Full-Body Yoga: 60-Min Live Athlete Flow for Grapplers

Arch your spine slightly and stretch your arms and lift your shoulders to your ears. Start stretching your feet as well. Stretch as long as you can. Bend your right knee and grab your knee and crunch your knee to your armpit, not to your chin or chest, but to your armpit.

So out to the side and pull your knee while you're pushing the other leg away. So you're splitting your knees away from each other and then switching. If you are over trained or if you have trained a lot the last few days, stop at 60%. So don't pull hard and make this into another workout.

This is not a workout, this is a work in. So slow down and stop at 50%. So if I say pull really hard, don't listen to me and don't pull hard, pull gently. The goal if you're tired is to be less tired after a class.

The goal is not to make this into another exercise. So keep switching knees from side to side, pulling the left and pulling the right knee into your armpit and push out through the other foot so that you get a nice tension thighs and hamstrings. I can feel this around my hips and in my side back. My side body can really feel this stretch when I push out through one leg.

Grab your feet or your ankles and try to pull your knees and your butt down, stretching your inner thighs and start pushing your head down into the ground so that you're engaging your neck muscles and roll your head from side to side, stretching the neck while tensioning it. If you think something is complicated today, that's only because I make it sound complicated because what we're doing is really straightforward. So just assume that I was unclear that you misinterpreted what I said, if you think something is complicated. Straighten one leg and bend the other so you're kicking from side to side slowly, really tensing up your hamstring for a brief second and then switching.

So no static holds right now, dynamic switching from side to side. If your butt lifts off the ground and starts going from side to side, perfect. Your body is not made out of separate parts, all parts move together as one when you let it. So don't isolate but let everything flow together.

Nice. Legs together, grab your hamstrings and roll up and down your spine five, six, seven, eight, ten times. We have a nice breath going today, keep that going, breathe in and out as you move. Nice, sit on your butt, hands and feet in the ground, lift your hips and start moving your hips around in circles, both circles sideways and circles back and forth and up and down.

Try now to not get into a pattern but explore different movements, different patterns, try to surprise yourself with what you can do with your hips here. You never really know what the body needs before you start moving. When you start to move, you will discover that, oh, I had no idea that I needed this. You can't really plan for it, you just have to explore and be surprised at what comes up.

Sit on your butt and cross your ankles, don't cross your ankles actually, cross your calf so that your knees can get as far down as possible. So this is unpreferable, this is better. The further down your knees can come, the better. Now start moving around, so even if your knees are not touching anything, just keep moving and if you can breathe, then you will trick your nervous system into relaxing even if it's geared up.

With slow movement and breath, we can fool ourselves to relax where we need to relax. Switching the crossing and switching directions. I like to support my hands on my knees but that's my personal preference. Maybe you can keep your hands on the ground or anywhere you feel like it supports you.

Place your hands behind you and feet down in the ground again and then move your knees from side to side. And don't do this with the feet together, spread your feet so that your knee is touching the sole of your foot, so one knee is touching underneath the foot and when it touches, squeeze the top butt so that you're pushing your hips into a twist. We're both stretching the hips and twisting our spine at the same time. This can be an intense pose if you take some time and really go deep into it.

It's not dangerous, ever, assuming that you don't have an injury. You can push really hard without risking anything. This is not a thing we do in any sport. In no sport ever is this a move that we do.

So why is it relevant? Why would we do something like this when we never ever do this in sport? Well exactly because of that, because we're not trying to do more of what we already do in sports, we're trying to complement. In no sport do you get any points or win by doing things slowly and even on both sides, so the right side and the left side.

So this is meant to help your body rejuvenate and recover, not get stronger or faster or better at anything. Sit down, stretch your legs, arms up. Actually, take your belt or strap and stretch your belt overhead and then let it fall back, but don't bend your elbows. So let it fall back as far as it can go.

And if you have to scrunch up your face, then you have to let go a little bit and ease off the pressure. So any time your face crunches up, that means we can stay in the pose for as long, so it's better to go a little bit easier and do it for longer. Lift your chest, bend your back backwards and then on the exhale slowly lean forward. Pectoralis and hamstring stretch.

