Plank Tutorial: Master Core Strength for BJJ (9-Min)

Because when you're learning things, if you're doing it incorrectly for a long time you're creating a pattern that is not helpful. Engaging the legs means you're squeezing the legs together and in all standing and plank positions, if we were ice cream we would just melt and fall apart. When you relax the body it kind of tends to flop outwards and that's how gravity works. So what we want to do is push everything in towards the center line.

We don't want to create width here unless we're doing a like a wide push-up. We want to squeeze everything in towards the middle to stay centered. Now let's try these things in actual plank pose. We start with the knees down, walk the hands far back and you're going to feel that it hurts the wrists a little bit.

And when you walk the hands far forward you're going to feel that this is an ab workout. You want your hands somewhere under your face, most people tend to have the hands too far back. But this is something you're going to adjust every time you get into plank pose. You're going to try to figure out where your hands should be today.

And then squeezing the elbows and the arms in towards each other, you can feel that activates the chest a little bit. Squeezing the knees together activates the lower core and that's plank. If you keep everything as is and you just lift the knees, that's a full plank, knees down, modified. If you do that a couple of times you're going to feel that it's not a lot easier to do it with the knees in the ground, just a little bit.

Okay, why are we looking at plank first? It seems kind of boring. Well when you have the position of the hands and legs you can move from there. We don't want to create a position where we can't move in and out of it because the type of yoga that we're learning is dynamic, meaning we're switching from one leg to the other, from hands to feet, from one position to the other.

So we really want to have a stable position where we can do many things because that's how we do jiu-jitsu. You don't want to have a jiu-jitsu position that you can't escape or that you can't get into. So we're biasing the whole yoga around jiu-jitsu. Let's look at a couple of more details.

We don't want necessarily a hundred details but we want the concepts to be here before we start flowing because it's going to be there in the back of your mind. And even though you're not actually maybe learning anything by watching this video right now, we're planting the seed so that we can get back to that later and reference it and then suddenly when you least expect it it's going to click and you're going to get it. So don't think that this is like a transfer of my knowledge to you, this is just planting the seed. So in plank let's experiment dropping everything down.

Keep your butt up but drop the belly, drop the chest and look forward and hang like this. And then do the opposite, push, squeeze, lift and run. So get as high as you can and then get as low as you can but don't lower your butt because then you're just in a in a back then. So try to arch and hang and then push and squeeze and contract.

So head drops, chest drops, knees drop and then pushing off. Just a few reps of controlled pushing and pulling is enough to give my shoulder back and give my shoulder blades a nice workout. Another thing we can do, I like to create dynamic exercises like that to learn something and not not learn theoretically but actually learn that oh aha and uh uh-huh. Another thing we can do looks like this.

High plank, touch the elbow, place the elbow down, touch the arm and now we're in forearm plank and then we lift up into high plank. We can do this with the knees in the ground too. One elbow down, other elbow down and up and your challenge now, check out your arms, your challenge now is to do that without wobbling the hips from side to side. Why?

Because our core, the trunk muscles, they are stabilizers and that's their main job. The main job of our abs is not to contract, it's to stabilize. The core should stabilize and when we do this without wobbling the butt we are stabilizing. That's it.

One final challenge is coming from plank down to the belly and coming up again. Not necessarily a push-up because we don't really do many push-ups in, we do a few but we call them chaturangas where we're coming through a really challenging position in order to set up for a back bend because both yoga and jiu-jitsu is extremely forward biased. There's a lot of contracting and pulling and squeezing and not so much extension. So when we're coming down from plank, we're going to talk about this in another video, but when we're coming down from plank we are trying to lower down so that our belly and hips touch down but not our forehead and shoulders.

So here this is kind of like the complete opposite of the plank, so we're squeezing and then pushing all the way up to plank. So this is one expression of plank and then as we're lowering down we're completely changing the bias of the position into the opposite. So in plank we're pushing squeezing and pulling and straightening and then as we lower down we do the opposite. We do the same but on the back of the body.

So there was a couple of things, a few things we talked about and felt the purpose of the plank you can feel the shoulders, you can feel the legs, you can feel the hips, they're working in plank. Now we can do a million variations from that but in in Downward Facing Dog that's coming soon, we're going to bring that tension and length that we create in plank and just bringing that into the next position. That's one of the principles that we use a lot. We learn something in position A and then we bring that energy into the next position, into the next position and with smart sequencing that's what creates that great effect of the flow that you're going to feel later.