Cooldown Sequence (Long): 44-Min Full-Body Stretch for BJJ

You're kind of lifting your elbow, but you're mostly leaning down towards the foot. If you had something to grab your foot here with a belt or a towel, you could do that, but it's easier to just go sideways and grab whatever you can grab, either your head or your foot or wherever. Get in there as deep as you can now. Let's take five long, nice in and exhales.

That's one. That's two. Three. Four.

And five. Slowly back to center. Take a second. And opposite side.

Sideways first, then reach the arm and grab your air or reach for the ankle or foot. Five breaths. two, three, ganzüchte. Five breaths.

For. Five. three, four, five. Back to center.

Now the perspective of time, guess how long we were here in this seated straddle. Just give it a guess. Five minutes and 20 seconds. When you're aware in what you're doing, time flies like this.

Legs together, either bent knees or straight legs, fold forward and let your chin roll into your chest and just relax inwards for a while. So really release your lower back and your neck. It's much harder to breathe here when our belly is compressing, but give it your best shot to breathe with your back. Keep breathing.

Sit up. That was about two minutes. Turn your toes outwards and a slight bend in the knee and then go a little bit deeper. So no hamstrings now.

It's more the lower back and the butt. So you can go a bit deeper and relax more. One more minute here. and sit up.

Sit on your knees. I usually need to place something under my shins to make the stretch feel better. This is completely optional. Lean back, squeeze your butt, squeeze your belly, bend your elbows, fingers are pointing forward, stretching the thighs and the shoulders without stretching the lower back.

If your knees are sliding apart, you can go deeper, but it might be better for you to keep your knees together. You have to feel that for yourself. If you want to drop down to the elbows, you can do that. I prefer to do it on my to get the shoulder stretch, but keep squeezing your butt.

Ten minutes have passed. Take a couple of breaths. Now on your toes, interlace the fingers behind your back, stretching your toes, shoulders, shoulders, chest, and shoulders. We're going to sit there for about two minutes.

So your toes and your feet are probably going to burn, but it's a good burn. This is one of those poses that if you really despise it, this is the pose that you should be doing often because you do not want super stiff toes and soles. That is going to have a tremendous impact for how you walk and the pressure you load on your knees. You need to have flexible feet to have healthy knees.

Keep stretching the arms, lean your weight back on your heels as much as possible. Don't hold your breath. Please do not crunch up your face. If your arms are falling asleep, no problem.

It's going to feel good when we finally release them. If you're just stretching your big toes, it's okay to separate the heels slightly to get the stretch in the other toes as well. Just a few more seconds now. And release the arms and release the feet.

Next one you can choose if you do it on the hands or the elbows. We're going to do a back bend with the knees in the floor. If you do it on the elbows, Sphinx pose, you can keep your hips on the floor. If you do lazy upward facing dog, fingers out, knees down.

Let your lower back sag. Drop your hips, drop your navel, drop everything down, but keep lifting a bit with the arms. The arms is resisting everything else. Everything else is just hanging down, even your head.

So you're stacking yourself up on top of your arms and then let the whole body except the triceps relax. You're locking your elbows and drooping down. Releasing the rectus abdominis, your six or eight pack, even if it's hidden under there, releasing it is one of the most important things I can do for my body because my, the front of my body is so stiff and it takes at least a minute before I can start releasing for real. Keep engaging the arms, keep dropping your hips.

One more breath. And let's sit back in a squat, butt low. If you want to interlace your fingers behind your head, do that. If you want to just drop your elbows or wrap your arms around your shins, you can do that.

We're going to sit here for a couple of minutes. If you cannot sit with your heels in the ground, I recommend placing your lower back against a wall so that you can kind of slide between the wall and your heels so you can actually drop down low. Only exception that you don't want to do this pose is if you have a meniscus injury where you're compressing the meniscus. You can do it with one leg, but you probably have to find your own way of doing this.

I like placing something between my calves and my hamstrings if I have knee problems. Keep dropping your head. Resist the temptation to look up. Look down and close your eyes for another minute.

Two more breaths. And get into plank pose. Left knee forward, right leg back. Pigeon pose.

Take a few breaths to get into the pose. Feel where your muscles are resisting most and don't try to cheat past that point. Try to stop at that point where you feel your outer thigh or your other hip or your butt resisting and then try to stay exactly there for a couple of breaths. Try to keep that sensation and prop yourself up on your elbows.

Lower your belly down. I really love propping up my forehead on my fists here. You can use a block or you can just hang with your head, but go as deep as you possibly can. Since this is post training, there is the only resistance you have in your muscles now.

It's not that you're cold or that you're stiff from yesterday. This is all your nervous system telling your brain that it's dangerous to go any further, which is of course wrong, but the nervous system cannot be overruled by thinking about it. You need to give your nervous system a chance to be convinced and that takes time. That's why breathing is so important when we want to go deep into stretches, because the only time the body is breathing deeply is when it's relaxed and calm and safe.

So if your gaze is flicking around and if you're distracted, then it's very hard for your stiff nervous system to let go. So nice, smooth, long, deep breaths. A couple of more breaths here. And let's switch sides.

Again, don't fall straight into the other side. Take a few breaths to ease yourself into the pose. The sides are usually different. The second side is usually the worst.

And lower down again. Make sure you're not biting your teeth together. And if you're starting to drift away and starting dreaming, take a big inhale and hold your breath for five seconds. And then relax.

