Hamstrings Program Day 1: 25-Min Static Stretch for BJJ

If you can't, then you need to bend the knees more. And if you feel like you're rolling back, you have to sit up onto something, a pillow or sit in a slant, like slightly downhill. Make sure that you can rest your upper body on your knees. And when you have found a more or less comfortable position to sit in, let's start with the neck by just doing the sign for yes, the sign for agreement, nodding our head up and down.

I personally find it extremely difficult to go into a static stretching position as a start of a yoga or stretching sequence. I find personally that I need dynamic moves before I have any idea to know what a static position, which static position I should choose. I don't know my body well enough to go straight into optimal static position. I need every time I do something like a yoga stretching routine, I need to figure out where I am today.

And that's why I start by movement. And since this is an extremely simple pose compared to many other poses, we can focus, we can dedicate more focus to our breathing. So deep inhale when you go up and easy exhale when you go down. And you're on.

Inhale and exhale as you move. Now that we're getting a bit more comfortable, we can exhale slower and stay down with our head longer and feel the stretch from the neck down through our back down our spine. If it feels really good to stay down with your head, take an extra breath in and out before you go up again. So inhale up, exhale down and then stay down as you inhale deeply and exhale.

And then lift your head again. So a combination of dynamic and static stretching. Go up a couple of times more and then stay down. And then when you're staying down, inhale deeply and exhale.

You can probably feel that even though your body isn't moving, your deep breaths creates a kind of movement and a certain amount of tension in the fascia and the muscles that we're working. So if you can direct your breath backwards, you will get more of a stretch on the inhale and more release as you exhale. And the reason we have our knees bent is so that we do not stretch the hamstrings right now. We cannot stretch the back and the hamstrings at the same time if both are tight.

That is today's takeaway from this class. Separate, don't integrate and try to stretch two problem areas at the same time. The exception to this is if you are advanced in your yoga practice, if you've been training for a long time and you want to be efficient, then you can find a position where you can feel the stretch everywhere. But in order to be advanced, you need to have a subtle and deep understanding of your limits and you need to be able to regulate in order to get a good effect.

Sit up and let's do a couple more minutes. Just stretch the legs a little bit so that we can go a bit deeper forward. And instead of just holding on to in the front of our shins, try to grab your elbows under your legs. So not hamstring engagement, but try to move a bit deeper and hang over your legs.

If your feet feel weird in this position, if you feel like you can't relax your feet, I would recommend facing a wall and pushing the ball of your feet or the soles of your feet into the wall to have more support for the legs. Every time you do a static position like this, it must feel very stable. If it does not feel stable, you're not going to be static in it for very long. And static positions work on the principle that we have less intensity, but longer time.

Some poses are great because they're intense and short. Other poses are less intense, but in order to get a good effect, we need to stay there for longer. I can literally feel my back releasing now because I'm sliding and slipping forward with my heels. Not because my heels are sweaty, but because I can feel the connectivity and muscles surrendering to the breath.

That sounds like woo woo yoga lingo, but for me that is exactly what's happening. The tension is giving up, the muscles are letting go of their grip, and the nervous system is switching gears. Not literally, but figuratively. Let's take five more breaths in silence.

And since we have been here for a long time, use your arms to slowly raise up again. Never rush out of a position that you took five minutes to get into. Lean back into your hands and arch your spine slightly, countering the forward fold with a tiny back bend. Move your neck around from side to side, right to left.

We're not going to let a burglar alarm stop our yoga practice. So feel your spine now. There must be some difference between before we did the pose and after. For me it feels a lot better in the upper back and neck.

A little bit in the lower back, but not so much. Grab your strapper belt or use your extremely long arms. Right leg up, place the belt on the middle of your foot and make sure you're not pulling the big toe side. Imagine that the ceiling is a floor and stand with the foot on that floor.

I have grabbed not far from my foot. You might have short arm, long legs, both and even really inflexible hamstrings. Two things you can do to regulate intensity. One bend the knee, not too much, not too little.

And another one is to let go of the belt, not too much and not too little. We want to find a position where we can feel that we could go deeper. But as soon as you start pulling the hamstring, you get a response from the hamstring. You don't want to be pulling so hard that you get a response back to the brain that says ooo or aa.

That's not what we're looking for. We want to find a position where there is almost no response. The hamstring is just acknowledging that okay, something is happening, I'm not sure what, need to raise a red flag. And if static is too much, for me, I never had a problem with my hamstrings.

They were always super flexible until I started lifting weights. Then suddenly I could really start feeling my hamstrings for the first time. So day number one or two after lifting heavy weights, I feel like one of the Yoga for Rocks members that we have a lot of. And those days I need to use movement to start a hamstring stretch, just like most people.