Inhale move up, exhale forward. Like you're holding a bar over your head, like a heavy bar, so really have structural integrity in your arms, but try to at the same time relax your chest when you're moving forward. Inhale up and exhale down. Don't explore how deep you can go, because then you're trying to get better and stronger at being flexible.

You're trying to improve your flexibility. Stop doing that, that's stupid. Don't improve your flexibility. Try to let go of the tension that is holding you back instead.

That's a completely different thing. Same result, but with that different attitude you reach a different place. Four more times. Inhale up and exhale down.

So the belt kind of stays at the same place all the time, so you're not moving the belt forward and back. You're moving your arms around the belt. One more. Nice.

Release the belt and now when we move into downward facing dog, we have already warmed up the shoulders and the hamstrings. So this first down dog probably feels very different from if we hadn't done that last exercise. The calves are probably still stiff, but the hamstrings and the shoulders feel different from what it normally does when you go into your first down dog. Bend one knee and switch from side to side.

So the first down dog shouldn't be static, it should be dynamic. Turn your neck and twist your spine. Now place your right foot on the outside of the right hand for a lizard lunge. Left knee to the ground.

I like to place my weight into my knuckles to relax the wrists. So from side to side here as well. Flatten out the foot and try to really relax your hips and make your hips heavy by not resisting with your legs. So the arms are bearing the weight of the upper body and the hips and legs are trying to drop down to the floor.

You can turn all the way to the right and all the way to the left if that feels appropriate. I can only tell you what to do, I can't guide you at what intensity you should do it, so you have to regulate the intensity yourself. Let's switch sides. Same exercise, side number two.

Make sure you have structure and integrity in your arms and shoulders. You should not feel like you're draping your weight over your arms. The more you push down through your hands, the easier it will be to relax your hips. Slowly start moving from side to side if you haven't already.

And if you find a sweet spot, stop there and take a few breaths. Twist deeper into it if you feel like it, all the way to the right and all the way to the left. Sit on your knees, if that's too much you can sit on your butt as well. Grab the belt again.

Throw your belt over your head and back so it hangs down behind you, parallel to your spine. Then grab the belt with the other hand and don't go as close together as you can because then you will be locked up. Try to keep maybe half a meter between your hands. As if you're scratching your back with a towel, pull one arm up, not as far as you can, stop at 50%.

Same grip but pull the other arm so that you're pulling one arm down. Don't go for 100%, just go up and down with your breath, helping your shoulder sockets getting into positions they are rarely in. So very rarely do we put our arms in these angles. And if you know some anatomy, you know that the shoulder joint, the ball and socket of the shoulder is very open so it has a lot of potential positions, a lot of range of motion but we tend to only use a few percentages of that range of motion.

So it's really nice for the shoulder to get into new positions like this. If you're already fatiguing, if you're getting tired in the muscles, that's a very good sign that I'm telling the truth. You're almost never in these positions, that's why you're fatiguing immediately. Switching sides.

Left arm up, right arm back. Don't go too close. The sides are probably really different. You have a certain flexibility on the first side and we tend to do our favorite side first.

So this one probably feels much worse. But don't try to improve your flexibility. Try to relax where you feel tension. I'm feeling tension in the front of my right shoulder.

Okay, I inhale and I try to exhale and relax. And since we're not doing static, it's much easier with dynamic because we're only in the intensity for a brief moment and then we move on. Now remove the strap and we didn't talk about the spine, but can you feel how much straighter the spine is now? We have no slouching because we worked with our arms in a certain angle and the chest automatically popped up.

Let's go back into down dog and let's work some not strength, but still some engagement of the front body by going from down dog to plank a few times. So let's move into plank, straight arms, straight legs. Inhale here and on the exhale, slowly exhale and move back into down dog. So inhale one, two, three, exhale back to dog one, two, three.

Again inhale one, two, three, exhale back one, two, three. Keep going on a count to three, but try to make the count slower and slower and slower and move deeper back into down dog. So get really into your down dog. Two more.

