The one module about your body, not theirs
A question I ask teachers, and the answer is almost always the same. When was the last time somebody adjusted you?
You demonstrate fifteen, maybe twenty classes a week. Every demo is another round of loaded shoulder work — down dog, plank, arms overhead, arms overhead again. Nobody counts it as training, because it is work. But your shoulders cannot tell the difference.
Meanwhile nobody corrects you, nobody sequences for you, and nothing in your week balances it out. So the ache arrives, and it settles in the same place it settles for everyone: the top of the shoulders and the back of the neck.
Lifting your arm overhead is not one muscle’s job. The shoulder blade has to rotate upward on the ribcage as the arm rises, and three muscles share that work.
Runs from the base of the skull and the neck down to the outer collarbone and the top of the shoulder blade. Strong, close to the surface, and always willing.
Lower trapezius runs from the mid-back up and out to the shoulder blade. Serratus anterior wraps from the ribs round to its inner edge. Together they keep the blade rotating smoothly and sitting flat against the ribs. Under high repetition they tire first, and their timing slips before their strength does.
When those two fade, the movement still has to happen — so the upper trapezius covers for them. It does its own job and then some, class after class, week after week.
Your upper trapezius is not tight because it is short. It is tight because it is doing three muscles’ work on its own. Stretch it and you get twenty minutes of relief, then it goes straight back to covering — because nothing has changed about who is doing the job.
Before, not after. The point is to get those two muscles switched on and timing properly while you teach — not to console them once the damage is done.
You should feel it low, between the shoulder blades and below them — not up at the top of your shoulders. If your neck tries to join in, you are lifting too high. Go lower. A centimetre done correctly beats a handspan done by the upper trapezius.
When this is not the answer. Numbness, pins and needles, pain running down the arm, weakness in the hand, or pain that wakes you at night is not fatigue and this drill will not help it. That needs looking at properly. Ordinary teaching ache responds to changing who does the work — anything with a nerve flavour to it does not.
One last thing, and it is the reason this module exists. Teachers look after everybody in the room except themselves, and then leave the profession in their fifties with shoulders that gave out. Two minutes before class is not self-indulgence. It is how you are still teaching in twenty years.
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 35Why “Engage Your Core” Fails → Module 6Backbend Prep: Where the Bend Should Come From →