we overlay esoteric concepts on actual anatomical structures.
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my recommendation would be to resist the urge to do that, and that also to know that there are many things that we don't know about the body.
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So embrace the not knowing, I always talk about the gap and minding the gap and the gap is the thing that stands between what we know and what we could know.
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And for all of us, there's a huge gap there and, uh, we don't always know how big that gap is, but we know it's there.
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Hopefully we know it's there, you don't know what you don't know.
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So just embrace the fact that.
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nobody knows a whole lot about this body, there's some people who know more than others, but I do think there's some mystery about the human body.
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And so we can all just embrace that mystery and that not knowing and we can just say out loud, I don't know, when someone asks a question that I don't know, I just say, gosh, that's a good question.
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I don't know.
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And I think this attitude towards learning anatomy, where We don't have to have all the answers and it's okay that there is mystery.
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Mystery is acceptable.
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Not knowing is acceptable is very aligned with the philosophy of yoga You're never going to know everything.
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You're never going to be perfect.
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That's not what we're seeking here.
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We are seeking to be present with our embodiment.
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That's right, and embrace the imperfection so the next tip is going to be grab some friends and make this a group effort because learning anatomy is definitely going to be more fun with friends.
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all your group of friends, they have different bodies.
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They have similar bodies, but different nuances, different quirks.
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And so that's going to make it all the more fun as a process to learn.
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And then lastly, repeat the information over and over and over.
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You will definitely forget.
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The anatomy, unless you repeat it over and over again.
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It is all about repetition.
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People often ask me, well, I have such a hard time memorizing things.
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What are some strategies? And I just say, you repeat them over and over and over again.
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There isn't another way around it, but we can make it stick, of course, by getting it in our felt embodied experience on the mat.
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That's the key.
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That will help it stick, but as far as what things are called, you just have to repeat it and go back and refresh it.
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And if you forget something, go back and learn it again.
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And as you do that, it'll connect to the fact that you've learned it before and it'll get easier and easier over time.
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We all have to do that.
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When I.
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Have let's say a patient or get a question about a body part that I don't work with that much.
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I have to go back and refresh as well.
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It's just how it is.
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So don't be discouraged if you keep forgetting things.
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It's a very normal part of the learning process And just keep going back and refreshing over and over and you'll do that as many times as it takes.
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That's just the way it is.
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Exactly.
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and some people do have an easier time memorizing concepts and other people have a more difficult time memorizing concepts, but other skill sets that are still incredibly valuable and important even in learning anatomy.
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For example, if one person is good at remembering the names of things, somebody else might be much better at applying anatomy to their body and the bodies of their students.
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So even if the memorizing part is hard for you, you have a phone in your pocket, almost at all times, where as long as you can understand the basic concepts of how the human body works, when you need to know a specific term and you forget it, you can look it up.
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you know, we're actually quite, privileged.
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as anatomy students that we don't have to lug a huge textbook around with us to help us in those moments that we forget.
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Yeah, that's true.
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It's a good point.
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It's not a big deal to go back and review.
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Exactly.
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With this understanding of how to learn anatomy, any yoga teacher is capable of becoming an anatomy nerd, of becoming somebody who studies anatomy, is fascinated by anatomy, and has anatomy in their back pocket as they teach.
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You have an anatomy education course specifically based around the principles you talked about today.
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Do you want to share more about that right now? Sure, I Do have an anatomy course that is an online membership program specifically designed for yoga teachers, and it's called Anatomy Bites.
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And what that entails is, one anatomy lesson delivered to members each month that they get to study through.
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Pre recorded kind of lecture tutorials, as well as a bunch of embodied practices on the mat to really help integrate those concepts and just one topic per month.
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The whole program consists of 36 different modules and I've designed those.
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Thinking through what are the concepts and the topics that are the most relevant for yogas and the teachers.
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And so that's what I designed the program around and what's really cool about it is that it also includes a community platform where members can talk with each other off of social media and connect and ask questions.
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And and then I do a couple of live Q and a sessions with the members each month so that people can ask any anatomy question they want and have another place to connect with others as well.
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So you can find out more about that at AnatomyBytes.
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com.
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And then for yoga teacher trainings, I also have an anatomy education program that can be delivered inside of teacher trainings, and that's called Embodied Anatomy.
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And you can find out more about that as well at AnatomyBytes.
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com slash Embodied hyphen Anatomy.
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there is an option for both 200 hour trainings and 300 hour trainings on that.
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Each module for the trainer, delivering the program, they have trainer cheat sheets and answers to the quizzes and all of that.
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And certainly direct access to me.
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But.
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it's hard to deliver the anatomy education piece of a yoga teacher training specifically and be able to field all the nuanced questions that come up from trainees.
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And so that's where sometimes people can get a little stumped and then I can support them and they can learn about that nuance.
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So it's a really cool way to not only deliver high quality Anatomy in your training, but also become a better anatomy teacher yourself.
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Yeah.
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If listeners want to find out more about the rest of your work, other than Anatomy Bites, where should they go? My website is libbyheinsley.
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com.
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And you can also find me on Instagram at Libby Heinzli PT.
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Perfect.
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Thanks so much, Libby.
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Thanks for having me.
