Sebastian Brosche · 19 min · 1,947 words
Previously titled: Yoga for 40+ Video 4
Hi guys and welcome back to the fourth day of the 40 plus program. Today we're going to work standing and build a little bit more heat than we did in the previous days but I am sure your body will enjoy this. Let's start by a straddle where the distance between our feet are the same distance as one leg is long. So if your legs are one meter long, have one meter between your feet.
That's a nice starting point. Narrow where is really hard to get down to the ground. Deeper might be too much for your groins. Let's start here by placing the hands on our hips and just move back and forth a few times.
So a little bit back bend, a little bit forward fold where you stretch the front and the back. This is a really nice way to start jiu-jitsu practice. This can be the absolute first thing you do to start your warm-ups. Nice.
Let's drop one arm down to our knee without bending the knees inwards, push down into the outside of your foot blade and stretch sideways like this. And instead of going fast from side to side like this, like in aerobics, let's roll the shoulder down and roll the shoulder ups. So we're doing more of a swinging motion from side to side than a straight line from right to left. I don't know what I'm talking about but you get the idea.
Now let's try to do a full circle. So the left arm in a big circle and then switching sides. All the way around. Nice.
Let's turn our heels in and bend our knees and catch the bottom of our thighs. So close to the knee but still on the thighs. So you should have a feeling of compression in your shoulders here when you don't do anything about it. Now engage your lats and lift your chest up so that it's quite easy for the front of your thighs to do this but you really have to engage your upper body for this squat.
So this is a squat for the upper body. You can't really go deeper than but in knee height. We'll go from side to side a couple of times here just to feel that the posture in the upper body can really help the posture in the lower body. What I like about this one is that we push the knees away from each other so we're getting a nice inner thigh stretch and a good work for our posture in our chest.
From here we're going to go for twisting. So this is a dance move. So we lift our butt up a little bit and then we twist the shoulder down and look under our armpit like we did yesterday. Inhale up and exhale twist.
One side is always worse than the other. Inhale up and exhale twist. Keep pushing your knees out. Inhale and exhale.
Inhale and exhale. One more inhale and exhale. Nice stand all the way up and point your toes forward again. Inhale up and exhale catch your chins and stay here in 90 degrees.
So make sure you're arching your back instead of rounding it. So I'm going to show from the side. I don't want you to stand like this. I want you to force yourself to be straight here.
If you can't be straight place your hands on your thighs. Don't lean back and lift your toes. Lean forward and almost lift your heels off the ground. If you can go deeper go deeper.
But what I want you to do here is to keep your hamstrings engaged while you're stretching them. So this is not a passive stretch. This is an active, active, active stretch. Now bend your knees fingertips in the ground.
Lift your right heel and drop down as deep as you can go without your right knee protesting. So it might be really high. It might be really low or somewhere in between. But keep going from straddle to I call it kung fu stretching but one legged squat to the side.
So up on the inhale and down on the exhale. Inhale center and exhale squat. Keep going from side to side and see what body part that I'm not mentioning you can get involved. I'm not talking about any body parts but you can get different parts of your body involved in this stretch by being creative.
This is both mobility for the joints, stretching for the muscles and we're working the fascia, skin around the muscles. Every night the fascia grows fuzz around it and makes you stiffer. So with movement, with yoga and jiu jitsu, you're literally melting the gripping of the fascia to make you looser and more movable. Alright let's get back up to standing.
Move our heels in a bit again. Bend your knees and stretch your arms forward. I'm going to do it from the side so you can see. So you're sitting down in a horse squat, arms forward and then inhale pull your arms in like you're rowing and then exhale look down and swim your shoulders forward.
Inhale lift your chest, exhale swim forward. Three more inhale. Inhale, get your wrists involved. Inhale, exhale.
One more inhale, exhale. Stand up, shake your hips. Let's do the opposite. Sit down a bit deeper, thumbs in armpits.
Inhale and exhale push. Swim up, inhale and exhale. Inhale, exhale. Two more inhale.
Last one, inhale. Stand up, walk your feet together and slowly squat down into a squat. If you can't get really deep, place something under your butt. I like placing something between the hamstrings and the calves.
