Shoulder Mobility Program Day 4: 23-Min Stretching for BJJ

So it's almost like you're trying to dislocate your shoulders, but just with minor intensity. Switch legs. So kick the belt away and let your arms stretch. Exactly the same feeling we get when we hang from a bar, from a pull-up bar.

You're stretching the shoulders, but this angle is different than when you're hanging with arms overhead. I think it's one of the best things we can do for our posture and our shoulders is to hang a lot, but this is the second best. All right. Sit back up.

Let's take a down dog and try today to turn your fingers out so that the part between your thumb and index is pointing straight forward. So you can place the thumb on the inside of the mat and the fingers outside. Let's do a slow shrugging with the shoulders. Both pulling the shoulders up and pulling the shoulders down.

Place your knees down, cat-cow, but extra focus on the shoulders. So you inhale and arch and you exhale and round. But notice what your shoulders are doing in cat-cow. When you're inhaling, you're squeezing the lower part of the shoulder blades together.

When you're exhaling, you're wrapping the shoulders around your ears and spreading the shoulder blades. A couple more. Nice. Stand up completely.

This exercise I recommend you do at work. If you work at a desk job, this is a great exercise. I'm going to straddle so that you can see my whole body. Interlace the fingers behind your back and start with small circles.

So you can stand with straight legs, feet together or straddle your legs. But start with small circles and squeeze your shoulder blades together. So this is a whole body exercise, but I think it's great for the front of our shoulders to do stuff like this. You can go the opposite direction.

Keep pushing your arms away from your butt. And if you can't interlace your fingers, the belt is your best friend. Just grab the belt behind your back, thumbs out and keep going. Another option if you almost barely can interlace your fingers is hooking the thumbs behind your back like this.

So instead of doing this and not being able to clasp, hook your thumbs or make two circles and then push straight. Or use your belt, thumbs out, push your arms straight. So when you've done maybe a minute and a half of this, your hips and spine and shoulders should feel loose. And then the technique I'm going to kneel down, you can stand up.

Raise your fingers and push your arms straight. The technique here is not like you're lifting an Olympic weight with the head forward. Most of the lifters have the weight forward because it makes you strong, but it doesn't make you relaxed. So you want to straighten your arms, lift your chest and balance the weight of your head.

The head is heavy. So balance the weight of your head on top of the rest of the spine. So push the arms straight. If they can't be straight, go as straight as possible.

So this for me is straight. You can be slightly bent, but arms should not be in front and the head should not move forward. Up and back, up and back, up and back. Breath is essential because if you don't breathe, you're not staying for long enough in the pose.

If you can breathe, then a minute passes in an instant. Relax your arms, move your shoulders around. Next exercise, next pose, cross your arm over your chest and then grab onto your other shoulder like this. And when I see people do this, they do this.

And they shake their head and they're finished. We want to stay here for a minute. So grab your shoulder and hug it down. So hug your shoulder down and squeeze your arm in.

You should feel it obviously on the outside of the shoulder. Even if you don't feel a stretch, do this anyways. It's maintenance. If you feel a stretch, then it's progress.

Let's take ten deep in an exhales. I prefer inhales and exhales to breaths because in an exhales are easier to say. I hate saying breaths. It's difficult.

I wish it was called breaths. It would be much easier. Ten deep breaths. So your shoulder naturally wants to raise to avoid the sensation.

Hug your shoulder down and in. And release arms back. Inhale. Exhale, release.

Other arm. Grab the shoulder and pull it down. Hug your elbow in towards your biceps. Keep hugging the shoulder down and squeeze.

So I believe that we all know what the body needs, but most of us are too impatient to stay in the stretches that are good for us for long enough. So I told you we just, I see people do this, this, this and they finished in like three seconds instead of giving it some patience and three minutes, which would actually probably have a much more dramatic effect than just like the wake up stretch. So instead of doing a ten second wake up stretch, do a ten minute one and you will watch your muscles respond accordingly. Hug the shoulder down, squeeze the arm in.

And relax. So we're going to do the dolphin pose, the amputated dog again. But today grab your elbows. So grab your elbows, place the elbows down for a kind of a forearm plank and then just drop your head down.

So you're, you should not be able to see your arms here. Your head is under your arms. Your arms are overhead. If you cannot keep the legs straight, doesn't matter at all.

You can walk the legs further apart. You can bend your knees. Try to put your forehead in the ground and kind of arch your spine. Just stick your butt in the air and try to lower the chest.

If you can't breathe, you're doing it wrong. Can just place your knees down. But then for me, there is no intensity at all. I need to push my back, my butt back to get a stretch for the armpits here.

Let's take 10 breaths. I'm just going to call it breaths from now on. It's not wrong. I just rebranded it.

If you have a competition mindset, if you want to win in everything, then compete with deep breathing. See if you can inhale for 10 seconds and exhale for 10 seconds. One of the most prestigious yoga teacher in history, he taught yoga for 80 years. I think he could do like a two minute inhale and a four minute exhale.

It's insane. I'm going to show you how to do it on YouTube. Nice. Sit down on your butt and place the, you can actually grab the belt, thumbs facing inwards behind your back.

