Crow & Chair Pose Tutorial for BJJ: 9-Min (Day 4)

The essential thing is the connection with your legs, your hips and your center. That's the important thing. So I want your focus to be in this area. What you do with your arms is non-essential.

So this is how it looks. Instead of just lifting your arms like this, we lift the arms and bend the knees at the same time. The deeper you can go the better, but when you go all the way down then you're moving into other things. So go as deep as you can, optimally get to 90 degrees with your butt really far back.

That's it for chair pose. Crow pose, the first arm balance and really the mother of handstand crow pose. So first you need to be able to squat down to more than 90 degrees. So if you have bad knees, bad ankles, stiff Achilles tendons, it's going to be hard to go really deep like I'm doing now.

I can sit with my heels down and my hips down and that has a lot to do with calf flexibility, but even more with the mobility in my joints, in my ankles. So maybe you will never get your heels down. Let's talk about that in another video. Just squat down as deep as you can, place your hands down.

Now lift your butt, bend your elbows and walk your knees up to your triceps and lean forward. And when you lift your feet off the floor, that's the first small variation of crow pose. So you have many different ways of placing the knees or the thighs on the triceps or elbow and you have many different heights. You can take the crow too, you have many different variations, but this is the first basic one.

Bend your elbows, lean forward and try flexing your toes off the ground. And here you will feel that in order to be able to place your knees on the elbows, you need to bend your elbows and kind of create a shelf for you. You can't do it with straight arms unless you're insanely strong. So bend your elbows to have something to place the knees on like this.

But then as soon as you have gotten the knees on, you want to start squeezing in because your elbows don't want to flare out. Just like Black Belt told me when I was a Purple Belt, he said, this is white belt, this is blue belt, purple, brown and Black Belt always squeeze their elbows in like crazy because a small little gap in the elbow, you can stick your arm in for the Kimura or you can push a leg in there and do the reverse triangle. Every time your elbow is out, you're in danger. When you're tight, you look at Marcelo Garcia, he's tight as a clam.

You can't stick a steel rod in between his triceps and his lat when you're attacking him because he knows the importance of being really tight. And it's that we practice in crow. So when you're doing crow, squeeze in. So I'm going to turn my butt towards you.

So this is crow pose, squeeze in. That's what creating the lift. So you start by just trying to lift your toes off the floor, but then it's the in squeeze with your lats and your chest that is creating the force to lift your butt up. That's it for crow pose.

That's more than enough what you need to know in order to do crow. Last pose for the Warrior I, last pose for the Sun Salutation B, enough to do a Sun Salutation B is Warrior I. Warrior I is feet hip width, turn one foot 45 degrees out like this and then step it back a big step. So foot out, step it back.

And then you bend your front knee like in chair pose. So knee as much over the ankle as possible, but a short step. This doesn't feel like anything because there is not enough distance between my legs. I need to have taken such a long step that it takes effort for me to push the leg down and keep this leg bent.

So the knees, the legs are doing completely opposite things. This leg is moving forward and out to the side and this leg is pushing straight and trying to lift my inner arch of the back foot. And these two different things is what's creating this tension in my hips that I need to keep my focus on the foundation here. I need to keep the focus on my feet and my legs in order to do a proper Warrior I.

This is what an improper Warrior I looks like. The back knee is bent, the front knee is pointing in and there is no integrity. If you were to drop a sandbag on top of me, I would collapse completely down to the floor and probably hurt my meniscus. So I think, I don't know the yoga legends and the lore so well, but this is what I've heard.

Imagine you have a sword in your hands and you're about to strike down like this. You have the power from the legs. This is where the Warrior I comes from. Imagine you're holding a sword over your head and then you have, even if someone is running straight into you, you have the back leg to control and even if there was an earthquake, you would be able to stand rock steady with your sword over your head.

So every time you go into Warrior I, don't think that you're like a collapsing octopus, but a proud warrior super strong with super engaged legs. So we have Chair Pose, Crow Pose and Warrior I. Let's put them together into Sun Salutation B. See you in the video.