Hip Flexibility for Beginners: 19-Min Yoga for Rocks (Modified)

Relax on the exhale. Inhale deep and slow. Exhale long and slow. If your mind is resisting, just breathe deep and focus on the breathing instead of your thoughts.

I saw a graffiti the other day that was really profound. I really liked it. It said, don't believe everything you think. And that is exceptionally true here.

You might think about the pose. You might have opinions about staying here, but don't let them affect you too much. It's just thoughts and opinions and ideas coming and passing. So if you can just lay here and stretch and breathe and not ignore, but kind of see through the ideas and thoughts you have about the pose, you're much better off.

Take three more breaths here. Now place your feet down, knees point straight up and then lift your hips slightly. Engage your glutes, your butt muscles and push your hips up. Take five breaths here just to counter what we did.

So engage your inner thighs, pull your knees a bit closer towards each other. And then slowly lower down. Straighten both legs up and then place your left foot in the ground. Bend your right knee and grab your right knee with your hands.

So again, if this is hard, use your belt around your knee or around your hamstring. And use the power of the arms and pull the leg towards you. So pull your right knee as close to your armpit as possible and stay here. Relax your right foot.

Hug your knee in closer to your chest or your thigh to your belly. And if you feel a crunching sensation in your right hip crease, please move the leg more out to the side because you have more range of motion on the outside of the hip than on the inside. So don't hug your knee towards your chest bone, your breast bone, but hug it more towards your shoulder and biceps. And the pose is meaningless if you're holding your breath.

So get back to that nice and smooth rhythm in and out through your nose if that's possible for you. If you feel the need of making this more intense, you can slowly stretch the other leg out so that your left knee becomes straighter. Stop wherever you feel like it. And as soon as you find stillness, come back to your breath.

So what we're doing isn't necessarily to become much more flexible. It might be that you feel more flexible and that placebo effect can be more than enough for you to actually improve your posture, your everyday life and your jiu-jitsu. Even if we were to measure scientifically the amount of percentage you increased your flexibility, maybe in a week or a month you just improved by 1%. But that 1% on paper doesn't transfer over to how it feels.

You might be as stiff as before, but you feel better and that changes everything. So I'm a firm believer in science, but I don't believe in science as such because it's limited. What we feel and the more subjective part of what we do is so much more interesting and important. So science has its place, but we can't really believe in it.

We have to take it into account, but also not limit ourselves just to the things we can measure. Switching sides. Pull the left knee in and place your right foot in the ground. So either grab your hamstrings, use a belt or grab your knee, but relax your left foot.

And instead of pulling the knee towards the middle, pull it slightly out to the side and stay here for a minute. So inhale slow and deep. Exhale long and deep. And if you need more intensity, then slowly straighten your other leg out.

Your right leg straightens out. Maybe not completely straight, but enough so that you can feel both the front, back and inside of your hips. Take a couple of breaths more here. And then straighten your legs out.

And then straighten your legs up. Shake them a little bit. Bicycle a little bit. And then rock up to a seated position.

So what we're going to do now is squatting, but I'm assuming that a normal squat is impossible for you. So what we're going to do instead is sit down on all fours, knees in the ground, hands planted firmly in the ground, feet a bit wider than normally. And then you slowly lift your knees off the ground. So this is for sure a squat.

This is a squat. It's just that we're leaning forward. And then we're going to do a squat. So we're going to do a squat.

And then we're going to do a squat. So this is for sure a squat. This is a squat. It's just that we're leaning forward.

So instead of going all the way back, come over, lean forward into all fours, into your hands. And then lean back and lift your knees. And then let's do this for at least 10 repetitions even more. Lean forward and lean back and lift your knees.

If your knees are hurting, lean more towards the other side. So inhale when you move forward, exhale when you lift your knees. Modified version rocking in and out of a squat. So when your knees are touching the ground, gravity is not working the hips.

And as soon as you lift your knees and the more you lean back, the more gravity is working to improving your hip mobility and flexibility. If it feels good to work your neck while you're doing this, you can multitask, stretch the sides and the back of your neck. You're probably feeling that your toes are quite stiff here as well and the soles of your feet. So that's just an added bonus.

Try to go a little bit deeper, push your arms straighter and lean more weight to the back of your heels. Maybe your heels are never going to touch the ground, but it doesn't matter. Just aim for the ground with your heels. Let's do a couple more and just widen our knees more.

So point the knees more out and the more intense it is, the shorter amount of time you stay in the pose. So if it's super intense, just stay there for half a second and rock forward again. So what we're doing is we're kind of hypnotizing ourselves with repetitions. When you do one or two or five, you can think about what you're doing.

But we're kind of using distraction as a tool here to forget what we're doing and let the body find its more natural rhythm where the mind and the brain and the thoughts aren't involved so much. And we can come back to a more intuitive way of using our body. Stop as far back as you can, drop your head, take five breaths. And then slowly sit down.

Stretch your legs out in front of you, hands behind you. Just shake your legs up and down and side to side. All right. So every day of the Yoga for Rocks Hip Week program, we're going to finish towards the wall.

And today we're going to stretch our legs straight up the wall first. So get your hips really close to the wall. Stretch your legs up and stay here for five breaths. And now cup your hands like a C, bend your knees and rest your knees into your hands and try to slide the feet away from each other.

So we're going for a wide. This is happy baby, but I'm assuming that you can't grab your feet here. So we're using the wall instead to push our knees into our hands so that we stretch both the back and the inside of our thighs. So find a comfortable position of the feet, so feet not too close together or not too wide apart.

Make sure the blade, the side of your foot is in the wall and your knees or your thighs are touching your hands. And it's OK if it feels awkward because we're going to rock a little bit from side to side. Again, hypnotizing ourselves by repetitions. Turn your thoughts, your mind in towards your breath.

Instead of projecting our attention outwards, we try to turn it and focus it inwards. Now stop rocking your hips, just relax and breathe and count to ten. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out And one more breath And let's sit back up with our backs against the wall. So lean back towards the wall and cross your ankles.

Just stay here for a few more minutes and just relax and feel this subtle sensation of change in your hips. You probably have really strong and tight muscles all around your hips, which is great in many aspects. But if we loosen up our hips just maybe 5 to 10%, our lower back and our knees are going to thank us for the rest of our life. Because Jitsu and a happy life is hard when your hip flexors and all the muscles around your hips are tight, too tight and overworked and exhausted and too weak.

So we're going to use this program to really relax those muscles and a little bit of really hard stretching as well, but mostly relaxing them in positions that are probably new to you. But trust me, progress will come when you are persistent and patient. See you guys in the next video. Oss!