Shoulder Strength & Pressure Poses: 9-Min Tutorial for BJJ

You are inhaling in plank and then you exhale and you stop right there. And from there you move on into the up dog. So you are going into 90 degrees like you know when you bench press. You are strong when your arms are straight and you are strong all the way down here.

And when you start pushing up, when you reach 90 degrees, that's when you are, that's your weakest spot. So that's why we go down. This is my upper arm and this is my lower arm. This is plank and when we go down we stop right there.

We don't cheat and go lower because then it's easy again and we lose a lot of integrity in the pose when we go deeper. So you just go to 90 degrees and then up again like this. Plank, 90 degrees and up again and then we move on. That's it.

If you can make that happen then you have a really solid low push up. And your vinyasa are going to both be efficient and improve your strength and feel really nice. Second pose, one of my favorite poses of all time, side plank. Many small details here that make the side plank feel good and make you stronger.

But what you are probably going to experience is your hips are going to drop and your arm is going to shake. The shaking arm is okay, the dropping of the hips is not okay. So be okay with the shaking but keep your hips high and strong like this. You set up from the plank, you roll sideways and for beginners keep both feet in the floor like I'm doing now.

So I'm not stacking the feet. The feet are staggered as much as the feet in the ground as possible. Hips forward, hips up. So you're trying to lift your hips as high as your chest.

So you're getting a nice side stretch through your upper side here and you're contracting your lower side. Getting stronger there and getting more flexible there. Then you add on the arm, roll your shoulders back. That's it.

Okay, from the second side, turn sideways, don't droop your hips, squeeze your inner thighs. Hips forward, hips up. The arm is the least important thing. So it's the left side and the right side that is working.

You're pulling your shoulder back. So bottom shoulder is moving in and the arm is just there for show. Stretch the arm and look up and that's side plank. Okay, straight forward.

Be as straight as you can. Lift everything up and fight gravity. And of course when you have the pose, you find your breath and you start breathing. Then it becomes yoga, not just a pose and stretching.

So when you breathe and are connected with your breath in the pose, then you experience the magic. Last pose is locust pose. If you have troubles interlacing the fingers because you have a weathering ring, because you have a broken finger, or maybe it's because your shoulders are so tight that when you try to do this behind your back, you just can't do it, then you can either grab a towel, make sure your thumbs are pointing out. So you're not grabbing it like this behind your back.

Remember you want external rotation in your shoulders, because in jiu jitsu we're only in external rotation when someone is arm-barring us. So we want to compensate for that with what we do in yoga. We want external rotation all the time. So whenever you're grabbing something behind your back, thumbs are pointing away from each other, pinkies together.

So either grab a towel if you can't interlace your fingers, or hook your thumbs like this. It's not really possible to externally rotate when you hook the thumbs, but it's better than nothing. So I usually just do this and stretch out, but for me it's no problem to interlace, so I prefer interlacing the fingers. Okay, so just like cobra, so this is cobra.

Locust pose is just a no hands cobra. So interlace your fingers, or grab your towel, or hook your thumbs, and then lift up. And breathe. And breathing here is hard, because you're with your belly in the floor, and you usually breathe with your belly, so when there is pressure on your belly, you're kind of knee-embellying yourself, or floor-embellying yourself.

You have to learn to breathe with other parts, because your diaphragm is like this, and it's pushing down and pushing your belly out. So when the belly is restricted, you have to kind of not just use the diaphragm, you have to use other respiratory muscles. You have muscles all over here, opening up and resisting the vacuum, creating a vacuum in your lungs, resisting the atmospheric pressure. So you have to learn to use the technique and move your breath into other parts of your lungs, not just moving the diaphragm up and down.

So I want you to never have to tap to a knee-embelly again, because you know how to engage the core when there is pressure on it, and breathe with other parts of your body, and that's what you're learning in locust pose. So if you can stay here for 10, 15, 20 breaths, engage your lower back without cranking your neck, breathing deeply, and you're super tight from your butt to your lower back, all the way up to your neck, you're tight and strong and lifting, because it's the back that is lifting you off, and if you can find a way to breathe while you're in locust pose, that's very applicable and transferable from the yoga mat to jiu-jitsu. So I usually combine the side plank with the locust pose. Every time we do some side plank stuff, you get a lot of shoulder work, so it's really nice to stretch the shoulders out with the locust pose after, and you get the work to the spine instead of the arms.

I like that combination, and you're going to see that later in classes. Let's put these things together in the sun salutation A that we already know. So we do four sun salitations, and then we add in some plank work in between. See you in class.