So after starting lifting weights, I can really relate to what a stiff hamstring feels like. So either side to side or bend and stretch the legs a couple of times. The most common mistake I see people do in this position is bending the arms and pulling with the biceps, which makes no sense at all. Rather lift up, grab higher on the belt and let the weight of your straight arms and your back pull the leg with gravity.

Nobody wins a fight against gravity in the long run, not even your stiff hamstrings. Your biceps might give up because you're using improper technique. But if your upper body is pulling your hamstrings with just the right amount of tension, your hamstrings will tap out, give up and let go of their tension. Why are we not doing both sides at the same time?

That seems to save time and be more efficient. But as soon as you stretch both hamstrings at the same time, your lower back suffers. That is why we do a yoga sequence with the right foot first and then the left foot. So we do one sequence on one side and then the other.

And only then do we do both sides at the same time. We start with a standing sequence and balancing sequence and then after that we would do a straddle forward fold, stretching both hamstrings at the same time. You never start a yoga sequence in a straddle forward fold because you didn't prepare your body for that intensity. Release a little bit, bend the knee a couple of times and then let's do one more minute with a bit more intensity.

So grab as high as you can, fall back and try to pull your foot not down but just let your arms get heavier and go for 70% intensity. Now you want a hamstring response. Your hamstrings should be saying la la la la. But if you are frowning or if you're clenching your jaw or if you're holding your breath, don't stop doing those things.

Those things are trusted signals that you are doing this with too much intensity and the response from the hamstring is too great, which means that your nervous system is not reprogramming itself, it is just continuing to fight against a threat. Because if you pull hard enough, you're basically trying to submit yourself and in jiu-jitsu we don't try to submit ourselves just like in football, soccer you don't score goal when you hit your own goalposts, not posts but you don't shoot at your own goal. You're not going to be very popular and if you submit yourself in jiu-jitsu that would look silly and if you try to submit yourself in yoga that is equally silly but that is what I see again and again people try to submit themselves. Switching sides.

That is what we're looking for. It should take time to switch sides because then we know we did it right. If it's easy to switch sides fast, you didn't get the right response and you didn't stay in the post for long enough. So 30 seconds would not have been enough.

Minute and a half maybe but three and a half, four, five minutes, a hundred percent guaranteed. The reason that most people don't do that is because most people are impatient. Most people I would say are not patient enough to do a pose for five minutes and that is why most people struggle with inflexibility. I can't put it more simple than that.

Ironic perhaps but the more patience you have the faster your results will show. So the only thing working right now is the grips. The grips are working but the arms are not pulling their hanging from the rope, from the belt and your inner thighs need to work a little bit too to hold the leg straight. You can't relax the leg completely because then they will fall out to the left.

The art here is to just tense the muscles that need tensing, namely the fingers, the forearms, the inner thigh and try to relax everything else. If you are struggling you are doing it wrong, most likely because you are inexperienced. Take a good look at your next white belt jiu jitsu class. Look at how the poor buggers are suffering and struggling.

It is not because they are incapable, it is not because they are unlucky, it is simply because they are inexperienced those poor white belts. The struggle is different when you get more experience but it is more manageable. So if you are struggling now and you can't manage you are doing it wrong simply because you are inexperienced. Be patient.

If you are struggling you have two things you can try. First thing is to adjust, usually tone down, adjust down the intensity 10% and if that doesn't really help usually does then breathe deeper and that should about solve 95% of your struggle and your problems while doing yoga. Last minute more intensity, grab higher, don't start pulling just relax your upper body but make sure you get a nice response from the hamstring which should be like... If you have seen the really shitty movie War of the Worlds, no was it?

No, not that one, Man of Steel, that was actually a pretty good movie. When the guy, the villain comes from the planet and he wants to change earth into Krypton, his planet, he puts two aircrafts on either side of the planet and he changes the gravity of the planet which is really silly but the sound that it makes, these space ships when they activate their anti-gravity, blah blah blah, that is the sound we are going for. Your hamstrings should be, your left hamstring should be the space ship in Man of Steel. I really have to work on the efficiency of my metaphors.

Being a good communicator is not simply saying everything that you think about, note to self. Ok, come up, feel your back, feel your hamstrings, try to fold forward, much easier. We did two poses in 15 minutes and this is the result we get. Booyaka, this is how simple it can be.

I'm going to make another class now, a longer version of this with many more poses so if you have more time I recommend you to do that one next time. If you don't have that much time, do this class again. In a hundred years this class is going to be equally valuable to you and to your grandchildren because it simply works. Not because I am a terrific person, I am, but that's not why because it simply works because it does.

See you in the next video or see you on the mat.