How Having Learned to Teach Yoga is Helping Me Better Learn Coding

Entrepreneurship Journal Day5: Importance of the shape of a big picture

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Sitting here today, I am mainly thinking, of course, yoga and coding are totally the same.

But jumping out of my skin and imagining sitting where you are, I thought, ok, maybe it’s not that obvious. So let me explain.

The shape of a yoga class

In the title picture above, there contains 3 blocks of drawings I made. (Sorry, stickman is all I know how to draw, and even that I guess, please excuse the lack of artistic flair.) But there is a point.

The 3 blocks here are titled: 1) Warm-Up sequence, 2) Standing sequence, and 3) Cool-Down sequence.

I hope it’s reasonable to assume we have all done yoga and understand how amazing and amazingly important yoga is. I went through 350 hours of training to become a yoga teacher over the last 2 years. What’s different about doing vs teaching yoga though, is in teaching, there is no following along or copying. You learn the sequence and you teach it.

In my first 200 hours of teacher training, the result we had to achieve as trainee teachers was to instruct a pre-made 60 minute sequence to a dummy student. To achieve this result, there are quite a few things one has to do almost simultaneously: remember the sequence, show the poses, instruct the poses, instruct the breathing, the alignment, the sensation, and the reason. And god forbid, remember your left vs right in a mirroring situation!

To throw us in the deep end, in a very early lesson, we were asked to teach the sequence after just having been introduced to it. When it was my turn to go up in front of the class, I could not remember a thing I had to do, and had to ask for a pass.

Subsequently, I worked hard at learning the sequence. Imagine all the poses in the title picture, and multiply by 3 (adding in salutations, floors, inversions, and longer sequences in each block). I would write out over 10 A4 pages of detailed instructions, think through and practice one pose at a time, then string one detailed pose to the next, sequentially from beginning to end. And I would reiterate the whole 10 pages again and again. It was very slow and totally painful.

One day, I approached another trainee teacher who was doing much better than me, and asked her, “How do you remember everything you gotta do?” I told her the pages of written notes I used.

She said, “Oh my god, Nicole. Nobody does that.” I said, “What do you mean? You mean you don’t write notes?” She said, “No.” And I had to laugh. She went on to say something like, “I learn the shape of the whole thing first, then I add the details where I feel like it.”

I went home and tried out her process. I let go of the details of the poses, and simply repeated the whole sequence many times. That means, I flew through and focused only on getting the entire shape of all 3 (x3) blocks of poses first, maybe like running it through 20 times in a row, before I would allow myself to think about the details of any particularly pose. When I did get to the details, my brain felt available and freed to take up new information. It was much better. I learned faster and it was more pleasant. And I could see then why some poses deserve more attention and detail, while some others less.

In learning a skill, I realised, the details wouldn’t make sense, and would be meaningless and hard to practice, unless we have the shape / roadmap / overview of the whole thing first. And this applies, whether it’s yoga, or coding.

So, what have I learned today, about the bigger picture of app development?

As mentioned, I am following Angela Yu’s iOS app development course on Udemy. In the last few days I went through 10% of the course, and made two rudimentary first apps.

Today, I spent 2 hours going through the “shape” of the entire course.

I watched all the introductory videos of all 36 chapters. And it was in the final 2 chapters I learned the much bigger picture of app development as a thing. And coding becomes only the last, and a small, albeit important part of it. It was truly useful to know these early. They make me now think much more widely about what I want to do everyday ;-)

The most important big picture shapes in learning coding and creating apps turn out to be:

1. Elon Musk would concur about the yoga analogy. His analogy is a “semantic tree”, where what I refer to as the shape of yoga, he refers to as the trunk of a tree.
2. The most important things about app development, is a higher quality lower risk route: validate market / idea → design flow wireframe mockup prototype → plan monetisation → code → marketing → raise funding. It is NOT the pervasive route of: create prototype → raise funding → build team → validate market.
3. “Build it and they will come” is a fallacy and a high risk route. Read the book The Lean Startup. There is a thing called an App Zombie and an App Poverty Line. And we’d be wise to know them and avoid them. No matter how great your app idea is, always protect the downside risk by choosing a better route at the beginning.
4. A superior way to having your app coded, after considering various forms and case studies of outsourcing, is to code the app yourself. It gives you the cost economy, the experience, and the skills to sustain and expand all your future options. And learning to code and coding is getting easier with commitments from players like Apple and Google, and platforms like Udemy.
5. At an end-of-course Ask-Me-Anything session, Angela also had a sound piece of advice for the bigger picture: “Go for courses that have some breadth, when you get out into the real world whether you’re going to get a job, or … work in startup, or be a founder, the thing you realise is that getting an A or … 100% on a test don’t matter as much as you think. … The things that matter in your life are your breadth of knowledge. … Don’t aim for perfection in your grades, just try to meet as many people as you can and have a great experience and learn a large breadth of knowledge, rather than trying to memorise everything. That was certainly something I was tempted towards and fell down on.” A valuable reminder for the many like-minded learners at the beginning of their learning journey.
6. There are non-coding lessons I can listen to while picking out my grocery, it’s not as desk bound as thought. There are also lessons I now know I can possibly spend less time on as I have prior knowledge. So the course at once now feels interesting and doable. Wouldn’t have realised these without getting the “shape” of the full course first.

Above all, I scanned through all the apps I would make with this course. And I simply can NOT wait, can NOT.

There will be dice apps, in 2D and 3D, timer app, quiz app, calculator app, weather app, chat app, todo list app, and machine learning apps. So exciting! Look forward to my next few journals.

A relevant side story about yoga, in the even bigger picture

So why did I get into yoga teaching? Believe it or not, it was to due to coding.

I mentioned in a journal 2 days ago, that 2 years ago, I had a stint at app development using React Native. I picked a Udemy course and focused so hard at getting through it, I did pretty much nothing outside of coding for a couple of weeks over New Years.

My dad, saw it. And he said to me, “If I don’t warn you about intervertebral disc hernia right now, I will regret it for the rest of my life. Do you know what intervertebral disc hernia is?” I said, “No.” Thank god for Dad.

Well for anyone with a sedentary career, one that involves sitting down a lot, that probably means you, yes you reading this, you, look that up, please =)

Although I am not a medical doctor, I think the pathology of this condition is not hard to understand. The health of our spine depends on the health of our spinal cells. The metabolic process of the spinal cells however is not supported by blood flows, there are no blood vessels in the spine. It is supported instead by spinal fluids, which in turn depend on us moving the spine to flow.

Stagnant spinal fluids cause poor spinal cell health. Overtime, when unhealthy cells become too weak to support weight of the body, the intervertebral discs rupture, impinge on the nerve cells in the spine, and cause a great deal of pain, which is hard to remedy without extremely invasive surgeries. It is a common problem as we age.

When my Dad told me this, it wasn’t the first time in life I was feeling lower back pains. So, yoga is divine and important. What better way to learn than to teach.

Hope this story reminds you and me to hydrate well, take regular breaks, and move our body, throughout our very productive coding, or writing, binge sessions =) Our body will love us for it.

(P.S. Any medical doctor who sees the need to correct any misunderstandings shown here, please feel free.)