In the last essay on somatic tools, we looked at music through the lens of the autonomic nervous system. We explored how rhythm can influence physiology through entrainment, why music can support both activation and recovery, and how a thoughtfully chosen playlist becomes more than background noise. It becomes another somatic tool in your teaching toolkit.
But understanding why music matters is only half the equation. The more practical question is this: How do you actually create a playlist that supports the arc of a yoga class? If you’ve ever wondered where to begin, or why some playlists seem to carry a class effortlessly while others don’t, here’s a simple framework I think you’ll find useful.
Give Me the Beat
Years ago, I had a fitness instructor who’d once run collegiate track for USC, Division I, the real deal. He used to harp on me constantly about running with music. “Whether you realize it or not,” he’d say, “the music is setting your tempo.” I brushed it off the first few times. Then I actually paid attention. An up-tempo beat and my legs just wanted to move faster. A slower one and I’d naturally settle into an easier pace. He was right, and it wasn’t subtle once I started noticing it.
It turns out this effect is precise enough to build a workout around. Look up “Zone 3 running playlists” sometime and you’ll find entire libraries of music organized by beats per minute, engineered to help produce a specific physiological output. Not a vibe. An output. Runners aren’t choosing songs because they sound cool. They’re choosing songs because the tempo will, with a fair degree of predictability, become their tempo.
From a nervous system perspective, tempo becomes another environmental cue. Just as lighting, temperature, and the pace of your verbal cues influence a room, music quietly shapes the balance between mobilization and recovery throughout practice. If you’ve ever noticed a class shift when a track changes (bodies picking up, or softening, without you cueing anything different), that’s not a coincidence. That’s likely rhythmic entrainment at work. And if you’ve been building playlists on instinct alone, here’s a way to add even more intention to it.
A Nervous System Lens on Sequencing
You’ve heard me talk about thoughtful class sequencing in other posts because a well-built class tends to follow an arc. I think of it as a nervous system arc. It gently encourages sympathetic activation when effort is required, then creates the conditions for parasympathetic recovery as the practice winds down. The goal isn’t simply relaxation. It’s helping students practice moving fluidly between activation and recovery, what we might call autonomic flexibility. (If you want to learn more about that idea, see The Stress Continuum.)
The sequence builds, it peaks, it comes back down. Drawn out, it looks something like a bell curve. This is obvious in hatha and vinyasa, but it holds true even in yin and restorative classes, where some postures ask more of the nervous system than others even when nothing about the class reads as strenuous. Sometimes the effort is just in getting into the pose.
I build classes along six phases:
Centering: helping the student arrive
Warming: accessible postures, nothing too demanding yet, but starting to bring the student into the practice
Heating: more stimulating, more challenging, pointedly preparing the student for where the class is headed
Peak: the most demanding pose, or whatever the focus of the class happens to be (it might not even be a pose; it could be a breathwork practice)
Cooling: bringing the student back down, reactivating recovery
Integration: savasana, which the student should feel genuinely ready for by the time they arrive there
Here’s the part that matters for your playlist: if you consistently teach this arc, you can build music around the arc itself rather than around any single class. That playlist becomes reusable. You’re not starting from scratch every time you teach.
Matching Tempo to Phase
In centering, you want music that invites the student inward, physically and mentally, as they make their way to the mat. Tempo can begin to lift here, but gently. You’re not hammering anyone with intensity this early.
Warming and cooling often occupy similar tempo territory. Think of them as the middle gears of your playlist. During warming, those mid-tempo tracks gently encourage students toward greater movement. During cooling, a similar tempo supports the transition back toward rest without feeling abrupt. These are the songs that comfortably accompany a cat-cow flow without making anyone feel rushed.
Heating is where you can turn it up. More propulsive beats, quicker tempos, music that invites the nervous system toward greater mobilization. This is often in the middle part of class and encourages the students to get up from the mat and find their feet, really start to tap into their dristi or focus.
Peak is yours to decide. It might be a power song that matches the intensity of the pose or krama (a short wave of postures). It might, just as easily, be the moment you start pulling things back down so the student can actually be present in natarajasana instead of just holding it.
From peak, the music starts to descend, signaling to the parasympathetic branch that the effort is done and recovery is available. We move through cooling and then integration. And savasana? You already know what goes there. Chill. All the way down.
A simple gut-check as you build: does this track make you want to dance? It probably belongs in heating, not right before savasana. Does it feel deeply, unmistakably chill? That’s your centering or integration music. Anything that sits comfortably in between is your warming and cooling territory.
And side note, if you’re still thinking this doesn’t apply to Restorative or Yin, just listen to a Garth Stevenson album all the way through and ask your nervous system if each song evokes the same sense of intensity or calm.
Why This Isn’t Just a Mood
Two mechanisms are doing the real work here, and they’re worth knowing by name.
The first is rhythmic entrainment. Human nervous systems often synchronize movement, and sometimes aspects of physiology, to steady external rhythms. It’s why people unconsciously tap a foot, walk in time with music, or settle into the cadence of another person’s breathing. A faster beat tends to encourage faster movement; a slower beat tends to invite slowing. We don’t have to decide to do this. Much of it happens automatically.
The second is the vagus nerve’s relationship to sound more broadly. Sound can play a real role in the nervous system’s sense of safety, which means volume matters just as much as tempo, both the volume of the music and the volume of your voice if you’re speaking over it.
Tempo isn’t the only thing shaping the room. Volume matters. Musical complexity matters. Lyrics can capture attention while instrumental music often fades more easily into the background. Emotional tone matters too. A slow song in a minor key evokes something very different from a slow song in a major key, even if the tempo is identical. The nervous system is responding to the entire sensory experience, not just the beats per minute.
Pro tip:
If you want a source for music that reliably evokes feeling, try Shazaming your favorite films and shows next time something moves you. Composers for television and film are choosing those tracks deliberately, for exactly that effect, and it’s a genuinely useful place to go looking.
Try It
Next time you build a class playlist, build it around the nervous system arc rather than around a single class or mood. Once the tempo structure matches your sequencing, you may find the same playlist works for more classes than you expected, because the nervous system arc you’re teaching to doesn’t change nearly as much as the poses do.
If you try this, I’d love to know: do you already think about the nervous system when you build a playlist? And have you found a playlist that works across more than one class?
Great teaching isn’t just about sequencing poses. It’s about understanding the physiology of the people practicing them. Learn more in Hands-On Yoga Assists: A Teacher’s Guide to the Rubber Band Method®, where nervous system science meets practical application for yoga teachers.
