Inverted Guard Yoga for BJJ: 19-Min Class (Day 4)

That's the only way you're going to get flexible if you start to enjoy being stiff. You can't really force yourself to flexibility. You have to relax in order for the muscles to release the tension that you have in them. Take six deep in exhales.

All the way in on the inhale. All the way out on the exhale. And then release and up to all force. Step your left foot forward.

Bend your front knee. And now today, let's not let's just not go a little bit. Let's move all the way back so that your left hamstring is stretching insanely. You can keep the knee bent and try to fold over your leg with a bent knee.

Or you can try to stay high and flex the foot so that toes on the left foot points upwards. Stretch the whole backside of your knee, your thigh and your calf. And then move forward again, pushing the hips down, maybe even lifting your back knee. If you can't reach the floor, place your hand onto objects, blocks or whatever you have.

And then go back again and try to either straighten the knee completely straight or fold over the leg as far as you can go. Do a couple more on your own. Breathing deeply while moving back and forth. One more.

Switching sides, right foot forward. Take a couple of breaths here. And then slowly lean back. Keep contact between your thigh and your chest.

Or lift as high as you can with the upper body and straighten the right leg and point the toes up, flexing the foot. Move back and forth four or five times. And since you're not staying in the pose for more than a second, you can go to 90-95% unless you have a recent injury. If you're fine, then just push as far as you can go without overreaching the limits.

But half a second is more than enough for your muscles to be able to resist it if it's too much. So even if you push 90-95% 100% just for a second and you do it slowly, then the risk of injury is slim to none. Alright, sit back on your knees. If you need something under your butt, place something under your butt.

And again, lean forward first and then tuck your hips under and sit straight up. If this hurts your knees, just make sure you elevate your hips onto something. And then lean back. And today we're not going to support with our hands.

We're going to strengthen our core and really squeeze our butt so that we stretch the front of our hips. Ten breaths here. Again, we stretch the front side in order to be able to contract it more. So if you get flexible on the front side, the front side is also going to be able to hug the knees closer to your chest.

Eliminating the space in your guard so that the guy has not much space to dive into. Because the more space you have between your upper body and the thighs, the easier it is for him to get a knee or his head in and force his weight to side control. And that's really why we're doing all the stuff we're doing. To be able to resist the guard pass.

Three more breaths. Alright, let's talk about inverted guard. Because when I say inverted guard, you're probably thinking about this as inverted guard. But this is actually just shit.

This is not the position you ever want to be in. Because there is no submissions or attacks or sweeps or ways to control your opponent from here. This is a pure defensive position. And you actually don't want to be there very often.

So what we're going to look at instead is options for the full inverted guard. Where you kind of stack together like this with all the weight in your neck. So we're going to do a couple of wall exercises to get some options instead of this one. So make sure you have a non-slippery surface under your shoulders.

Place your feet to the wall. And lift your hips high. So go as far as you can go. And if your neck is hurting already, maybe you have to put a blanket or something under your shoulder blades.

So that your neck can point a bit more backwards. So you can elevate your shoulders up onto something. And keep your head off of the elevation if your neck is hurting. Alright, so first thing we're going to do here is just move the hips from side to side.

This is actually something you should do every Jiu Jitsu warm up. Work with the feet against the wall as if the wall is your opponent. And you're controlling his arms, you're controlling his hips. And you're moving your hips.

So move around in circles, up and down, side to side. You can relax your hands down. And kind of push your shoulders down. So that you have weight into your shoulders.

And now we're going to do something tricky. We're going to lift one shoulder off the ground and lean into our other shoulder. And release down. Not too much, just slightly.

Lean all the weight into one shoulder because that way you don't have any weight into your neck. Go from side to side and don't exaggerate. Just do it very subtle in the beginning. And then after a few hundred repetitions you might start lifting up higher.

Go a couple of times from side to side. And then lower your hips down. Stretch your legs up the wall. And either let them fall out to the side or bend your knees.

Take five here. Stretching the inner thighs. And if your legs are straight, also the back of your thighs. So we're already learning how to move and breathe when we have the weight stacked into our shoulders and our hips are elevated.

The downside with having the hips elevated is that the guy can control my back here. But the upside is that when my hips are high and they're heavy, when I move my hips down there is nothing he can do to stop them. So if I learn to control my hips from side to side, then it's going to be hard for him to control. Because my hips are big and heavy and if I can move them they're a good weapon.

