Sebastian Brosche · 7 min · 978 words
Three favorite spine mobility drills, done together for longer than usual. Build a strong, supple back for grappling.
Namaste motherfuckers! These are probably my all-time favorite three exercises and instead of just showing you them let's do them together for longer than usual. So start in a turtle position, spread your fingers, take a couple of breaths. And then lift your elbows, straighten your arms, look back towards your feet so that the top of the head is touching the ground and then engage the front of your belly so that you're curling your spine.
Slowly start transferring weight into your hands, curling your tailbone under your hips and I keep doing this until I can't do it anymore. Then I look at my belly as my rash guard is starting to uncurl and then I roll my shoulders back and push my chest forward. Then I lift my neck and I always have to move my neck here because I feel stiff and tight. So like this is that I make a lot of effort getting here and then I move my neck and that's the reward.
Then lift your knees and roll back to a dog. Then take a couple of walks in the dog, sinking one heel down, sinking the other heel down and I also like to rock my hips from side to side here. Then lifting your heels, rolling forward just the same way with straight legs until the knees are touching, rolling the shoulders back. I like having my thighs in the floor here, moving from side to side and then back to turtle.
So this flow between the turtle and the sprawl and the dog just gets so many parts of the body. It's both the hamstrings and the whole spine, the neck, the shoulders and even the lower back when I'm back in turtle hair. So it's just a simple, it looks simple but it's extremely complex. It's not complex to learn but there are so many things happening and there are so many opportunities to really dig into many areas of your body.
We're not doing side stretches and twists here but the whole front and back side I feel like it's really really doing something to me. We only did it for a couple of minutes but already I feel like I want to move more and I feel stronger by every repetition. Do one more for good measure. Nice and then sit down on your butt and shake your wrists.
That's one of my first go-tos to warm up front to back. Another front to back that I like to do is the reverse tabletop. I'm gonna do this on the knuckles. So feet and hands in the floor, lift your hips and squeeze your butt so that your hips are lifting.
I like lifting the hips so much that I can't see my thighs anymore and then the head comes back like this and then I lower down my butt to my heels and then butt back and lift. And then finding this flow. I used to go too fast here I started doing it slower because I really like the shoulder stretch and the power of the engaging of the arms and the core here. So instead of just going up and back up and back I really like to lift higher here because I need the shoulder and chest stretch.
And this is about as many as we do in a jiu-jitsu warm-up because it's a lot of people and you know you have to be efficient and not do too much. But when you do it yourself instead of doing four or five or six or seven try to do ten fifteen of them because the last three or four have a completely different quality than the first. You're getting tired but that's quotation marks it's not really tiredness. Tiredness is different.
You're barely starting to scratch the surface like if you really try to go for the I don't know there's very likely no world champion in this but you could probably do four or five hundred before you start getting really tired. So those extra few ones feel much much better than the first ones. But then again when you do more take some time in between shake it out do some circular movements at all. Do some circular movements at all also I meant.
And then last one from this one as well grab the hamstrings small rocks first and then when you feel that okay the back is fine today my old hernias are on my side that's nice then you start rocking a bit more. I really like rocking up and then doing a back bend here rolling back sitting up into a back bend and then when I feel like okay I got this now then I start you know sliding my hands up and down my calves and hamstrings because it really helps I find that it really helps my nervous system to relax when I stroke myself yeah and then I can rock a little bit further if there is a wall behind you you can slam your feet into the wall and stop there a lot of people ask me how do you get the feet to the ground it's not necessary to get the feet to the ground just have super flexible hamstrings that's easy and but it's not necessary you're fine by being here to just doing this this is absolutely much better than not doing anything all right this has been my three favorite front to back exercises and the reason I put them on my like top five top ten list is because they're so nice for the spine before starting recording this class my back didn't feel really well now it feels really well all right hope you enjoyed it do it every day and never regret
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