Mobility for Late Starters: 26-Min Yoga for 40+ (Part 1)

Hi gentlemen and welcome to the Yoga for BJJ over 40 program. I realized since we installed intercom on the website that many of you are starting BJJ after you're 30 and some of you even start training Jiu Jitsu after 40 or after 50 which is absolutely amazing but with of course the cost that injuries takes a long time to heal and our joints and muscles aren't really getting younger by themselves so we need gentle soft movements repetitively to maintain what you call it maintenance on our body we have to do a lot of maintenance on our body so we can't just we don't have nipples on our joints where we can just insert some lubricants we actually need movement every day in order to stay young in our joints so we will do a lot of nice gentle movements together nothing hard if you want something hard you can go for to the other programs so we will just do a lot of warm-up style exercises not focusing so much on exact technique or what you call it increasing anything just regular maintenance of our body okay grab your belt and lay down on your back we start with placing the belt around our right foot and instead of like in the other videos and other programs we're gonna do this one not static but dynamic so big start by medium circles with your leg so go one direction about two to three seconds for one complete circle one of the things I'm gonna repeat this throughout this series one of the things that we guys have that are getting older compared to the young guys we have one crucial ingredient that that is almost exclusively for older guys and that is patience you don't see find many middle-aged or older people who are very impatient that's more for the young young kids they have no experience so they're impatient but try to use that as much as you can when you practice yoga in jiu-jitsu you probably have a completely different game from the other kids switch feet so left foot up right leg down go in one direction so the young guys probably have a completely different game than you I'm assuming that your game is more patience based more pressure more hydraulics leverage and precision rather than lots of reps lots of speed and fainting and stuff like that so I want you to practice yoga the same way that you roll and spar and fight slowly and deliberately nice switch legs again go back to the first leg and go in the opposite direction so you can start going in the natural direction and then you switch and you might go in bigger circles to here if you want as long as you're not falling from side to side actually try to take the leg as far as you can without tilting over so that one hip lifts off the floor try to keep both hips in the floor and do big circles switch legs again left foot up go the opposite direction of what feels natural and make big circles without lifting your right or left hip off the floor try to keep your leg straight and the only go so far as that you can keep your legs straight that's not the only reason I wanted to keep your legs straight is to have one less parameter you only want one kind of movement you don't want to combine the bending the knee with a with a circle it makes it much easier for your body to adapt when fewer things are going on all right release the belt down and place your feet in the floor you can interlace your hands behind your head if that feels perfect for you and then windshield wipers from side to side take at least two to three seconds to switch sides so you can stay with your knees down for two seconds and you can use three seconds to switch over to the other side if you were to explain what yoga is for someone who has never heard about it or never seen anything yoga like you could explain them very like a very simplistic explanation is the stretch that you do after you stand up you have been sitting for an hour or two driving or just at office when you stand up you everybody every human being does some kind of stretch they arch their hips forward or they side stretch or they twist yoga is just putting those natural counter movements into a system so instead of just stretching your arms overhead and saying oh I feel stiff you do that 10 15 20 times and with different angles and you breathe at the same time so it's just a more advanced stretch than then the one you do after waking up in the morning or any kind of sedative passive like lack of activity we call it the down dog and the up dog those poses we call them because after a dog has been asleep it does those two poses to stretch out their bodies so again that's in order to get someone who has never done yoga before to do 15 repetitions it's pretty hard because your natural tendency is to just do one and then you feel slightly better after doing one stretch and it takes some discipline and some patience to do it 10 15 20 times because there is a threshold where it doesn't feel nice it starts feeling you're starting to fatigue and you start feeling how stiff you actually are and that's the threshold we need to get over right legs up in the air and then bicycles without focusing on core strength so instead of stretching our both legs out at the same time we try to keep the knees in like this so the knees meet over the hips so it's not so much core strength it's more hip joint mobility I like to do two things at the same time in this specific one I also pedal my feet so I get movement in the knees in the ankles and in the hips at the same time if it's too much to bicycle down to the floor you bicycle straight up instead so we're basically just working two different things in the yoga for BJJ over 40 program and that is flexibility and mobility we try to move the joints in as many directions as possible and we try to stretch our muscles and our nerves a little bit outside the comfort zone so the comfort zone grows right legs straight up you can keep on a little bend in the knee if if your legs if your feet doesn't come over your hips then bend your knees so that your feet come over your hip and then go legs apart and then together so just wrapping up and down like this slowly not in order to increase our strength in the inner thighs but more just to get a stretch in the groin and warm up the hips so instead of counting to five or ten we're probably gonna do between 15 and 30 reps in most of the exercises throughout this series I'm not gonna talk about breathing in and breathing out like I do in the other programs but I want you to do as many reps as it takes to get over the point where you think about what doing your the repetitions and the exercises are supposed to be so monotonous so monotonic that you stop thinking about what you're doing and you start relaxing instead nice three more and then feet down to the ground arms overhead and lift your hips take a couple of breaths here and engage your butt muscles so your hamstrings and your butt are contracting so your hips are and then lower your hips down lift your hips and lower the hips keep going and keep breathing now add on the arm so when the hips go down the arms go down and when the hip goes