Spine Mobility & Strength Basics: 6-Min Fundamentals for BJJ

Welcome to video number six, which is a very difficult video for us to explain because to us that's been doing this for many years now this is this is the baseline this is normal automatic and how it should be but it's very hard to verbalize it we have discussed it for a long time now and there are so many layers but a couple of those layers the reason why we do it the way we do it this is how it would look if we just did it like the standard basic warm-up you're in dog jump forward jump to your knees lean back jump to your squat jump back to dog this is what people are used to in jiu-jitsu so we have found ways to do this to add several layers breath is one layer being able to to float forward while you're breathing so you inhale as you bend your knees and as you exhale you lean your weight into your arms and land softly on the outside look how she didn't hear a sound because she activated her core and her arms and really press we talked a lot about float so you should know how to help people float a little bit at least after you had some experience teaching the level one but so we're not we won't go into detail on that one but the we're trying to tell you why we're doing it this way and that's because you want to be able to maximize your force while you're breathing so in no part of this sequence will you be able to catch your breath if you're cheating so you will have to do this whole sequence while you're breathing inhale and exhale so doing this three times the first one we don't talk about the breath we just say float forward and land in a wide-legged squat as soft as you can bend your knees land in a soft squat and then lift your chest this is where later we will tell them to inhale and then lean all your weight into your arms and land quietly and softly on your shins so land on the top of your feet landing shins lean back activate your core and front of the hips or front of the thighs lean your weight forward into your hands again and jump up into a quiet squat lift your chest and then jump back to where we started from back to dog now with the breath bend the knees inhale exhale squat inhale lift your chest exhale land on your shins softly leaning back inhale exhale push up to a squat jump nice inhale prep exhale float back land with bent knees then you have them do it one more time but doing so that's that that's something that people should be comfortable with because you've talked a lot about rounding the spine for cat pose so this is basically building on the cat cow that everybody has done before but you can't really say cat cow but you should know that this is built on the now when she leans back it's the cow and when she leans forward it's the cat and you generate all you activate all the pecs and stuff when you lean into your arms and round your spine so if you see people struggling it's not necessary because they're weak it's because you're not encouraging them to really lean into the arms and round the spine and generate the force from the right place without repeating myself too much what you are trying to help them do is breathe while they're moving so this is this is we talked about this could be a really nice endurance test or exercise endurance drill for jujitsu athletes doing this with the breath for a minute or two would probably cut out 90% of all white belts who are at their first training because they don't have the capacity to generate force while breathing so this is only three rounds but if you know you have the time you can see maybe go for a minute or something yeah yeah instead of doing three rounds back and forward if you see like yeah I have a couple of minutes or just 30 extra seconds you have them do three more rounds and people will suddenly be gasping for air and you can tell them like hey this is not really that hard if you do it correctly like you can do this really effectively efficiently but you can also take this as far as you want some people are super strong and they might want to float and catch the float in the air or maybe handstand or lean back all the way when they're on their knees leaning back yeah you can take it as far as you want yeah just encourage if people want to encourage like 10-15 extra percent then it's suddenly like a proper workout instead of just a soft jumping forward and back so we love these type of drills and exercises that basically grandma can do modified and even the toughest athletes in the world would struggle with it because it's mobility breath and strength based have fun with it and encourage people and smile a lot and if people are cocky you can whip them a little bit also yourself like you practice this drill and you practice floating all the way up coming really slowly down and then you can motivate the other yeah but you can do also yeah it's really motivational if you have done it a lot and you will find when you practice it yourself you will find ways to express it and just as a quick side note when me and steene comes up with this combination of it we haven't invented a single of the poses but the unique combinations we have invented and the reason it sticks and we choose to go with it it's because when we do it we smile we come up with something and like yeah this flows this flows and feels good and makes you smile so that's should that's the heart of the exercise is like it starts from a place of joy and that's what you can tell when we're doing it and when you're doing it yourself you will feel that this feels good and that's the baseline that's the criteria to have exercise like this