Transitions

Total 360 Yoga August 2026 blog

Welcome to the August 2026 blog for Total 360 Yoga. In this blog, we are going to discuss transitions, how they help, blend, and feed our practice as both instructors and participants.

In yoga, the concept of transitions refers to the space between one set of exercises or poses and the next. When you first learn to teach yoga, you build 3 or 4 movements, then 3 or 4 more as you continue up to a peak pose. In the building process, you have to figure out how to get from one block to another in a seamless.

I think of transitions as progressions into something or out of something. For example, you complete the sun salutation and come to tadasana, and then move to the tree pose as the start of your balance sequences. Transitions are important, especially in vinyasa flow, as the

flow is what we seek to keep moving. The question that has to be asked is How do I get from one set of movements to the next set? The answer is to look at the peak pose and the objective for the class. When you consider those things, transitions become easier.

Logic plays a role in transitions. We could simply stand up for the seated legs-out pose to get us into tadasana, or rotate around sphinx, child's pose, runner's stretch, sprinter's stretch, and this gets us to standing.

Most of the time, you will see in my transitions that grounded exercises all occur together, and then we move up to standing. There are occasions where the goal is to move up and down. Balance exercises generally come from a standing posture. Core work or engagement comes from being grounded.

As you gain experience as an instructor, you can move from the idea of having to create transitions and move straight to designing the entire class, where the transitions are built in as you design. For students, the classes seem to be continuous, and motion is not wasted.

Where transitions can become difficult is when new poses are added, and the instructor needs to focus on the cuing of the pose and the transitions within. The fix for this is to do all of the classes you design as your own practice. This way, you can see if something doesn’t work or transition well.

Look at your practice, notice the spots where you are changing, can you see the transitions after reading this blog?