When my knees are bad or I feel really tight. It can be your wrists, it can be a ball, it can be anything as long as you feel comfortable in the squat. Drop your head down and take a minute in a deep squat. So a minute is about ten breaths.
So inhale and exhale. Three seconds in, three seconds out. That's sixty seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Two more. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Three seconds. Inhale, exhale.
Three seconds. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
Two more breaths. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
Nice. Let's stand back up again. Let's do one more sequence from the straddle. This time you can walk your feet slightly more out to the side.
Place your hands in the ground. If you're kind of in a plank pose with your arms, if you can't get all the way down, find a couple of books or blocks to place your hands on. And then start by moving as far side to side as you can. So all the way to the right, all the way to the left.
So a little bit of side stretching and a lot of hamstring stretching. Nice. Two more on each side. This is just a prep for the next pose.
Okay, move your thumbs together so that your hands are touching each other. And then place your right hand on your lower back and go up and down to the right. So looking down, looking right. Just warming up our back and our inner thigh, left inner thigh for the twist that is coming.
Two more. Now let's add on the right arm. So right arm up, inhale. Touch your left foot, exhale.
Inhale up. Exhale, left foot. Try to get your whole body involved. Inhale.
Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
Exhale. One more. Let's take a break in the kung fu stretch. So you might want to sit down all the way to your butt and stretch.
Or you can stay in a half squat like this. Go from side to side. Just to rest our spine and our arms for a bit. Let's do the second side.
Straddle with your legs, hands together. Don't place them between your feet. Place them far forward. It's going to make it much easier.
So weight into your right arm, left hand on the lower back. If you actually place your palm on your spine, you can get a much better sensibility of where your spine is and how your muscles are moving. So left shoulder down, left shoulder up with your breath a few times. One more.
Now add on the left arm, left arm up. Inhale. Touch your right foot. Exhale.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Don't complain. Complaining doesn't help. Inhale. Not even quietly for yourself.
Just focus and breathe. Two more reps. Nice. Sit on your knees.
Interlace your fingers behind your back. Stretch out the arms. If you can't really interlace your fingers, catch your belt again. Thumbs pointing out.
Straighten the arms. Straighten the belt. Let's take a few seconds here. It's hard work to work in a twist against gravity.
Every yoga pose that is a twist where you're working away from the floor is usually really hard. From all the work we did today, I have a surprise for you tomorrow for the last video. So don't skip that one. Enjoy the last video.
It has plenty of juicy stuff in it. Last pose is seated. Feet together, knees apart. Butterfly stretch.
Start by just letting your knees flop up and down a few times. What I like to do is to not keep my feet perfectly glued together, but only the heels and a 90 degree angle between the soles of my feet. Grab your ankles and use the biceps to pull your belly forward. Then head down and push your knees down slightly, 30% with your body weight.
This pose is divided in two parts. One part is the inner thighs. One part is the spine. So you can keep pulling with your biceps and just work the lower body.
Or you can dump your weight into the thighs by dropping your head and rounding your spine. If one feels better than the other, please go ahead and do that variation. Let's stay here for about a minute. So 10 breaths, 3 seconds in.
3 seconds out. Sit back up. Last pose. Hands and feet on the ground.
Lift your hips for a reverse tabletop. It's just a nice way to counter that forward fold. If you're not comfortable with your posture, you can try this. Then you can just sit back up.
Then you can just lift your hips. Then you can just lift your hips. Then you can just lift your hips. Lift your hips for a reverse tabletop.
It's just a nice way to counter that forward fold that we did. Active back strengthener. Back of the body strengthener and the shoulder stretch. And sit down.
That's it for today. I hope you guys like it. If you don't like it, you're doing it wrong. Yoga shouldn't be fun.
For me it's not fun. It feels good. Jiu-Jitsu doesn't feel good, but it's fun. So that's why I like how they complement each other.
When I do yoga and BJJ together, I get fun and I get nice. The feeling of doing yoga is nice. It's not exhilarating like Jiu-Jitsu, but I really need it. And if I just did yoga, I would be bored to hell.
Jiu-Jitsu is fun, so that's why they go perfectly together for me. Don't miss tomorrow's class. See you then. Us!
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