Competency A4 asks a candidate to identify these in a live body. So here they are in full, before you enroll — because a standard that references principles it won't publish isn't a standard.
A teacher watching twenty people move cannot run a twenty-five-item checklist. They get about six things, held simultaneously, in real time — so the useful number of principles is the number a human can actually carry into a room. Everything below is written to be usable while a class is already moving, not to be recited in an exam.
These are an editorial choice, not a received tradition. Every school orders alignment differently. We're publishing ours so it can be argued with.
Establish what is touching the ground before arranging anything above it. Most visible errors in a pose belong to the base, and cannot be fixed higher up — you can cue a collapsing Warrior II at the shoulders all day and nothing will change, because the problem is the back foot.
Teaching consequence: your first cue in any standing pose addresses the feet, and your first cue in any seated pose addresses the sit bones. Always. Even when something further up looks more urgent.
What it rules out: starting a correction at the most visible error.
A joint tolerates load well when the load passes through it, and poorly when it passes across it. This is the whole reason the front knee tracks over the ankle in Warrior II, and the whole reason a collapsed wrist in Plank starts hurting by week three rather than on day one.
Teaching consequence: you're watching for the direction of load, not the prettiness of the line. A knee drifting two inches inward matters; a slightly low back arm does not.
What it rules out: treating every deviation from the photograph as equally important.
▶ This one is taught in the free unit — six minutes, Warrior IICreate length in the spine before adding range anywhere. A deeper shape bought by shortening the spine is a worse pose than a shallower one, every single time — and the deeper version is the one a student will be proud of, which is exactly why it needs a teacher.
Teaching consequence: "lengthen, then fold" is an ordering instruction, not a poetic one. Say it in that order and mean it.
What it rules out: rewarding depth in a room, verbally or with your attention.
If a student cannot breathe smoothly in a shape, the shape is past their current range — regardless of how it looks from the front of the room. Breath is the most reliable safety instrument available to a teacher who cannot feel the student's body, and it's the only one that still works in an online class where you cannot make a hands-on adjustment.
Teaching consequence: you cue breath as a diagnostic, not as ambience. "If you can't breathe here, come out" is an instruction with a decision attached.
What it rules out: holding a room in a shape because the timer hasn't finished.
Bodies are asymmetric. Leg lengths differ, femurs are torsioned differently left to right, scoliosis is common, and old injuries leave permanent asymmetries. The symmetrical picture is a reference point for observation — it is not an outcome to enforce on a person.
Teaching consequence: you are looking for unloaded or unsafe, not for different from the photograph. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is teaching.
What it rules out: "adjusting" a student into a shape their skeleton does not make.
A long-femur body and a short-femur body cannot make the same Warrior II, and neither of them is doing it wrong. The cue "step about a leg's length apart" is 107 cm on a five-foot body and 136 cm on a six-foot-four one — so a fixed stance number, taught to a whole room, makes most of the room wrong on purpose.
Teaching consequence: cues are stated as relationships to the student's own body, never as absolute distances or angles.
What it rules out: a single filmed demonstration standing in for every body in the room. It is also why this program renders every pose at the candidate's own proportions.
▶ See the same pose at five heights, with the numbersCompetency A4 is Observed. You don't write these down in an exam — a named faculty reviewer watches your recorded practicum and marks whether you applied them to the actual bodies in your actual room. Naming all six and using none of them is a fail.
The two marked above are demonstrated in the free unit and the motion lab, so you can see what applying them looks like before you pay anything.
Version 0.1. These six were drafted by Yoga.org and are pending review by our faculty — no reviewer has approved them, and we're not going to put a name on this page until one has. When they're approved, this page will carry the reviewer's name and the date, and every subsequent change will be logged here.
The open question we're asking reviewers, in public because it's the honest way to do this: are these the right six, and is number five the one to cut or the one to defend?
If you teach and you think one of these is wrong, we'd genuinely like to hear it — raj@yoga.org.
