Standing Poses Yoga for BJJ: 9-Min Startup (Day 6)

You push both legs so hard that your insides are lifting and it's the pinky side of the foot that is rooting down. And if you slap your back thigh, it should be super firm. No wiggle wig. Your kneecap should be lifting and everything is strong.

Your front knee usually tends to point inwards like I said because you collapse in the foot and then your knee points inwards. You want your front knee to point as much outwards as possible. So both legs are doing the same thing or opposite thing. They're moving away from each other to the outside.

So not in, out. If you can get that going, the rest will follow easily. What you want to be doing now is take away the tilt from your hips because this is common in World War II that you stand just leaning and reaching forward. What you want to be doing is lift your head.

So from here, lift your left hip up so you're not tilting. You're leveling off. Look at my waistband here. I'm leveling off so that it's parallel with the ground.

So no, yes. When you do this, it's going to be much harder to keep the knees moving away from each other. So you're doing opposite things that are not helping each other. When you push your legs away, you want to tilt your hips.

When you're leveling off your hips, your knees will collapse. So those two are probably the hardest part. So get your legs in place, then adjust your hips and stay there. Get your spine straight, so head over spine.

Not forward, but a little bit back. Your spine is in the back of the body, so your shin should not be sticking out. You should have your shin over your clavicle bones. Stretch your arms, and by that I just mean keep your arms straight and spread your fingers.

Not here, not here, just boom, perfectly straight. That's it for World War II. You stand in a line. You take a deep step, not a short step, because this is nothing.

This is World War II. This is not so much. This is just standing. It's not hard at all.

It has to be challenging for you to get any benefit out of it. That was pose number one, World War II. The second one is just World War II with a side stretch. So you set up from World War II, and then you place your back hand, the hand that is with the straight leg, on your hips or on your thigh, but not on your knee.

Somewhere, just push the hand down into your hip, your butt, your thigh, wherever, and then you flip the palm so you can see your palm, and then stretch back. Not a back bend, it's a side stretch. So you're trying to lift from your left hip to your left armpit, and stretch as much as you can. It's hard to breathe here, and it's hard not to straighten both legs to make it easier.

So set up from World War II, stretch the front side, the side that is pointing forward as much as you can. You usually think like the three-legged dog. You think you're at 100%, but you're just at 60. You can go deeper and deeper and deeper with your breath.

So if you get to World War II, you start testing it by stretching back into reverse warrior. The next one is the logical conclusion of these two. You have the center, you have the backwards facing one, the next one is, hint, hint, correct, forward. So we stretched the left side, now we're going to stretch the right side, or the back side.

So first the front, then the side that is pointing back. If you're super stiff, place your elbow on your thigh. Not only for the stiff, I would consider myself very flexible, but often I do this when I feel that something is going on in my hip that I really don't have control of, and I don't want to be scrunching everything together and have all my soft tissue squeezed together between two hard bones. So this is perfectly okay any day of the week.

If you want to take it deeper, hand to floor, palm flat, or maybe even later you can bind and wrap your arms around here. So there are levels of intensity here, but the first one, this pose is by the way called side angle pose, because it's supposed to be an angle from the foot up through the hand, like a 45 degree angle, just a straight line like this. If it's a little bit wonky, that's also okay, but what you want to do is you're working yourself deep in the pose, and then you're twisting backwards like this. So you're not kind of facing the floor with your belly, you're facing sideways.

So it's a warrior two, taken forward. That's it. And it's a lot of work for the front leg. You really need to be pushing and kicking down into the floor to resist gravity.

If you start dumping your weight into the hips, if you're super flexible, I see a lot of weak girls do this, they're super flexible, but they're weak. So they're cheating completely, and they just use their flexibility, and they don't get so much out of the pose. And what you have to do if you are super flexible is start working the wrap and push up from the floor. So if you're stiff, you're trying to reach down as low as you can, you're trying to work yourself down.

And if you get all the way down, then you start working yourself up again, but with a new challenge. But never mind that, this is the startup program, so all you have to think about is be connected with your hips, which means be stable and squeeze everything in, and try to survive for three breaths with poker face. You're not showing everything in your face how much you're suffering. Try to be neutral in your face and in your breath, and just get in and out of the pose with dignity, and I will give you five stars.

Let's put this together into a sun salutation flow. Oos!