up the arms go pull your knees into your chest hug your knees for a couple of seconds and now start rolling up and down if it's hard to roll all the way up then just roll on your lower back if you can roll up to your butt you can do that as long as you're massaging your spine let's go for about 15 of these five more nice sit up on your butt and place your feet in front of you hands behind you and windshield wipe your knees from side to side again this is different from when we were laying down on our back because this is much more for the hips than the than the spine because now the spine can move together with the hips and you can push one knee down a little bit extra to get some juice into the hip joint and what i like about this one is that we get a nice shoulder stretch as well when you turn your chest you get hip and shoulders at the same time and one thing we can appreciate when we're in our middle age is that after the first five to eight repetitions that's more just getting into it and that's when all the the teenagers and the 20-somethings they drop out because they think that they know what is coming they think that just because they did five reps they know what the next 50 reps are going to be like and they give up immediately because they want to be excited all the time with new stuff but what you and me understand that they don't understand is that after you get into it you can start appreciate the small things like for example when i roll over my right hip there is a clunk when i go over the glute medius that feels really good that doesn't never that does never happen on the left side so every time i go over the right side i can really feel that muscle softening up and i would never feel that the first five reps because i'm too busy thinking about how far i should go and how i should breathe but after you get into the rhythm when you get into the trends of the movement you can start to appreciate the subtle things in what we're doing okay nice cross your ankles if your knees are high and your back is round like mine is now then you have to sit onto something so cross your ankles i if you have problems with the ankles you can place a pillow under the crossing of your ankles i usually do that when i'm when i feel anything going on in my ankles you can of course also sit towards a wall so you have a pillow or anything behind you so you're supported we're going to start by just moving our chest around in a circle so chest moves towards the knee and then over to the other knee and then back up so around and around we go this is on the my top three of all yoga exercises this is something i do every single day every time i sit on a yoga mat this is my first go-to exercise because it doesn't take any effort i could probably do a thousand repetitions of this one i'm supporting my hands on my knees to release even more pressure of the spine so normally if you don't use the hands then the spine have to activate a lot when you go forward but since i'm using the pressure of my chest and my triceps my spine learns to relax and that's when really things start happening in the lumbar spine go the other direction and like i said the youngsters they see no point in doing the second direction because they already think they know what's going to happen but what you will notice here is that when you go the opposite direction things are different it feels different coming up on this side than on the other side and in jiu-jitsu when you start doing your favorite technique on the left side or the wrong side or the right side no let's keep it to on the wrong side because right and right are two things when you start doing your favorite technique on the opposite side you feel that it's a completely different technique it feels so weird because you're just on doing it on one side but when you actually do that job you have to put in twice as much to learn it on the other side you have to double your workload in order to learn the same technique again but you notice after you did that work your understanding of your technique on the first side is on a new level so it's not just like learning a brand new technique you also upgrade your understanding you learn something for the first time again which is paradoxical but that's exactly what happens in jiu-jitsu when you start doing things on both sides and i think it's the same here so try that go back to the first direction again and you probably feel that it feels different doing this now after just half a minute doing the opposite direction try to freestyle a little bit rock from side to side maybe add on a little bit of looking from side to side you can speed up but i recommend slowing down taking your time see if you can use your arms to twist a little extra or maybe go deeper so that your head is closer to the ground so right switch the crossing of your legs let's do side stretching on your fingertips hands out to the side lift your arm and then bend your bottom arm so you are supporting yourself with the bottom arm but you're also releasing a little bit of that pressure in order to stretch your opposite side do one or two breaths on each each side try to stretch the lat and your whole side body from armpit down to the hips so this is how your car feels when it gets yearly maintenance service done to it imagine if you could only ever have one have one car when your one car breaks down you get the car when you're born and you're going to have it until you're 90 years old imagine how good care you would take of that car you know if it breaks down i'm never going to get a new one i can't get a bike i can't get a motorcycle when this car is done i'm done i have to walk everywhere imagine how great of a care you would take with that car you would never dream of fueling it with some cheap ass gasoline in a in a like the cheapest gasoline you would take it for service often and you would make sure if a warning sign started blinking you would immediately check it have it checked so why are we not doing that to our bodies well we are now but remember that every time you you fuel your body with with dubious substances and every time you are seated for more than an hour at length remember that you only have one car you only have one body in this life so take care of it as good as you would if you had a volvo from 84 or 74 if you want it to last for a lifetime you actually have to take good care of it all right all right last exercise all fours fingers out to the side wide arms knee and knees under hips straight arms all the time cat and cow so drop your belly down and look forward and round your spine and pull your head back towards your hips just keep going back towards your hips just keep going so five more so and last one so sit down on your knees on your or your butt let's finish each of these program videos with one minute of just seated meditation which means do absolutely nothing just let everything be and just feel your presence in your own body huh and open your eyes. I hope you guys feel better. Tomorrow we're gonna take it further and do lots of other exercises.