Neck Mobility & Tension Relief: 13-Min Class (Week 1, Day 3)

So if you have acute herniated neck, this is not the program for you. This is for you if you have a stiff neck, if you have a little bit of pain in the neck, but it's not something acute and terrible. Right, let's try this with the hands off the floor. So place your hands on your legs and slowly move your head from side to side and front to back with your knees in the floor.

So this is strengthening your neck in the outer part, in the outmost range of motion. So you're rolling all the way to your eyebrows, all the way to the side, all the way to the front, make big circles or eight figure eights. And then breathing while you're doing this. And then sit back up on your knees and do the same motions, but without the pressure in the head.

Now feel how free, how free this feels compared to normally when you, when you're all the muscles around your throat, your neck and the sides of your head are engaged. So can you feel how much more control you have now that you have, you know how to engage those muscles. Let's do another round with an option to make it more intense. So hands down, knees up, so more pressure into your head.

Now you need to, if this is dangerous in any way, you should put your knees down again. But if you feel that this is exactly what my neck needs, roll from side to side, front to back and support yourself with the hands. So this is a combination of the last two. It's both strengthening and stretching at the same time.

You can try placing one knee down and switching. You can also move the hands depending on how strong your arms are. So feel free to experiment with this exercise. And sit back up again and go all four directions.

To the right, to the left, to the back and to the front. Nice. Grab your support for your hips. Lay down on your back with your hips on your object.

And then place your ball sack under your traps. So somewhere between your shoulder blades. This was probably a bad idea. So first balls, then block.

So with this extension of our hips, with this increased height of our hips, when we pull our knees into our chest, you're going to feel something magical or just, we can also call it torture. But now the pressure of our lower body as well as our upper body is pushing us into the balls. So for me, this is at least a 50% increase in intensity. So we're going with the balls between our shoulder blades.

But as you can feel, you're rolling into the balls. So if you lift your knees up again, this is actually a super nice way to massage yourself deep in between your shoulder blades. So you can choose if you want to stay still or if you want to rock your knees up and down. Oh my God.

Try exhaling when your knees are lowering down. And then inhale on the way up. If I were to name this exercise, I would call it Jesus Christ. Do a few more because it feels so good.

And if you're insane, you cross your arms over your chest like we did in the other days. If someone is watching you and they don't know what all the fuss is about, put them here and they'll know. A couple more. And if you have been moving, then stay here for five breaths and just let the weight.

We can even do the happy baby here if we want to play. So much pain, but yet so good. Lift the object away. Sit back up.

I just want to explain why I chose to include a sack of balls into yoga practice because traditionally this has nothing to do with yoga. But we can't limit ourselves to one pigeon hole. Just because this is yoga for BJJ doesn't mean we just have to do classical yoga because classical yoga will never give you this effect. You cannot do a yoga pose that gives you this pressure massage ball sack therapy.

You can feel it. It's amazing. It's like you have a new upper back after just a couple of minutes on the balls. I don't think there is any way to do yoga in that way.

Everything has limits. When we are smart and we learn the basics of each category of stuff we can do, if we learn the basics of Jiu Jitsu, the basics of breathing, the basics of yoga, and if we add in a little bit of smart tools like this then we can be super efficient and get a lot of control over how we feel. So that's why I chose to include the balls. I love them.

They work like magic for me and they're really cheap. Just a couple of lacrosse balls or tennis balls are just a few dollars. So why not? All right.

See you guys tomorrow. Us!