Last one. Nice. Step the right foot between your hands. If your foot doesn't go all the way, lift one arm, step forward and let's move up into warrior two.

Right knee forward, arms straight. Make sure your chin is not sticking out, but you're pulling your chin back. Spread your fingers and take three breaths. Straight elbows, spread the thumbs and pinky away from each other.

Nice. Hands in the ground, bend the left knee and flex your right foot, toes to the ceiling. And switch sides, bend the right knee, stretch, really stretch the left leg straight and bend your right knee maximum. And don't do the switch fast, switch slowly, go from side to side.

I've been doing this stretch for at least eight years. Every single time I do it, I do it in a different way. There's always new muscles that we need to tend to. You're never stiff the same way two days in a row.

So every time you do a stretch, it will be slightly different from the last time. So we cannot learn a certain pattern that we can follow all the time. We have to constantly be ready to adapt, explore and be curious and attentive and present. Let's move back into warrior two.

Simply reverse the warrior, so stretch your right side, keep your left leg straight, bend your right knee, take a breath. Maintain this length through the right side and the left foot when you lean forward into flying warrior. So try to get as straight as you can, right arm forward, left toes backwards. Stretch everything.

Take a breath or two. Nice. Hands down, standing splits. Bend your left knee, drop your head so your head dangles.

Your left knee is bent and lift the left knee high. If your right hamstring is not protesting, I have no idea why it should. All the weight into your arms, jump back into a plank, both feet down, all the way down to your belly. Lift your chest for cobra pose.

Inhale, exhale down. Let's do that two more times. Inhale, cobra. Exhale down.

Come on, in a plank pose, down dog, three breaths. No words, just breath. Head foot forward, warrior two. To improve our posture, move the palms so they point up like you're holding something in your hands.

Look forward but don't push your head forward. Pull your head back but keep your gaze forward. Lift your chest and let your breath flow all the way down to the bottom of your lungs. Hands down.

This time, try to almost sit down to the ground. Maybe your butt is touching, maybe you're far off, but try to lean back as far as you can and then switch to the other side. You can put your hands further forward to counterbalance the weight of your butt, but the goal now is to get deeper with your butt closer to the ground. That way, we're stretching different muscles from last round.

Improvement in yoga does not come from effort. Improvement in yoga comes from patience. You can write that in stone if you have a pen that can write in stone because it will always be true. Improvement in yoga does not come from effort but from patience.

Warrior two. Boom. First, the warrior, without extending your left knee, keep the left knee bent. Take a breath.

Maintain this length throughout the left side. Move into flying warrior. Keep your left chest super open. Stretch your right foot, stretch your left hand.

Get as long as you can throughout your body. Both legs and both arms straight. Breathe. Very good.

Standing splits, bend your right knee, drop your head, neck relaxed, right butt tensed up. Lift your right knee, bend your right knee and lift it high. All the weight into the hands, one legged plank, normal plank, vinyasa. Child's pose or turtle pose.

Relax your head and breathe. To use a metaphor, we are stirring the pot. You're moving your body and you're moving your emotions and you're moving your thoughts with the practice. We're going to slow down for a second and do pigeon pose.

So move to all fours and bring your left knee forward. And I like to think of pigeon pose like a transforming plank pose. So we start in plank pose and then we slowly transform the plank by lowering the hips and lowering the chest. And this is the way to regulate the intensity.

I find this approach simple enough for a beginner to understand it. So you lower the hips and you lower the chest, but not at the same time and not too much. We are trying to stretch our glutes and our outer hip muscles. If you have neck tension, stack your forehead onto something like your fists or a block or a cat or dog that is close by.

So there is absolutely zero effort to improve our glute flexibility here. What I said in the beginning, the effort and the work is to cut out time in your schedule to do yoga. The actual yoga practice is reward. All you have to do here is to be patient.

No effort needed. If you're a type A personality, you have to do something or else you will explode and die. Breathe deeper. So put your effort into inhaling, no effort into exhaling.

All the effort goes into the inhale. And let me be more specific. All the effort goes into making the inhale slow and deep. And simply relax on the exhale.

