Backbend & Inversion: Teddy Bear to Headstand Flow

And if the nerve is tight, or sorry, if the nerve's got a compression on it, you know, I'll say like a whatever injury, muscle, I mean, a muscle could do it, but more likely to be like a disc herniation or something like that, or even if you're older, some narrowing through the area where the nerve comes out. If that's compromised, and then you put a stretch on something, it actually puts more torque on that load to the nerve, and you're gonna get worse symptoms down the leg. So please definitely do not do the segmental rollback, or this one. If there's any kind of pain, specifically, there may be pain from like the muscles being weak, especially in an injury, but you never should have reproduction of symptoms, you know, down the leg, or sharp lancing pain, definitely don't try to push through those at all.

And it goes without saying, but people start to push themselves a little bit too early, I find, in jujitsu, when they have nerve injuries. So anyways, let's get back to what we were talking about here, is again, we're doing the opposite of the segmental rollback, which is actually a headstand. And once I started doing headstands, I found my back pain went away completely. Now this is purely anecdotal, and this is specific to my back, but I always found like my back had a little bit of weakness to it, and it was really hard to challenge it.

And again, I don't like deadlifts, I don't feel like safe in that position. I do light ones, but I can't get heavy. And so I've sort of turned more into doing bodyweight style exercises, which is why I'm such a fan of yoga for BJJ. All the things in body movements, all the way down to like animal flow and headstands, and all these kinds of things are so important, especially for jujitsu practitioners, that it should almost be mandatory as a warmup, okay?

So and again, if you're looking for warmups, make sure you go down to the yoga for BJJ warmups, videos and stuff like that. And if you have any questions, you can always ask. Okay, let's get to the headstand. So again, some people will jump right into a headstand, and I personally think the goal here is not necessarily the headstand.

I'm just gonna take my glasses off here. So the goal is not the headstand. The goal is actually again, going into a headstand and then back out of it. So I wanna try and get into a teddy bear headstand.

And again, the prerequisite for this obviously is that my knees can touch my elbows. I like to think that you can do this if you're doing jujitsu, but you never know. So if you can't bring your knees to your elbows, this is gonna be a lot harder for you. And then we need to work on maybe some of the other flexibility before this.

So we wanna create a tripod with our head and our hands. And I wanna put my head down and then notice my knee is resting on my elbow. And then I bring up the other one. So just this position of going from feet to head and feet to head is very important because you need to feel comfortable being on your head.

And you really wanna think about being on the back of your head, not your forehead, which is gonna pitch your head back and it's gonna hurt. So don't do it. Anyway, so we're gonna be here. We create the triangle with our head and our hands.

And from here, I'm gonna tighten up my core and lift my hips up. And if it's your first time, you might only just get your knees off your elbows and back down. And that's totally cool. And if you wanna go farther, you go farther, farther, farther, and you're gonna feel this sort of balance point.

And I'm trying to sort of pitch myself forward and backwards using my head and my hands. And if you're really unsure with that, use the wall, right? So again, we go here and I create the triangle and I come on up and I'm gonna use the wall to help control me. And then I feel safe bringing my feet all the way down and all the way back up and all the way down.

And I'm gonna touch the floor and then come all the way back up. If you wanna make it harder, you can add in feet. So my legs are straight-ish and I'm gonna come down and back up and come down and back up. But again, the most important thing here is to make sure that you are stable at your head triangle.

So between your hands and your head, you're engaging your core and you're either bringing your knees, which are bent towards my chest to touch the ground, or I'm straightening my back to come up into that nice, strong neutral position. And you can also work on rotations through the hips and stuff like that. And that's more advanced. What I really wanna see out of this is people get comfortable doing the segmental rollback and then doing the opposite and getting comfortable doing some form of a raise and lower to a headstand, okay?

Beyond that, we're gonna talk about, in the next little bit here, about how to properly strengthen the hips because that's the last piece of the puzzle, other than hip mobility, which is a long series of stuff that we'll get to right after that as well. All right, I hope you enjoyed it. Give it a try, let me know what you think. Have a great day.