So you can grab onto the belt and move one elbow to the inside. You can do one elbow at a time. If you can manage to get both elbows on the inside, I'm just going to move this one. If you can get both elbows on the inside, then you can follow along.

Otherwise just do one first and then the other. So when you have the elbows on the inside, push your knees apart. Inhale, exhale, squeeze the knees together slightly. Go easy on yourself.

So inhale, push up and out. Exhale around. So it's like a seated cat cow. Inhale, exhale.

If you need something to sit up on too, you can do that. That can really help, especially if you're against a wall like this, then you can lean your shoulder blades into the wall and just do this seated. If squatting is better for you, then squat and keep doing it. Inhale and exhale.

Inhale and exhale. One more inhale and exhale. Stay here for five. Four.

Three. Two. One. And slowly release one elbow first and then the other.

And then stretch your arms back behind you to counter this. This is one of the two poses, one out of two poses that I know that can stretch these muscles, the subscapularis and the muscles that are on and wrapping around your shoulder blades. It's very difficult to get to. That was the first one.

We're going to do one more and then the second version. So again, belt the same way behind you, hands as close to each other as possible, and then just walk your hands back or place your hands down and walk your back forward. So it's probably highly unlikely that you will lay down flat here, but go as far as you can go. So before we did the palms flat bent elbow version, this is more of a nicer version.

It's not too intense, but still it's a nice stretch for the front of our shoulders. So this shoulders rounded forward, the only time you want to do that is when you stretch them. You do not want to have the shoulders rounded forward and down as a permanent postural problem. So stretching and doing this is okay, internal rotation and intense forward stretch.

That's nice. It's okay. But when I hope I made that perfectly clear during this four sessions that shoulders should be back and down the back as you're always putting your shoulders back and down when your arms are below your shoulders. Because the shoulders are kind of a, it's not supposed, the force is never supposed to originate from the shoulders.

The shoulder is just a medium of transfer. And when the shoulder is out of place, you're using the shoulder as a center of your motion. And you don't want that. You want the shoulder just to be a link, a joint, not out of place.

So when you pull the shoulders down, you connect your shoulder blades to your back and your torso is punching or lifting or whatever you're doing with the shoulders. So the shoulders are very fragile when they're out of place. They're extremely strong when you pull them in place. All right, that's it.

Release, shake your arms. Now interlace your fingers halfway so only the top knuckle is interlacing. And then you're trying to place this whole packet behind your back. So you're trying to achieve this.

So the thumbs can be under the shoulder blades. If you're extremely flexible, then place your hands more to the lower back. And then you lay down on top of your hands and you're basically kimura-ing yourself. So the weight of your body is doing a kimura.

If you're super inflexible, place the hands under your hips. If you're medium inflexible, lower back. If you're slightly flexible, then on their shoulders. I don't know any more levels, but that's the three I know.

Stay here and relax. Or if you want more for some reason, bend your knees and let them fall over to one side. Take a breath on each side and then your windshield wipe your knees. One breath on each side from side to side.

So you're kind of turning against the elbow. It's completely wrong from a jiu-jitsu perspective. You never want to turn into a kimura. Then you have to tap fast.

But here it's nice because the kimura done with medium intensity is actually very healthy for the shoulder. A really fast kimura that someone else is doing on you is something very different. So this is one of the two poses that I know and that I've ever seen that are working these small, really tight, really annoying muscles that gives us both headaches and really bad posture. And I believe that everybody that does jiu-jitsu eventually has to do rehab at some point.

And to make the rehab both more enjoyable and maybe avoid rehab altogether, we can do prehab instead. And this is for sure a prehab exercise. So instead of doing the exercise to build up muscles after we fucked up, we can make the joint and muscles used to the movement. And when it happens, next time someone puts you in a kimura, your shoulders have been there before and you might have time to tap or if it's a bad kimura, you might even escape.

Alright, get back up. One more for you. Either you sit with crossed legs or you sit on your knees. Sit next to a wall and it's like you have someone next to you that you try to push over.

So you just push into the wall. You should sit perfectly straight and your palm should be flat in the wall. And then hand on knee or floor and then you just twist away from the wall. So it's like you're doing a side plank into the wall.

And the pushing action through the right arm can turn the chest away from the arm. So we did this one before when we lay down on our back and did this one. This one is kind of, it's the same thing but it's also different. Push the hand forward and make sure your shoulder, again I repeat myself a lot, but roll the shoulder down the back and push through the arm and lift your chest.

Back bend here, not a forward fold. Five more. Nice. Switching sides.

Other arm into the wall. Your arm should be, your hand should be the same height as your shoulder, not too high because then it doesn't work. So lower the shoulder, lift your chest and twist. Eight on this side because I talked a lot on the first side.

In the beginning it's all about enduring. It's not hard, it's not difficult, it's just different. And relax the arms. Sit down on your knees and let's do slow circles.

Arms up, inhale. Exhale, hands back. And down. Three more, inhale.

So it's backwards swimming. Exhale, arms down. Inhale up. Exhale down.

Inhale up. And exhale down. Move your shoulders around. Maybe you feel difference.

I hope so. See you guys. Us.