So what we're going to do now is place the feet in the wall again. Move the hips over to the left. Move the right arm under. And lean my whole hip weight into my right hand.

So instead of being straight to the wall, I'm moving closer to the wall with the right arm. And then trying to get my right foot to the ground or right knee to the ground. And even if I'm like a hundred inches away from the floor, stay there and let the weight of your right leg weigh down. If your wrist is hurting you need to find a better positioning of your right arm.

But when you master this you will be able to balance on your right elbow here. But we're using the wall for support. So push the hips up from the wall but also lower your right leg to the floor. This is a nice alternative to the inverted guard.

This is kind of a spider guard going so deep that it's almost inverting. Take two here. And then get back to the middle and take a break. Legs up the wall or maybe hug the legs closer to your chest.

Take five. And if you can feel your lower back, good. If your lower back is spasming and you're screaming in pain, not very good. But sometimes it's hard to know the difference because if you're not used to use your lower back correctly, it might feel, the sensation might be similar to pain, but it just might be that you're working the lower back correctly.

So don't give up just because you feel something there. Okay, second side. Hips up first. Move the hips over to the right.

Elbow under your hips and lean your hips into your left hand. Your left foot is probably not going to be able to reach the ground and that's not important. What's important is that you learn to tweak the hips up and lower the leg as much as possible. You might support your back with your right arm as well.

So both arms are supporting your hips. And don't be discouraged just because it feels super hard and weird. Jiu-Jitsu is the weirdest thing ever. First of all you're wearing pyjamas and then you're wrestling like crazy and you're not punching or biting each other, but it's still a matter of life and death.

So it's really weird. So this is just like one pixel out of the Jiu-Jitsu image. This is a weird pixel, but you have to learn to enjoy this one if you want to be able to play the inverted guard one day. One more breath.

And lower down. What we're going to do now is the classic one, the ankle over the thigh, triangle stretch. Take half a minute here. And again you can slide the top foot down the wall and that way your ankle will get closer to your chest.

But when you see the flexible guys grabbing their foot and pulling their foot to the nose, never do that. It's stupid. Even the flexible guys get their outer meniscus hurt this way. What you want to do is hug the knee toward your armpit and get close with the thigh instead of getting close to the foot.

Alright. Take another breath here. So if you're going to hug, hug the knee, don't hug the foot. Switching sides.

So you can start with your hips elevated. Make sure you're not sickling the foot but have the ankle over the thigh. And then when you lower the hips, try to relax your butt, but engage the foot, engage the knee by flexing the foot. And maybe even hug the knee closer to your chest.

If you have a big belly opposing your legs, try breathing with your side body instead. So try to breathe with the ribs and your waist instead of belly breathing or chest breathing. You can actually breathe with your back too. So if you breathe into the floor, you're fine.

Alright, both feet in the wall. Again, lift your hips. Move over to the side with the hips, to the left, to the left side. And then right arm under and now get up on your shoulders.

So we're combining the two things we did. So you're using the wall for support, you're pushing up on your shoulder. And if this was jitsu training, you might come up on all fours and then go back and kind of matrix around the wall. Move the hips over to the right, leaning into the left elbow, getting up on your shoulder, trying to get the foot down to the ground.

And go from side to side. So this is a great exercise to learn how to manipulate your weight on top of your shoulder blades. Never lowering your hips, keeping the hips elevated from side to side. Let's go a few times back and forth.

Never putting all the weight into your neck. If it's too hard, then just move away from the wall and just do it 25% like this. I don't care if you're complaining about it being hard. Of course it's hard because you never did it before.

One more from side to side. And roll all the way down. Get back up to a squat position. You can place something under your butt or you can place something under your heels.

But today, instead of folding forward and trying to mimic the inverted guard position, lift your chest as much as you can and stretch your chest. Five more. Five more. And what we just did is more or less everything you need to do about the inverted guard.

Tomorrow in the next session we're going to put it all together into a long sequence. A sequence that you can do before any Jiu-Jitsu session, especially if you feel that your lower back or your neck is hurting. But what we did now is you will find nothing more relevant for Jiu-Jitsu than the stuff we just did. So thank you guys for doing this session with me and see you guys in the last video.

Tos!