The Abdominal Wall
It is the most repeated cue in yoga, and it is one of the least useful. Not because the intention is wrong — because the sentence doesn’t tell anybody what to do.
Say “engage your core” to a room of twenty and you will get twenty different actions. Some suck the navel in. Some grip the outer abdominals until the ribs clamp down. Most hold their breath. And the ones who most need the help — the ones whose backs hurt — usually grip the hardest and breathe the least.
To cue it better, you have to know what is actually under your hand. There isn’t one core muscle. There are four layers, and they do different jobs.
Runs vertically from the lower ribs and sternum to the pubic bone. Its job is to flex the trunk — to curl you forward. It is strong, it is visible, and it is almost always the one students recruit when you say “core.”
Fibres run diagonally downward and forward, like hands sliding into front pockets. It side-bends the trunk and rotates it to the opposite side. The left external oblique turns you to the right.
Fibres run the other diagonal, roughly at right angles to the layer above it. It side-bends and rotates to the same side. The two obliques work as a pair across the trunk, which is why a twist is never a one-muscle job.
Fibres run horizontally, wrapping the waist. Behind, it attaches into the thoracolumbar fascia, the broad sheet spanning the lower back. When it works, it narrows the waist and puts tension through that sheet. It does not bend you in any direction — which is exactly why students cannot find it by trying harder.
They grip the outer layers. Rectus abdominis and external oblique are strong, familiar and easy to feel. Under a vague instruction, a body reaches for what it knows.
They stop breathing. A hard, gripped abdominal wall leaves the diaphragm nowhere to descend. Watch the room after you give the cue and count how many ribcages stop moving.
They clamp the ribs down. Which draws the sternum towards the pelvis, rounds the upper back, and makes the very thing you were about to ask for — a backbend, an overhead reach — mechanically harder.
So a cue meant to protect the lower back can hand you a student who is stiff, short of breath, and rounder through the chest than before you opened your mouth.
Three replacements. Each one describes an action a body can actually perform, rather than naming a region and hoping.
“Narrow your waist a little, as if a belt were tightening — and keep talking to me.”
The waist image points at the horizontal fibres rather than the vertical ones. “Keep talking” is the safeguard: if they can speak, they have not shut the breath down.
“Ten per cent, not a hundred.”
Most students hear “engage” as “maximum.” Naming a number gives them permission to do less. For holding a shape, low and continuous beats hard and brief.
“Let the breath widen your back ribs while the waist stays gathered.”
This is the one that separates support from bracing. It asks for two things at once — a stable waist and a moving ribcage — which is what the shape actually needs.
Two honest limits. How much any of this changes long-term back pain is still argued over in the research, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What is not in dispute is the short version: gripping hard and holding the breath makes a body worse at the pose in front of it. And if a student has pain that wakes them at night, pain running down a leg, or any numbness, that is not a cueing problem — send them to get it looked at.
Before you put your hands on anybody. Several modules in this library teach hands-on adjustment. Wherever you use one, ask first and keep asking — name what you are about to do and where, get a yes, and make it plain they can decline or stop you at any point without explaining themselves. A student who is new, pregnant, recovering from injury or surgery, or carrying a neck or spine condition gets the shape, the words and the props — not your hands. Adjust to help somebody find a position, never to take them further into one. And anything that looks medical — numbness, pain down a limb, dizziness, breathlessness, chest pain — stops the class and goes to someone qualified to look at it, not to a technique from this library.
Energy Yoga is a library of forty-five modules built the same way — the anatomy underneath the shape, the mistakes we all repeat without noticing, and the cues that change what happens in a body rather than what it looks like.
It is not a certification. No hours, no registry, nothing to add after your name. It is for people who already teach and want to understand what they are doing.
Your other two free modules:
Module 6Backbend Prep: Where the Bend Should Come From → Module 31Neck & Shoulder Care for Teachers Who Demo All Day →