How Hands-On Yoga Assists Regulate the Nervous System — and Why Yoga Teachers Should Know How to Offer Them
- Kiara Armstrong, ERYT500 YACEP CMT
- 2d
- 6 min read
I recently joined Petra Brunnbauer on The Jōrni Podcast to talk about something I believe every yoga teacher needs in their toolkit: hands-on yoga assists. Not the casual, untrained kind — the kind that are anatomy-based, consent-centered, and biomechanically precise. The kind that don’t just help a student hold a pose better, but actually shift their nervous system while they’re in it.
What started as a conversation about nervous system regulation turned into something more personal: my own story of misdiagnosis, a decade of the wrong treatment, and the somatic tool that finally moved the needle on my healing. That tool was touch. And it’s the same tool that became the foundation of the Rubber Band Method®.
Here’s what we covered — and why it matters for how you teach.
The Personal Journey Behind the Methodology
I’ve been practicing yoga for 25 years, teaching for 15, and I hold a California massage therapy certification. But the experience that shaped how I think about hands-on yoga assists more than any credential is one I rarely put on a bio: I spent nearly a decade being treated for the wrong diagnosis.
In my early twenties I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Complex PTSD and bipolar can present similarly, and no one paused to question it. Medications were stacked, increased, rotated. I temporarily lost my vision from side effects. I experienced episodes of full-body paralysis. When nothing worked, the next recommendation was electroconvulsive shock therapy — and I was so broken down at that point I was ready to agree.
A friend urged me to get one more opinion. I did. A specialist heard my story and said: “Sweetheart, you don’t have bipolar disorder. You have Complex PTSD.” I fainted. Literally. Because for the first time in nearly a decade, I heard something that felt like it could actually be healed.
I took a sabbatical, left pharmaceuticals behind, and committed fully to somatic healing. I explored just about everything. And through it all, one thing kept rising above the rest: safe, consensual touch from another person. That’s what eventually became the heart of my yoga assist training.
Why Touch Is One of the Most Powerful Tools for Nervous System Regulation in Yoga
Safe, consensual human touch is one of the most well-researched nervous system regulators available to us. The science is consistent: physical contact from another person measurably lowers cortisol, reduces anxiety and depression, diminishes felt pain, and — this is the part that stops people — reduces future instances of all of those things. It doesn’t just help in the moment. Regular touch builds nervous system resilience over time.
Two research findings I return to often as I teach yoga assist training:
First, it’s not about duration — it’s about frequency. You don’t need long sessions to get the benefit. Brief, regular contact is what the body responds to. A yoga class with hands-on assists offered two or three times a week delivers exactly that.
Second, it doesn’t have to come from someone intimate or close to you. Research shows the health benefits of touch are not dependent on relationship. They occur with a yoga teacher just as they do with a partner. That means the yoga studio — when teachers are trained to offer touch skillfully and safely — is a genuinely therapeutic space.
We are in what the U.S. Surgeon General has called a loneliness epidemic. Loneliness has been linked to the same health risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day — heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression. And if someone is lonely, they are almost certainly touch-starved too. In most Western cultures, the options for non-intimate, non-clinical touch are very limited. A well-trained yoga teacher offering consent-based yoga assists is one of the few accessible entry points to that kind of connection.
Yoga Assists and Adjustments Are Not the Same Thing
This is one of the most important distinctions in the Rubber Band Method®, and one that most yoga teacher training programs never address. Hands-on yoga assists and adjustments are distinct techniques with different purposes, and using them interchangeably is one of the most common errors I see in the field.
An adjustment uses light tactile guidance to correct or refine a pose. It changes what the student is doing. The goal is improved alignment, safety, or stability — and through that correction, the student builds proprioceptive awareness. For someone who is disembodied from trauma or chronic stress, that feedback — “oh, that’s where my hip is, that’s how this is supposed to feel” — is genuinely powerful re-embodiment work.
An assist is applied to a pose that is already biomechanically sound. It doesn’t change the pose — it enhances the experience of it. A neck traction in Savasana. Firm, receptive pressure along the upper chest. Thumb palpation along the arch of the foot. These techniques bring a student out of their head and into their body. They create grounding. They make the pose feel good in a way that lands in the nervous system, not just the muscles.
Knowing which one to offer, and when, is at the core of what I teach in my yoga assist training. And none of it works without the right consent framework around it.
Consent-Based Yoga Assists: Why Agency Is the Foundation, Not a Formality
Trauma, at its core, is what happens when the nervous system experiences a loss of safety and agency. Which means that offering hands-on touch in a yoga class without a clear, structured consent protocol isn’t just an ethical oversight — it can actively retraumatize students who are already working to heal.
In the Rubber Band Method®, consent isn’t a waiver or a quick show of hands at the start of class. It’s built deliberately into the class structure: it’s clear about what students are agreeing to, it’s private so no one feels peer-pressured, and it’s revocable at any point. Students always have the right to change their answer mid-class, no explanation required, and that right is explicitly stated.
That structure is what makes trauma-informed yoga assists possible. When a student knows their agency is fully honored, something shifts. The nervous system registers safety. And safety is exactly the condition under which touch becomes therapeutic rather than threatening.
This is especially important for teachers to understand: students who have a trauma history are often the ones who look the most relaxed or compliant in a yoga class. They’ve learned to comply. Consent-based practice gives them a genuine choice, possibly for the first time in a touch context.
*And this isn't a precautionary nicety reserved for trauma-informed classes. Research is clear: undisclosed trauma around touch is statistically present in virtually every room — corporate wellness sessions, beginner workshops, Tuesday evening flows. We never assume otherwise in RBM, which is why consent isn't an add-on to the methodology — it is the methodology.If you want to go deeper on the research behind why consent is non-negotiable in any yoga space, I’ve written about it at length here.
Tactile Awareness: Reading the Body Through Touch
The other core principle in anatomy-based yoga teaching is something I call tactile awareness — and it’s the skill that the name “Rubber Band Method®” comes from.
No two students’ bodies are the same. A technique that feels supportive on one person can feel like too much on another. Yoga teachers who offer hands-on assists without tactile awareness are essentially applying the same pressure to every body they touch — which is how assists become injuries.
When you learn to truly listen through your hands, what you feel in a student’s tissues is remarkably like stretching a rubber band. There’s give, and then there’s a bound — the point where the body communicates that it’s reached its limit. Every body has a different bound. Every student is their own rubber band.
Teaching yoga teachers to feel that bound — to adapt every assist to the individual body in front of them rather than applying a cookie-cutter technique — is the foundation of the Rubber Band Method® and what distinguishes it from most hands-on yoga assist training available today.
Ready to Learn How to Offer Hands-On Yoga Assists?
Whether you’ve never offered a hands-on assist in your teaching or you’ve been offering them for years and want to refine your technique, the Rubber Band Method® gives you a clear, anatomy-based framework to do it safely and skillfully.
Visit rubberbandmethod.com to grab a free hands-on assist technique you can start using immediately, plus 15% off any on-demand course.
Or pick up my book, Hands-On Yoga Assists: A Teacher’s Guide to the Rubber Band Method®, available on Amazon.
You can start offering hands-on assists safely, confide
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