Lying Twist & Hip Opening: 12-Min Mobility for BJJ

No, happy guard. Happy guard so you can hold the outside of the feet and pull the feet down and also push the feet into the hands. So use the hands to pull the legs down. Yeah, you try to not lift your shoulders head and hips try to push the hips down and you can also take one knee down to the side and then the other knee.

So you don't need actually use needs to pull the feet and just push the knee down with the feet over the knees. So you just push the feet into the hands and the hands into the feet and you can stay completely still or you can move a little bit from side to side. So happy guard pose. And after a few moments here we move on to the hips but before we do that it's nice to just stretch the legs up, stretch the arms up, move the fingers, move the toes, move the ankles, move the wrists.

It's always nice to get into those joints. And then we're moving into, we call it the figure four. So we flex the ankle and put it over the knee. So now here's the right foot over the left thigh and pull the left leg in and you can grab between your legs with the right arm, the outside with your left arm.

Someone likes to hold in front of their shin like Sebastian does, someone grabs the back of the thigh. I like, especially in the warm up, that people can move a little bit here. So instead of just lying completely still you can rock the hips around. So then you will feel which part of the hip is tightest and then you can stay there for a little bit, breathe.

And you have to notice if people are looking really tense here, if they, their neck, like if you sway your neck Sebastian, if you're on the top of your head, yes. So try to have them draw the shin in and lengthen the back of their head. If they have a gi jacket or something close by they can put it underneath their head. Just so you don't tense up the shoulders too much in this pose.

But it's pretty straightforward. It's not important that you flex the feet to protect the knees or anything, but it's nice to flex the foot to just stay active in the pose so you're not just resting in the pose. So you want to have some good tension when you're stretching here in this pose. And then it's the other side, so when you release you can just, yes, before we release we move into the twist.

So we have the twist with both knees together in the regular class. Here we keep the figure four. So same thing like we did with the regular twist is that we move the hips before we take the legs over. So you just use the bottom foot to push into the foot and hip escape the hips over to the right when the legs go over to the left.

So please just turn so they can look the other way. So he hip escapes, move the hips, but here he doesn't allow the knee to fall down like this into the twist. He keeps the knee facing upwards and the foot and the knee goes. It's pretty intense for the outside of the hip.

We move into the twist without allowing the knee to fall down. So the knee is facing up, the foot is down, the bottom leg knee is down. And this pose is actually, the more you relax and the less you tense up, the deeper you go. So if you're tensing up and holding, you won't feel as much as if you actually relax your hips and relax your legs.

You can also give a cue that will help people to deepen the pose and that is try to push the opposite shoulder down and also try to push the low back down into the floor. So that's our figure four twist. So it's a nice variation to the regular twist. It targets a different part of the body, which is usually really tight in most people.

So now we've done the figure four hip stretch and the twist. Then you just do the same on the other side. You do the figure four rocking around and then you do the twist. Now we're done just the pulling in, moving around, the happy guard.

We've done the figure four hips and twist and now we move into the bridge variation. So you want to put both feet down, hip width, pretty close to your hips, so not too far away. It will make the bridge really low. So walk the feet in, push into the feet and lift the hips and at the same time, at the same time that you lift your hips, you do a bridge to the side.

So you lift your hips, you bring one arm over to the opposite side and you roll onto your shoulder. So it's probably seen in jujitsu warm-ups if you've done warm-ups like this. So you come back down, lower the hips, lower the chest and it's nice to now push down. At the same time, you come underneath with the opposite shoulder and stretch the arm over on the other side.

So roll down. If you want to do it with the breath, it can be nice to inhale, push up, exhale, lower down. If people need more time to figure out, you can inhale, come up, exhale and then stay for a breath and then you can lower down. So it's nice to do things with in and out breath, but if you see it's too fast and people are not having enough time to actually move into the pose, you just give them an extra breath in the bridge, in the shoulder bridge before they come down.

So that's our variations from the back before we come up to a seated. And when we come up to a seated, we use the rolling up and down a few times. It's always nice for stiff back bodies to have this rock and roll up and down before we come up instead of just rolling one time, maybe five, six, seven times rolling up and down before you come up. Recap.

Recap. So we start laying down on our back, straightforward, we can have your knees together, straight legs. We give them the opportunity to take a nice stretch. It's always nice to stretch your arms, stretch your legs.

Maybe a yawn. And then they take their knees in, grab their feet and just move around. So one leg out to the side, to the other side, the head can move, everything can move. Then we do the more happy guard position where you just push the feet into the hands and push the hips down.

You can stay still or you can take one knee down, one knee up. Then we have the figure four. The hip stretch, you can rock and roll here, just moving the hips around or you can stay still. Then we have the hip twist, scoot the hips over to the side, foot down but knee up.

And then you do the same on the other side, the hip stretch and the hip twist. Then we have the bridge, the shoulder bridge. Feet close to the hips, hip width apart. You can roll onto the bottom shoulder and stretch the upper arm over.

After a few of these, maybe two, three to each side, we draw the knees in when we start to roll up and down. Allow them to have at least five rolls up and down. And then we are into our next section.