Published June 30, 2026 08:08AM
Despite how ubiquitous “all-levels” yoga classes are, they’re not easy to teach. For those of us leading students, it can feel like constantly walking a tightrope between providing enough challenge to interest those who are more experienced and delivering sufficient options to support everyone else.
But there are also challenges for students in “all-levels” classes. Who hasn’t looked around the studio and compared your practice to everyone else’s and felt that you were falling short. It’s all too easy to identify with the performative aspect of yoga and be vividly aware of your own struggles as you watch other students seemingly effortlessly come into a pose that seems impossible to you.
Although teachers can’t always give everyone exactly what they need, you can help cultivate a less comparative and competitive class environment that gives everyone space to practice the way they need. And you do that by reconsidering the effects of the words you speak and actions you take. Following are some of the ways you can remind students that yoga is a personal practice, not a performance, and help them let comparison be a thing of the past.
7 Ways to Lead Less Comparative and Competitive Classes
Some of these are pretty obvious and well-known while others are more subtle and help you bypass habits you didn’t even know you had.
1. Tell Students to Listen to Their Bodies
As you start class, remind everyone that each time you practice, you land on the mat as a slightly different version of yourself. That means you need different things on different days.
Also, explain that the aim of yoga is not to “do all you can do,” but to discern what your body actually needs and then tailor your practice accordingly.
This essential lesson takes only a moment to explain and establishes a clear norm that how anyone shows up in class is less a statement of capacity or ability and more an expression of self-awareness.
2. Offer a Range, Not a Hierarchy, of Options
Even the most foundational yoga poses can present challenges for students—wrist discomfort Downward-Facing Dog, balance issues in High Lunge, limited range of motion in standing forward bends, and so on.
Most teachers already provide workarounds for these situations. But the way we frame them makes a world of difference.
The usual approach is to cue the intended pose and then provide relevant options for students who might struggle with it. Take High Lunge. You might cue the pose and then add, “If you can’t balance here, you can lower your back knee to the mat or take your feet wider apart.”
Whether you intended to or not, you’ve created a paradigm in students’ minds in which High Lunge is the correct pose and anything else is lesser than and a compromise. Framing options as a hierarchy sets some of your students up to “succeed” and others to “fail.”
Instead, what if you sequenced Low Lunge first, perhaps with the added option of padding the back knee for comfort? You could then cue “Stay here if you want to feel more grounded today, or lift your back knee if you prefer to focus more on hip stability.” Now both options appear equally beneficial, just for different reasons.
3. Watch Your Language
You also make (or break) the culture of your class through the use of phrases or words that are so common, you might not realize they have an effect on students.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that in recent years, the word “modification” has been conspicuously absent from many classes when teachers. “Modification” implies a dilution of the intended pose, just as the phrase “full expression” implies that one version of a shape is more complete or perfect than another.
Also, the phrase “if you can’t” creates several issues, including the suggestion that if you can, then you must. But that’s a false dichotomy. There are myriad factors—stress, sleep, focus, energy, mood, etc.—that affect students’ strength, flexibility, and balance on a given day.
Even something as subtle as “just” paints a demeaning picture when used in a phrase such as, “You can just stay here, or….” A word probably intended to convey simplicity can be interpreted as settling and being less than instead of striving.
On the flip side, including the word “today” in your cueing can be a surprisingly empowering word. The previous Low Lunge cue of “stay here if you want to feel more grounded today” frames a student’s decision as the best one for them in that moment instead of a permanent reflection on their ability.
It’s nearly impossible to choose every single word you utter in class with intention. When you talk for a living, you will misspeak at some point. But it’s worth giving your language careful thought. The words you share are at least as resonant with your students as the poses you sequence.
4. Demo Various Options
Possibly the best way to encourage students to choose variations that suit them on that day is regularly modeling that behavior yourself. Not only does this normalize what you’re requesting, it allows you to quickly demonstrate pose or prop options without having to explain them in detail.
Using blocks under your hands in Sun Salutations, for example, can be time-consuming to explain and interfere with the desired rhythmic flow of the sequence. Demonstrating with blocks under your own hands, however, takes little to no extra time at all, provides an option that might work better for visual learners, and makes the flow more accessible.
There’s real power in not even drawing attention to these options. But you can also be more explicit at times.
For example, you can provide context with statements such as, “You could also extend your legs here; I’m keeping mine bent today as it helps me feel my core working more than my legs” in Boat Pose. You could even poke lighthearted fun at the idea that harder always equals better with something like, “You could also extend your legs here. That is, you could, I’ve got nothing to prove so I’m not going to.”
5. Harness Humor
A somewhat unexpected tool in a teacher’s arsenal is humor. Used judiciously, humor can be a potent way to reveal and challenge underlying assumptions.
Many students believe that a pose requiring more strength, flexibility, or stability is more “advanced” than one that seemingly requires less of these. Or that a complex pose is more “challenging” than a simple one.
So every now and again, call out that mistaken belief with a tongue-in-cheek statement in that aligns with your unique voice, along the lines of, “the most advanced version of this pose includes breathing” or “if you really want a challenge here, try smiling.”
6. Acknowledge Anatomy’s Role
As most teachers these days know, a student’s skeletal proportions have as much, if not more, effect on their outward appearance in yoga poses as their skill. For example arm length compared to torso width dictates how easily anyone will find a bind in Extended Side Angle (Utthita Parsvakonasana). And the length of torso compared to the length of thigh bone, not to mention the bony range of motion in the ankle, determines how easily someone can sit in a yogi squat (Malasana). So why not clue students in?
Your classes don’t need to become lessons in comparative anatomy. But even a throwaway reference to anatomical variations can make students aware that skill is not the only factor at play in their practice.
For example, when offering the option of an arm bind, you could add something like, “Don’t take it personally if your hands don’t meet, your arm length compared to the shape of your torso has a major role here.” Or when cueing students into Squat, you could say, “If, through some trick of your anatomy, your heels rest on the floor here, great. If not, you can roll the back of your mat and use it as a wedge under your heels or bring your hands to mat to help you feel more stable.”
7. Choose Class Themes With Care
Finally, consider that the way you teach begins before you even set foot in the studio through the themes and sequences you compile.
A sequence focused purely on building to a peak pose, such as Dancer Pose (Natarajasana) will only allow some of your students to feel successful. You can, of course, offer options—holding a wall for added stability, using a strap to help you catch the lifted foot. But by theming around an external shape, the path you offer students toward accomplishment is fairly narrow and inevitably some students will be left behind.
Focusing on internal states or actions, however, allows every student to work toward the same aim regardless of the outward shapes they make. For example, the exact sequence you use to build to Dancers Pose could instead be themed around the action of steadying your breath. The challenge then shifts from balancing on one foot while holding the other, to something more nuanced. For example, “Can you breathe steadily, no matter whether you’re working hard or taking rest?” Or, “Can you find a version of this shape that allows your breathing to be smooth and steady?”
The most empowering thing about this approach might actually be its transferability. There are only so many ways you can use the outward skills you learn in Dancer’s Pose in your everyday life, but these subtle internal focuses and actions apply to a limitless array of real-world scenarios.
