Sarah Draht · 11 min · 1,900 words
Sport-physio mobility and warm-up concepts for playing or teaching open guard. Move better and skip the cookie-cutter warmup.
Hi there, Joel Kriska, sport physiotherapist back here today and I want to talk about some ways to kind of help do some warm up or a little bit of a flow if you're going to play an open guard or you're teaching an open guard. And I really think it's important that we, especially as instructors, ensure that we're not doing like a cookie cutter kind of warm up where we're doing jumping jacks and pushups and somehow that's supposed to transition into what we're doing with a sport specific task. So there's no issue with doing that from a cardiovascular standpoint, but we should really try to work from a generalized conditioning, generalized task to a very sport specific task. And in this case today, like I said, we're going to, I want to talk about an open guard way to kind of get your hips moving and get your back moving so that we minimize the chance of injury.
So the first thing that we're going to start with here is making sure that we can get into a deep squat. And so we might want to take people, I'm not going to go through it right now, but we might want to get people working on some squats and you know, really getting their legs moving and we might even add a little bit of twist or those kinds of things into it. What I want to really focus on here is making sure that we start to encourage our students and ourselves to get down to a full squat where our knees are up near our armpits. This is really hard for some people and you think about it in jujitsu, we do it technically all the time.
And really what we want to try and focus on here is having a neutral back and our heels flat. Now, if we can't do that early on, most people, when they come down to a full squat, they get into this really bent thoracic kyphosis is what the term is called, like a big C curve in our back. You notice it goes from my back all the way up to my head, like a big curve. And I really want to be here.
This is way more powerful. And if I was in someone's guard, I would never let myself do this. So I want to try and be up tall and obviously on my heels or at least flat foot here. If people can't do that, you can let them get up on their toes and that helps them to straighten their backs.
So the first thing that we want to try and do is encourage this little bit of rocking motion to try and get lumbar flexion, lumbar extension, a little bit of stress through our ankles and just kind of warm up everything. So again, I can do it as a squat, come down and reach. If I have to, I could come down to squat and get up on my toes. So we train these movements to happen where the person feels as comfortable as possible.
And so then from that position in the deep squat, I want to start to work on reaching. Okay. I'm reaching and I'm twisting and I'm coming over top and doing nice, big side flexion reaches, but in a deep squat. Again, for people who have a problem getting their heels down, they can stay up on their toes and do it.
It's a little bit more of a balance act, or you can put your gi underneath here. But again, I want to be in a deep squat and I'm working on thoracic flexion or sorry, lumbar flexion and thoracic rotation and then lumbar and thoracic side flexion. So we're really getting our backs warmed up in a deep squat. Okay.
People aren't going to like it if they're not used to it, but it really encourages them to work on their squats. Now, the next piece of this is we want to start to work on a butterfly position. So again, this is one position. If you're going to be an open garter, it's really, really, really important to be able to work on your butterfly.
If you look at 10th planet practitioners, they are super flexible in this position. Okay. So again, there's, it clearly takes work, but it pays off. And just to be like on a side note here, I have a back injury that doesn't let me touch my toes.
I am, again, I've worked at this for years and it's really, really hard for me to get this. This is actually quite a bit of an improvement. Basically because it stresses the sciatic nerve in the backside of my leg. But when I open up my legs a bit, I can go all the way down and more.
So that's how I know it's the sciatic nerve. And if you have students that can't touch their toes, there's ways to work on that. Again, we work on having a little bend in our knees and we reach and be tall through the torso. And we work on getting our knees straight.
That's not what we're talking about here, but the same concept applies is that if I have someone who doesn't have hip flexibility to bring their hips in, then we start out here and we work on again, having a nice tall torso and reaching, or again, I start to work on some of these thoracic and lumbar movements in this position. It's not just about bringing my knees in and cranking my knees down. Okay. It's very, very important that we play with this in lots of different positions.
So I might start out in this very open space here and I work on coming down and bringing my forehead down to my feet. I can then also start to work on bringing my feet in slowly and reaching down, bringing my head to my feet. So we work on again, in the first part, squats with reaching and movements, and now we're starting to work on butterfly position with forward reaching. The next part of this is we want to bring our elbow to our knee and I'm going to start to rotate up and over, almost like I'm giving someone an elbow like this.
And as I do it, I want to look at my hand, and then I go to the other knee and I look at my hand. So I'm effectively working on my thoracic stability. I'm stable here and I'm squeezing the muscles between my shoulder blades to open up and rotate. And we often, people will try this exercise in a full deep squat and doing that, which is another option when we're here is our hands are down and we're working on rotating.
And you won't be able to see my hand here because I'm trying to focus on the hips, but I am just looking at my hand. There's nothing else going on here. And we do the same kind of thing in the butterfly position. From that, we can also look at coming here and coming nice and over.
So we get a nice side flexion and side flexion. So you notice that I'm spending a fair amount of time with my hips in a full deep squat and a butterfly position that we can play with the range of where my feet are. But I start to work on movements with my torso, either flexion, rotation, or side flexion. And you'll see that people really appreciate this for their backs.
Now, the last piece of the puzzle here that I want to talk about is making sure that you get good at baby pose, happy baby. It's fantastic for an open guard. Now, essentially, if you're not sure what that is, what I'm doing is laying on my back and trying to grab my own feet. And if you can't grab your own feet, that's fine.
Just grab your shins. But the ultimate goal is to flex your hips enough that we start to bring your knees right into the elbow, sorry, armpit area. And some people, you know, they can get a little bit more flexible and their feet are coming way over their head. That's definitely not me.
If you can get it though, again, your regard scenarios are going to be way better. But one thing that I wanted to talk about that I don't think is really mentioned enough is from a regard perspective, it's not good enough just to have flexibility up over our shoulders. Again, like that just basically prevents an inverse stack on your neck. And you're taking the load through your hips and legs.
And that's great. But we want to make sure that if we look at our hip, it's got rotational movement here, which is part of that regard. And when I get up top here, I start to lose a little bit of that rotation for some people. So first step is to work on happy baby and getting your knee in your armpit.
The second part of this is starting to work on cranking your hip into an externally rotated position. Okay. So again, what I'm doing here is I'm using my elbow and doing a grip on my foot. And I'm trying to pull it over towards either my opposite hip or my opposite shoulder.
So I can show you hopefully here is that I'm hooking here and pulling over. I can have my elbow on the outside and I stabilize my hip here. But you can see how this is much more appropriate to a regard. So I then grab here and pull over and play with that position.
Maybe I do it in a more knee bent position or I do it in a more knee extended position. Like I'm up over my shoulder. These are the kinds of things that we have to encourage to ensure that there's flexibility in your low back, there's flexibility in your hips. And then when we start to strengthen, like some of the other things that we've talked about in terms of clamshells and deep leg raises and segmental rollbacks and teddy bears to headstand.
Now we're not just getting mobility or range to move our hips and low back. We're starting to incorporate strength in them. And these kind of drills that we just did, if you, again, I could be in this position and be fully on my side and crank here. Maybe I'm not on my back.
Maybe I want to get right on my side and I really crank that over. Or maybe I'm just here and I work on lifting my foot up. But you have to have the concept of thinking about, I want spinal flexion, hip flexion, and then rotation, side flexion, all these kinds of movements around to really help your students get better flexibility and more importantly, control of those movements so they're not getting injured. And they're actually able to do some of these amazing things that we can do in jiu jitsu.
I hope you've learned something today. I hope it helps you out and I'll see you soon. Have a great one.
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