Take another breath. And then let's stand up or sit on your knees. We're going for shoulders, so grab your belt. Arms overhead, go slowly from side to side a couple of times.

And then twisting from side to side. And start to combine them. Rolling motions with your torso and your neck. And slow that motion down.

Most people over 30 that I know have shoulder problems. They're not as severe and as painful as back problems or knee problems. But they're limiting nonetheless, especially in your jiu-jitsu game. And the remedy, in my experience, is just slow movement.

The shoulder is meant to move, but if your shoulder is frozen in one angle or the other, slowly moving the shoulder around that angle is surely going to help unless you have a severe inflammation. In which case you should eat more spinach and dark green leafy vegetables and turmeric, of course. Now release the belt, shake your arms out, and then throw the belt overhead and catch the belt behind you so that you can push one arm up to pull the other arm into a kimura. Take three breaths in the kimura and pull as far as you can without actually provoking serious pain.

Just enough so that you feel like, hmm, I would be starting to consider tapping if I ever got into this position. That's where you want to be. And then pulling the bottom arm so that the top arm goes into americana, a key lock, and pull it just enough so that you feel that, oh, if I were to rapidly pull here I would get injured. Like I have no, I've reached the limit of my range of motion and that's where you want to be.

Let's start going back and forth between those two. You can stand up, you can sit down, you can kneel, just go up and down to the extremes. Get in there as far as you can go. And let's switch sides.

So other arm up, second arm down, start with the kimura. The second side is usually much worse. For me it feels like a troll living under my shoulder blade, just tugging and defending for its life when I do this side. It takes some serious relaxation to not feel that troll fighting my shoulder blade.

And again, pull the bottom arm so that your top arm gets into americana. And start moving between the two. And then relax. And let's finish with a double arm bar.

So grab your belt as narrow as possible and then go behind you with straight elbows until you feel like someone is arm barring you from back mount or something with both arms. Don't round your spine, try to stay here with almost straight arms. If you straighten your arms completely they will fall down so try to bend the arms so that you kind of lock yourself into place where you can't go lower. This should be a big big big stretch for your chest muscles, your pec minor and your pec major.

One more breath. And lay down on your back, belt around your left foot, left foot up, catch as close to the foot as possible, split your legs apart from each other and firstly just let the weight of your arms, so bend your elbow slightly and let the weight of your upper body stretch the whole back chain, both the calf and the hamstring and a little bit up through your butt muscles. We have been doing this pleasurable activity for half an hour already. Can you feel how different you feel right now in the middle of it compared to when you started?

Purposefully changing our breath and our rhythm and our pace changes our whole mindset and our presence. So take another breath and catch both belts with the left hand, relax your right arm and then let your belt fall out to the side. Try to keep your both butts in the ground and if you're falling over to the side, rather release the belt so that your left leg is hovering just above the ground and try to keep your other leg heavy. So you have to release the belt just about enough so that you don't have to work here.

The only thing working is the left forearm to keep the belt if there was any way that we could wrap the belt around our wrist so that we didn't need to grab the belt, we could do that. I'll leave it to you to figure out how. For me it's just best to hold on to the belt but relax everything else. So take another breath and switching sides right leg up, both hands up.

Make sure you're not pulling with the biceps but you're relaxing your shoulder blades down to stretch your hamstrings. So if you want more hamstring intensity don't pull the arms more because that will just lift your hips and that won't really do anything with a hamstring. If you want more hamstring then just push your knee away from you, so push the hamstrings away from your face. That gives you more hamstring stretch.

Most likely you don't need more, you need less so you just need to breathe more and don't fight yourself. If you fight yourself you will always lose. The only time you can win is if you fight someone else and even that is rare but if you fight yourself you will always wind up the loser. So nice steady slow deep in an exhales through your nose and now grab both belts with the right hand let your leg fall out to the side and release the belt just about enough so that it doesn't touch the ground.

If there is a wall in the way be okay with that just appreciate the support of the wall. As soon as you stop trying to make everything perfect everything becomes perfect. No matter what is going on around you, you can feel calm and steady in your breath and in your mind. So so take another breath and release the belt.

Knees together roll over to the left side spinal twist. So Final moments of our long cool down class. Switching the sides, twisting your spine in the opposite direction. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Five more deep breaths. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Happy baby pose.

Catch your feet. And play a bit of frozen open guard. And lay down for Shavasana. Final pose.

Take a deep inhale. And relax. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Now take a deep inhale again, hold at the top and relax. Bend your knees, grab your hamstrings and roll up to seated.

I really much hope that you enjoyed these 42 minutes of cool down. The sensation we're left with now compared to if we would have just jumped in the shower and then straight home. I don't think it's even comparable. And it's with a, what do you call it, it's dual.

I made the reason I made that 13 minute official cool down sequence short version. It's not really genuine because I don't believe that that makes a big difference. I believe you need to take a bigger chunk of time to get into the deeper levels and actually release the tension that is there. 13 minutes is just a, it's a taster there for the people that are so stressed out that they couldn't even try 40 minutes of stretching.

Those of you who did this, those of you who did both clearly feel the difference, right? This is the real thing. The other thing is just like advertising to do more yoga. So this is what I believe in.

This is what I think needs to be done if you want to really get more flexible. It's a nice start to do a couple of minutes here and there, but if you do 43 minutes of deep stretching like this, this is where your results are going to come from. Thank you guys very much for joining me in this class. Please make it a staple of your training at least two, three times a week.

Do this and you will see tremendous results.