When I was a new yoga teacher a few years back, now would be about the time I would take you out of the pose. But I'm smarter than that now and I know that now, about now, after a minute or two is when the pose actually starts to feel really good. And we're not trying to make the practice a punishment. We don't want to steal the cookie just when you had a taste of it.

So let's take five more breaths here and really savor and enjoy the feeling of this intense hip stretch. If you hate the pose, it's because you're new. You haven't done it enough. When you do this pose more often, even if you're still stiff as a rock, you will enjoy this sensation.

Let's switch sides. If it's hard to get out of the pose, that's a perfect sign. You did it right. And side set up from plank pose.

And yes, hello. This side is much stiffer. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one that gets a sting of guilty conscience. Why am I not doing this more often?

It feels so good and the results are so nice. Why don't I do this twice every day? But hey, once is better than never. We're doing this hip stretch in a forward folding manner, which means that to create a nice flow, we have to counter this pose with a back bend.

So enjoy the feeling of folding forward and we will wake up out of this in a minute with some back bends. And let's start moving out of the pose. Move forward into plank pose and turn your thumbs forward. Place your knees in the ground and drop your hips.

And use your biceps to push your chest through the arms. So try to push the chest forward while you drop your hips and voila, we have a back bend. If you have lower back pain right now, not good. You need to go down to your belly and prop up on your elbows instead.

So this way it's very easy to regulate the intensity and stop before you get a symptomatic pain. If you're fine, well and dandy, knees in the ground, chest forward, shoulders back. Open up space between the front of your ribs. Two more breaths.

And after this cat pose, round your spine, chin to chest. Take at least 10 seconds to crunch your core and stretch your spine. We're countering the counter. We do the forward fold, we do the back bend, now we engage our core.

The next pose will be similar to this one. We will do a squat on top of our arms called crow pose, which is an arm balance. And the same rounding of the spine that we have now we will use in the next pose. So look forward, spread your fingers, point them forward.

Now sit down in a squat and make sure your knees are touching your arms. The higher the knees goes, the easier it will be to balance. So look first, I bend my elbows, I lean forward and then I round my spine. I can't be flat like this.

That's only for balance. We're trying to engage and round and use our fingertips as brakes. Take your feet together and try to lift them off the ground. If your toes are touching like mine are, the pose is equally worthy as if you're lifting your heels.

So try to balance on your fingers, even if your toes are slightly touching the ground. It's just more scary, scarier when you lift your feet, but the intensity is the same with the toes in the ground. Give it 10-15 more seconds. I know even if you're overtrained, if you're tired, we still need a little bit of this juice, this fire to make the practice well rounded.

Nice. Sit down on the butt, roll back into the same pose, but on your shoulders. So we're still in the same forward rounded position. This is the last pose we're going to do before we counter these intense rounding forward folds.

If your neck is not okay, don't go as far back. Just pull your knees in. Three more breaths. It's time to counter.

Straighten your legs straight like Sharashana. Now we start by engaging. We're going to do this in three levels. So the first thing we do is just lift the butt off the ground and tense your back muscles in the legs and the back.

Five breaths. One. Lift your hips. Two.

Three. Four. And five. Relax.

That was step one. Step two, bend your knees, lift your hips off the ground. Tiny bridge pose. Stretch your arms overhead and try to lift your solar plexus, your sternum, your chest bone up to your chin.

If you're trying to lift your chest towards your head, you get a nice neck stretch. You can probably feel your lower back. I want you to squeeze your butt muscles and push the hips up. Push the feet down into the ground.

Really engage your butt. This is not supposed to feel good. It's supposed to counter the other poses we did. Let's counter the counter with a happy baby.

Grab your feet and pull your knees and your butt down. Do you feel how different this one feels compared to the first one we did? Same pose, completely different feeling. That was step two.

We have yet another step in our counter sequence to the forward folds. We're going to do a half bridge pose. Feet down, hips up, hands close to the ears. I like to point my fingers out and my thumbs are pointing the same direction as my feet.

Then I lift my hips as high as I can and then I lift up to the top of my head. Not the top of my forehead, mind you. The top of your head. You should not be looking down into the ground.

