Deep Hip Stretches & Pigeon Pose: 10-Min Tutorial for BJJ

The foundation in lizard stretch should be that you should feel it equally in both hips. So it's not just the front or the back of the hips. You should try to angle and turn around so that you feel the stretch in both places at the same time. You both minimize the risk of injury.

Also you're efficient because you're stretching more things at the same time and you're going to get your results faster. So lizard stretch is always there for you. If you can drop one elbow, then for sure you can drop both. I like placing my fists as a tower and rest my forehead on top of the fist.

But lizard pose, you just have to figure out on your own where it feels good and stay there for as long as you feel necessary. What I do when I'm in a flow class, I usually tell people to grab their knee and push their knee away because then we get a deeper hip opener plus a side of the hip and waist stretch plus a spinal twist. So when you push your knee away and look up, it's kind of everything at once pose. Makes it harder to breathe, but it feels damn good for the hips and spine.

So this would be considered a lizard twist. So it's a lizard but with a twist. It's different from the next pose we're going to do. So we did the lizard variations.

Next one is lunge twist. But instead of being low here and getting our hips down, the lunge twist is with the foot between the hands and then one arm up straight. So it's almost exactly like a side plank combined with a crescent pose. So if crescent pose and side plank had a baby, this would be it.

So the arms are like in side plank, my shoulders and torso are in side plank, but my back leg is stretching back and I'm trying to work the exact same way as I did in crescent pose. And this combination makes this a hard pose to master, but it's perfect. The perfect middle position. It's like half guard.

This would be the half guard of a vignasa flow class because you can transition from all fours up to standing into different variations of side plank. And I really love this lunge twist. So the lizard twist was here, the lunge twist is here. So every time you're in low lunge here, roll open and notice this is an important detail.

The bottom shoulder is usually poking forward. Your job is to engage your trapezius and pull the shoulder back always. You don't want weight in your hand with all the weight sticking through your shoulder ball. So pull it back, integrate your shoulder into the pose and twist as deep as you can and breathe.

Two poses done, one to go. Pigeon pose is an ass stretch. You stretch the glute max and if you change the angle, you can stretch other muscles as well. The basic pose is from the down dog.

You place your knee forward and tuck your foot under. It's not necessary to do it 90 degrees or have your shin parallel to your hands. It's perfectly okay to have the heel under your left hip here. For beginners, I recommend up dog here.

So you combine up dog with a hip stretch. Most of the weight is into my back leg and my arms. Maybe 30% of my body weight is into my bottom leg. So I could easily just lift the leg off the floor here.

This is great for people who have a problem with the knee. So if you go deep into pigeon and really crank it, you can hurt your knee if you have meniscus problems. So this is step one of pigeon pose. The ultimate step for super flexible people is to catch your foot with both hands.

We're not going to bother. I can't do it. I'm not going to teach it. So this is that's maybe step 20.

So we're going to focus on the first few steps. So up dog in pigeon pose, great place to start. If your knee hurts, I would skip all the other variations and do the 90 90 position instead, which is a great mobility exercise. I have a friend who is a yoga teacher, but also into CrossFit, and they use this a lot for mobility.

So 90 degrees, 90 degrees, 90 degrees, 90 degrees. And here you can move around. And it's really weird for your hips in the beginning, but it's also super healthy. So this is a good alternative if you have knee problems, you're not going to hurt your knees from this.

It's all going to go straight into the hips. All right, we're going to focus on pigeon pose though. So that's alternative if you have knee problems. Step number two is to move from up dog with the elbows down.

Okay, you can stack your fists and rest your forehead and let your body weight push down over your legs. So the more you relax, the more of a stretch you will feel. Okay, you can also go down all the way so that your belly and chest is connecting with your calf muscle here. So you're really, really deep.

You need a lot of flexibility to get all the way down here or a really big belly. That would help too. But anyways, you let the weight fall down over you. And this is some of the problems I usually see.

Either the knee is too far out to the side. So I always encourage people to go towards the midline. So move your back knee in towards the middle. Another thing I see is that you're too far forward.

So you're basically just sticking your butt in the air. I want your whole body to slide back. Okay, so instead of lifting the foot and moving it forward to make the stretch more intense, I would move my back knee back a couple of millimeters when I feel that it's appropriate. Okay, so from here, I first go down and relax for a bit.

And then I slowly start inching my back knee back to make the stretch even more hip and butt oriented. You could later on, you could combine these with twists or funky variations. But the most important thing is that you stay here for a while. Don't do pigeon for 30 seconds.

It's a waste of time. It's just 30 seconds is what it takes to get into the actual pose. So if you ever see me teach the pigeon pose for 30 seconds to a minute, what I actually want you to do is to press pause on the video and just do it until you almost feel your leg. When you begin to feel your leg falling asleep, then you know it's time to leave.

So how long should I be in a stretch? You should find a stretch that is comfortable for minimum one minute up to three to five to 10 minutes. As soon as you feel the tingling sensation in your nerves or from your blood, like you cut off your blood and oxygen supply, move on to the next stretch. That's how I stretch.

I think it's the safest way to stretch and the most effective one. Okay, we did lizard with the variations. We did the lunge twist and we did the pigeon pose. Let's move on to today's flow class.