Foundation Week 1 for BJJ: 35-Min Class (Day 4)

Circle your arms up, inhale, exhale fold. Inhale halfway. Bend your knees and jump back to your belly. Land flat on your belly.

Inhale Cobra. Exhale down dog. Take a breath here. And now lift your heels, roll forward to plank and without doing anything else, just sink your hips and look forward.

Straight arms, straight legs on your toes and then chin to chest and roll back to lift your hips. Down dog. Bend your knees, look forward, inhale to prep and exhale walk or jump. Inhale halfway up, exhale bend your knees and pull your head down as far down as you can.

Inhale all the way up. Exhale hands to chest. One more inhale, exhale bend and fold from your hips. Inhale halfway up, exhale jump and land on your belly.

Squeeze your elbows in all the way down. Inhale Cobra, elbows in, spread your fingers and exhale down dog. Take a breath again. Lift your heels and roll forward to plank.

Keep your arms straight and lower the hips and try to widen your arms and push your chest through the gateway of the arms. So up, up, up. Chin to chest, lift and roll back. Use your core and your legs to get back to down dog.

Bend your knees, look forward. Inhale to prep. On the bottom of your exhale jump forward. Inhale halfway up.

Exhale fold and if you can catch your ankles, catch your ankles. If you can place your hands under your feet, go ahead and do that. Flex your neck and just fold and stay here for three. We're going to do a standing sequence, but first we're really going to work on the floor.

So sit down on your butt on the middle of the mat. Grab your hamstrings and lift your feet as high as you can. So try to get your feet above your head so your toes are above your head and your chest should try to reach over the knees. So lift your chest over the knees and lift your feet overhead and then release your arms and try to stay here for a second.

Roll back to upside down guard, hips up or all the way back depending on your neck. Coming up to your butt again, lifting your hips up and try to lift the hips so far that you can no longer see your knees or your thighs. So get your belly to be the highest point of your body. Take a breath here.

Sit down on your butt, stretch your legs on your knuckles, lift your hips and take three. Sit down again and get up to a squat, hands to the floor, lean your head down so that your feet get lighter. Maybe you even flex the feet and you fly or you keep moving the weight forward and squeeze the elbows in. Lower the head until your feet are light and sit down on your butt again.

Same thing again, both toes first, lift, lift, lift. If it's impossible and your back hurts, use your hands behind you, stretch your feet as high as you can, lift your chest even higher. And if you have back problems, this is one of the exercises that helped me the most to get connection with my core again. Lower down the absolute slowest you can.

This is superb core work. Roll back to your shoulders, roll back up to reverse table, lift your hips, lift, lift, lift, lift, never be satisfied. Keep lifting your hips and lean your butt back, lift your hips off the ground again, three, two, one and roll up to a squat. Again try the crow pose.

If you have really flexible hips, you can try the elbow crow, but if that's inaccessible, try the normal crow with your head forward and down, lift your hips off the floor. And then stepping back into plank, turning the heels to the right, lifting the right arm up as high as you can for side plank pose, lift the left side, lift the left arm, lift the chest away from the right arm, take a breath. Switching sides, right arm up, keep hugging the shoulder back. I can't emphasize it enough.

Do not hang in the shoulder, lift your body, shove your hips forward and stretch the fingers. And lay all the way down on your belly, interlace the fingers behind your back or grab your pants, lift the chest and lift your legs, spread your toes and squeeze the heels together, lift the legs. Your lower back is weak. Toughen up and strengthen the lower back.

Hands down, push back up to a gentle cat and cow. Hard work is behind us. Now we're going to start the standing work. Push back into a downward facing dog.

Move your feet together and stretch your right leg up behind you. Bend your knee completely, open the hips and lift up on your toes and don't move forward yet. Pushing your head back towards your left big toe. Now roll the right knee to your right elbow and slowly place the knee down in the ground and look forward.

Inhale, exhale knee to your armpit. Again inhale, exhale knee to your armpit. Stretch the leg up and back, inhale, exhale knee to nose, place the foot in the middle between your hands, on your fingertips, moving back to warrior two. We did it before a couple of days ago.

Stretch the left arm back, right arm forward, lift all ten toes and point your right knee straight forward. Change the back leg and take a breath here. Straighten both legs, hands in front of your chest, bend the back knee, the left knee, squat half way down, place the hands in the ground and bounce up and down. If your knee is hurting, don't go so deep, try to stay in the middle and strengthen the leg.

Switch from side to side, bend your right knee, stretch the left and keep going from side to side. If you're super flexible and you have a long Achilles tendon, you can place your heel in the ground. Otherwise, stay on your toes for Kung Fu stretching. From side to side a couple of times.

This kind of stretching is super relevant to Jiu Jitsu because usually you don't have the luxury of just having nothing to do with gravity. You actually always have to take gravity into consideration when you're doing Jiu Jitsu. So this is very Jiu Jitsu specific yoga. Now get back to a straight right leg and bend the left knee.

Look forward and straighten your arm forward and fly. Right arm forward, left leg and arm back. You can rest the hand on the thigh, make sure the thigh is engaged. Take a breath here in flying warrior.