You should be looking forward or up. Squeeze your elbows together. If you get a blood sensation taste in your nose and mouth, that's only a problem because you haven't done this enough in a while. Squeeze your butt.

Everything I said before is true. Squeeze your elbows together. Squeeze your knees together. Take three more breaths.

Stop complaining inside your head. And lay down. Kick your left leg up and grab your calf or ankle. Under the counter with some nice stretching.

Switching sides. So the trick to make a good yoga class, I use the same tricks as a professional chef, someone who is really good at a recipe. You know that the amount of ingredients really, first of all the ingredients really makes up the dish. But how good the dish tastes depends on how much of each ingredient you put in and which order you do them in.

If you want a well rounded, well good tasting nutritious dish, you need to select your produce, the stuff you're going to put in. You have to find the right order to do, to put them in the pot and you have to find the right amount of each. That takes many tries, many failings. But when you get it well done, when you really know the amount, the order and what to use, then you are a master of that dish and you can do it many, many times throughout the rest of your life and still enjoy it.

Let's twist. Feet down, knees left, right arm to the right. A supine twist like this tends to get too intense too quickly. Try to not go too deep too quickly.

Every third or so exhale, you can experiment with increasing the intensity. This pose is nice because you can use your inhale to take you out of the pose and exhale to go deeper into it. The rhythm of the breath really makes the pose easier and harder. Switching sides.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. One more breath.

Move back to center and take a couple of breaths on your back. You can tilt your knees in towards each other. I always find that really hard to say. Towards each other.

Grab your belt again. Final pose on this side. Kick your left leg up. Grab the belt with the right arm.

Your goal here is to get the right elbow over your head like this. Your right arm goes over your head while you hold on to the belt. Then you can place your left arm under your left butt and roll your left leg over your left arm. Now your left leg is pulling your right biceps into your ear.

Hopefully the left hand is stopping your leg from falling too far. I'm not sure if your proportions of your body allows for the same balance as the one I've found. This is one of the weird poses that I keep coming back to because it feels so weird in such a nice way. We're getting hamstring.

We're getting to the inner thigh. We're getting a huge side body stretch through the right side. If you relax your neck you might even get some neck stretching here through your right neck. The pose is difficult to set up.

Difficult to find the right intensity. It turns out to be one of these unique dishes that satiates you and makes you feel really full and complete after you've done it. Experiment with a deeper breath. Take five more super deep inhales.

To get out of the pose first lower your elbow down to your chest. Then pull your leg back and switch sides. If your arm is not supporting your leg then I recommend that you position your yoga mat and yourself close to a wall. So that you can scoot out from the wall so that your foot is just barely touching the wall for support.

I don't want you to be falling over so that you're laying on your right side. I want you to be flat on your back. For me personally the struggle in this pose is to engage the grip so that I can hold on to the belt without tensing my armpit and my biceps. So I can in theory squeeze the fingers and grip without squeezing my whole left side.

In theory, in practice it's a different story. It's much harder than I make it sound to relax your left side and keep holding on to the belt. But that's the practice. We call it a yoga practice not a yoga performance because it's a constant practice.

The better you get at whatever you think you're getting good at the more you discover that there is to discover. Five really deep breaths. And then we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again.

So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. And then move out of the pose and lay down on your back for Shavasana. As simple as that.

Five minutes on your back. If your phone starts ringing let it ring. If your partner starts screaming at you ignore them. These five minutes are holy time.

A chance to find back to yourself. And then we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again.

So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again.

So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again.

So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again.

So we're going to do the same thing again. So we're going to do the same thing again. Ah. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Inhale. Exhale.

Nice. Pull your knees to your chest gently. Give yourself a hug. And experience the feeling of this reward that we have been through.

This 60 minute reward. Of good prioritizing. If you start your days with a healthy breakfast and a nice yoga class. Few things can make your day turn sour later on.

Roll up to your butt. Cross your ankles. Take a quiet moment to reflect and digest. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Thank you guys on the interwebs for practicing with us today. Thank you guys for coming.

Namaste.