Sebastian Brosche · 8 min · 1,260 words
Previously titled: Section 13 - Fold & Savasana
The time has come for the last section. We are in pigeon and we swing both legs forward and do a forward fold. The variation we have for you today is a straddle forward fold wide legs, place your hands behind you, tell everybody to always do this, roll forward on your hips or lift your hips up and tuck your butt back so that you're seated at the front of your hips. Look, show me what it looks like when the top jiu-jitsu guys in the world are doing this pose, even worse, even for like a half boat almost.
This is common, this is common and this is not good. This is, people will hate the class if you let them do that. So lift up, good posture, lift your chest, inhale, exhale, fingertips in the ground, walk as far forward as you need, not as you can, don't walk as far forward as you can, walk as far forward as you need. If you engage the quads that kind of stabilizes the legs and hips, it creates a little bit more hamstring stretch, most people don't need that but having sloppy, floppy legs, it's very hard to keep your hips in the right place when the legs are floppy.
So it's better to start every kind of stretch actively and then eventually as you stay in the pose you let go. So tell people to engage the legs, walk forward, stay straight and strong. I usually say down dog arms, so dog arms and then from here maybe lower down bit by bit and I never show like go all the way down, I never fold flat forward just because I can because people when they see you they don't listen to you, they do what you do, they don't do what you say and they put themselves in a miserable position. Start in the center, take a couple of breaths, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
What you have time for, you really have to be time aware at this point of the class, see how much time you have. One hand on each side of the left leg, inhale, exhale folding over one leg, inherent twist and side stretch in this pose. So you're both twisting and side stretching and stretching everything at the same time basically. Holding on to the foot is an option, every time you say that you should say you don't have to, it's a nice stretch even if you don't hold on to the foot.
Same thing second side and this is really the part of the class where you should not be babbling constantly, you have said enough, give people some space to relax and enjoy and breathe. Back to center, when you did a couple of minutes here and you went really deep, you don't really have any firepower in your legs, so grab your legs and use your biceps to pull your legs together, that feels really good instead of just leaving them free, help them, guide them. Roll down to your back, feet in the ground, scoot your hips sideways for a twist, knees together, we talked about before, here's an option, so grab, let's do that again, start from the center, hip escape over to the right, pull your right knee into your armpit, stretch the other leg down the floor, from here, left hand to right knee, twist from here, right arm can be anywhere, out for leverage, behind your head for support. What you should know is the top hip, it tends to be really crunched up, the right side if she's twisting the right leg over to the left, the right side is usually really crunched up here, so you can't probably always teach this, but what you want for people is for the top hip, the top waist to be stretched a little bit too, because if the hips are crunched like this, it even hurts, I just rolled her hip a little bit and it hurts her hips, that stops you from doing the pose correctly, so again, hip escape over to the left, pull the left knee in, straighten the other leg, twist your leg over using your hand to weigh down the leg, either looking up or just relax your neck, some people look left towards the hand and that is for many too much of a twist and you don't really want to twist the neck in a pose like this, you want to focus on the breath and make the breath fill up and relax on the exhale, for me it takes five, six, seven, eight breaths to really let go of the tension in my lower back, so give people some time to enjoy the pose.
And you can always say if this is too much, keep your knees together like we talked about before, that's also a nice option. Back to center, pull your knees in towards your armpits and grab your feet for happy guard pose and whenever I do the same pose in the end of the class that I did in the start of the class, I kind of wrap up the journey we went on together by saying, check in and check your save file for the pose we did in the start of the class, who you were then, how you felt, how your mind was balanced and how you are now and notice the difference between who you are when you started and when you finished the class. I always say something like that just to wrap up and make them realize that this stuff we did now, it actually worked, I'm feeling amazing now and the class actually passed really fast. And then from here, shavasana, straight legs or not straight legs, don't talk in shavasana at all, just get, yes, get people's hips and shoulders and neck right and then let's everybody take a big deep inhale, inhale, inhale, keep it in, inhale a little bit more and then when you are ready, a big slow exhale, sigh the whole class out and then be quiet, completely quiet.
Maybe look around the academy and if someone is laughing or chatting, tell them, show them the signs that they should shut up because this is whole time, this is one, two, three minutes of complete silence. People have deserved it, they have worked hard for it, so make sure the room is quiet. And after a few minutes here, stretch your arms overhead, start moving your body again, hopefully you will feel a lot better now than when you came but you will feel even better if you come back tomorrow or next week. Rock and rolling up a couple of times, find a comfortable seated position and then wrap up the class in any way that you feel is genuine.
Don't talk too much, people are tired of hearing you talking, so just acknowledge that they did a good job and that they should come back. When it's not a pretty class, we teach differently to people that come to our yoga studio and when we do, you do yoga for B2J classes, so to wrap up a class for not a typical yoga crowd, it's nice to just do one arm circle and thank you guys for showing up. Yes, one last breath together is always a really nice wrap up. Inhale, arms overhead, exhale back to center, awesome job today guys, really good.
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