If you're airplane, you're not landing, you're lifting, you're taking off. Back to warrior two. Hands in front of your chest, squatting back down into the Kung Fu. You can keep your hands in the floor or stretching the arms out.

One more time stretching forward, lifting up, finding balance. Try catching your back foot or keep doing the last pose. One of those. Releasing your foot if you grab it.

Back to drop stance again, the Kung Fu stretching. Try to sit all the way back. Catch yourself with the right hand. And then with your right hand behind you, try to lift the hips and stretch up.

Sit down again and do not bend your right knee. Keep the right leg straight and try to get up on top of your feet again. So use some momentum and get back up. And if you can't do this, then do this as homework.

Keep trying until you can do it. It's a lot of technique and you're probably fucking it up because you're using the wrong technique. So just keep going until you can get up effortless. One more time stretching up into the flying warrior.

Place your right hand on the right side of your foot and in front of the foot for half moon pose. Flex the back leg like you're karate kicking the heel backwards. Lift the left arm up and spread all ten fingers and breathe. Hands down for standing splits.

You might need to jump your right foot back a little bit. Let's do seven handstands. One. Engage your left leg, karate kick it back.

Two. Three. No wild jumping. Look at me and do exactly what I do.

Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Stepping back to plank pose. Inhale. Exhale, lower down. Wide hands, fingers point out.

Wide Cobra. Take a few breaths and stretch the front of your belly. Pushing back into turtle pose. Relax your arms.

Relax your upper body. Take a few breaths here. If you're still listening to this and still doing the flow, good job. Most people give up not because it doesn't work.

They give up because they give up. Rolling forward to a cat and cow. It's always nice to release your shoulders and your spine with a cat and cow between rounds and then push back to down dog. Feet together.

Stretch the left leg up. Bend your knee. Open the hips and lift up on your toes and keep pushing your head back towards the right foot and keep lifting the left knee. So you twist the hips to the left, but make sure your shoulders are still in down dog.

So you're kind of counter twisting the shoulders. Rolling the knee forward towards your left elbow and stay here. Lower the knee down and inhale. Stretch your chest and belly.

Exhale, hug the knee up. Inhale knee down, look forward. Exhale left leg up. Inhale, exhale knee to nose and place the foot between your hands.

Flatten out the back foot on your fingertips, circling your arms into warrior two. Take a couple of breaths. Make sure the back arm is not dropping. Keep them level.

Hands in front of your chest. Straighten both legs and bend your right knee down. Try not keeping your hands in the floor now. Switch from side to side and try to push your elbow into your inner thigh and your knee and use the power of the legs to stretch the legs.

We're never going for extremes. It might feel extreme, but we never want to push past six and a half on a scale one to ten because the eight, nine and ten is where we get injured. If you can have the discipline and the courage and the patience to stay at six, six and a half, you're going to have tremendous development. Stretch your arms out and bend your right knee.

Look forward, stretching up into flying warrior. So you're not landing, you're taking off. Lift the left arm high, lift the back leg and keep it straight. Everybody's bending the back knee here.

Don't do that. Kick it out and breathe. Bending your standing knee, warrior two first and then kung fu. Take a breath here.

And move into the same position again. Maybe catch your back foot and stretch the front of your right hip and breathe. Look straight forward. Don't look down.

Breathe. Release. Move all the way down. Try to sit down.

Use your left hand for support. Make a big triangle. Lift the chest, lift the hips and stretch the right arm up. Push down into the right foot to lift the hips more.

Sit down again. Resist the temptation to bend the knee. That's going to fuck everything up. Try to instead go up and down.

And even if you're stuck, keep trying. Eventually you will get the hang of it and gravity is helping your hips to get the message across. Eventually this will be easy. It's never easy in the beginning.

Last pose. Stand on your left foot. Lift your right arm straight up and karate kick your back leg. Place the hands in the floor.

You can bend, place the left hand in the floor. You can bend the left knee, but keep rolling your hips open. Don't bend the back leg. Keep the back leg straight and open your body like in warrior two.

Look down, spread your fingers and breathe. Try straightening everything out. Circle your hands down, spread your fingers and jump the left leg back so you can keep the back leg straight. And then seven, six, five, just small kicks.

Just a couple of inches off the floor. Five, four, three, always jumping up on your exhale. Two, one, stepping back to plank and lower both elbows down. Ten breaths in low plank pose.

Remember that you're a weakling and you're pathetic if you give up in ten breaths. The world record is five hours, 28 minutes. So if you can't do ten breaths, then you're very weak and you have to do this every day. I mean it.

Ten breaths in low plank. Engage your psyche, your arms and your legs. The reason I'm calling you a weakling is because I know you're not. You just think you are when you give up in ten breaths.

Everybody can stand here for ten breaths who is healthy and do jiu-jitsu. So it's nothing. We could stay here for a hundred breaths too. We just don't today.

Lower down into Sphinx pose, elbows under your shoulders. Lift up, pull your chest forward and stretch your core. If you have lower back problems, just do it slightly lower, but keep pulling your belly long. And then pushing back up to all fours.

Let's do a new stretch today. Old school yoga stretch. Sit down on your butt. You can actually sit on the right of your yoga mat or where you are.

Straight right leg. Pull the left foot into groin and if your knee is hurting, place something under the left knee. First of all, just sit up straight. And if this is more than enough, this is more than enough.

If you want to bend your straight leg and grab the hamstring and let the straightening of the leg pull you forward, you can do that. If you can catch your foot, you catch your foot. If you need your yoga, your jitsu belt to put around your foot, you can do that. But I want you to lean forward away from the bent knee and towards the straight leg.

So if you have short arms and long legs, use your belt. Seated poses look easy, but they're some of the hardest to do right. If you don't do them right, you're going to feel very awkward and weird and tense here. If you do them right, you will still have tension, but you can slowly ease into the pose and release tension as you sit here for a period of time.

And if you're still new to yoga, I'm going to exaggerate. Look at me now. This is how we want to sit here. Calm easy.

And this is how people do in football, soccer or jiu jitsu stretching. You can see it's two different things, trying to attain some goal of holding on to your foot and trying to win over the pose and just sitting in the pose and be here. One way is immature and one way is mature. Guess which one I would wish you to try.

Switching sides, stretching the left leg straight, hugging your foot in towards your groin. If you have niscous problem, you need to keep something between your hamstring and your calf, place something under your knee. First of all, sit up straight and stay here for a few months. And eventually you are much more flexible than you think.

And finally, you can lean forward and grab where you can grab and relax. Just because it's not easy doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Things that are shitty in our life is almost always because we took and choose the path of least resistance. We avoid things that are hard and we just do things that's easy.

That does not mean we should always choose the hard path. Sometimes the hard path is stupid and we should just do what comes naturally, but not always. Sometimes we have to choose the tougher and the more challenging option. Another breath.

And stretch both legs out. Let's move into upside down guard with wide legs. So catch your legs and you can stay here. If you can roll up to your shoulder blades without pain in your neck, try to stay here, but also widen your legs.

So either with something under your lower back here, spread your legs and straighten them out. Don't hold your breath because then you're just going to last for tops 10 seconds. Ten seconds is just enough to start the pose. So if you want to get flexible, 10 seconds is not enough unless you do like 10 seconds a minute for two hours.

But if you want to feel an effect here, 10 minutes is just to find your breath. If we do a stretch for one minute, then the first half of that minute is just figuring stuff out. The last half of a pose is where we can reap the benefits. Roll up to seated again.

We're going to try something new again. Your right leg can be as you want. Catch the foot and the knee and try to hug everything in towards your left armpit. So the foot should not come towards the nose.

This is very, very bad if you're not super flexible. And even if you're super flexible, this is usually a bad idea, especially in jiu-jitsu when someone can put pressure on you. What I want you to do is to grab and squeeze the knee into your armpit. And then when the knee is in, you try to hug the rest of the leg as well.

So the foot can be on the outside of the shoulder. It can be far away from you. But don't grab the pinky toe and pull it towards you. You're going to fuck up your knee.

So hug the knee in, squeeze it in, and then kind of rock it like a baby. I don't know if you have rocked a baby, but just imagine how we pretend like you know how to do it. So just rock the calf. It's our calf baby.

I'm going to call it a calf baby. Rock the calf baby. Move the foot around. Try to squeeze the calf baby in towards you.

And then grab the heel and try to get the elbow under the hamstring like this. Like this. Try to elbow your way through and then try lifting your hips off the floor. Three, two, one, and switch sides.

So first of all, knee towards your armpit. Use the power of the biceps to squeeze it in. And then try to squeeze the... Like the foot is the least important.

What you want to squeeze in is the thigh, the knee, and the top of the calf. Any means necessary. Just get that thigh close to you. If you need to sit with your back towards the wall, go ahead.

Grab the calf baby and rock it. We're all going to have to learn this stuff eventually, so we might as well start training now. Hopefully you will get a baby that is more beautiful than this calf. Now grab with the left hand in the right heel and elbow the right arm under.

Pull it in there. Push it in there. And even if you don't get the knee all the way up, just squeeze the arm and lift your hips. If you need to stay on your knuckles, do that.

Three, two, one, and sit down. As long as you try it, I'm happy. Happy baby pose. Lay down.

A lot of babies today. Lay down on your back. Catch your ankles or your feet. And pull the knees down and push your hips down.

To improve our open guard, try to straighten your legs as far as you can. If you can't catch your feet, you can always use a belt or two. And then feet in the ground. Lift your hips.

Interlace your fingers behind you. Lift your hips and move the shoulders towards each other. Honey bridge pose. Lift the chest towards your chin.

Push and dig your heels down. Release your hands. Bring your knees towards each other. Relax your arms.

Relax your face. Yoga is not like a main dish, a main course. It's more like marinade. You just did about half an hour of yoga.

Hug your knees in. Rock up to a seat. Take a moment in seated meditation, which just means being passive. Don't do anything.

Just sit. Lift your shoulders. Inhale and exhale. Release the shoulders.

Open your eyes. Thank you very much. Good job for being with me so far. One more day of the foundation week.

See you tomorrow and let's go.