Standing Splits & Handstand Balance: 8-Min Tutorial for BJJ

You can stand on your fingertips, you can stand with your palms flat, you can have your heel off the floor, but as long as you keep working the top leg and relaxing your head so your spine and your head should be relaxed, your legs and arms should be strong and that's a good standing split. Pose number two is exactly standing split but you transition all the weight from the foot into the hands and we call that pose handstand. But whenever I say handstand, this is usually what people think I mean. Jump up, hold the balance without any control of the legs and in a banana shaped back.

That pose has, I would say, no value at all. But when you learn to transition from standing split to handstand, there is plenty of benefits to it. Strength of the core, strength of the hands, focus, breathing control, the list goes on. So from standing split I lean forward so that my chest is over my fingers.

So it's not back here jumping, it's more leaning forward and lifting off the floor. And this is why the back leg in standing split is so important. If my back leg is here, then it's hard to get the leverage to get my hips over my shoulders. But if I'm here, look now, all I have to do is lean forward, inhale and as I begin to exhale, I lift off the floor.

This has taken me quite a while to learn to just balance in a handstand like this. What I want you to do when you practice handstands is just inhaling and exhaling, lifting off the floor. And the smaller the jumps, the better. This is contraindicated because in your head you have defined handstands as when you are balancing on your hands.

But out of the 10 steps, that is step 10. You have to learn the first 9 steps first. And the first steps are palms flat, leaning forward, on your exhale lift up slowly off the ground. No matter how low you go or how high you go, it's equally important to land softly.

Because when you have control of the up and down movement, you learn to control your shoulders and your chest. And that's really what's keeping the strength in the pose. When you learn to have really good control of your shoulders, both on the way up and the way down, and you learn to breathe while you do that, then you have learned essential skills in your yoga practice. So handstands is really a key pose for advancing your yoga practice forward.

So always from standing splits, lean forward, spread your fingers, make sure your fingers are pointing forward and your elbows are straight. Your gaze can be straight down on the fingers, so just look at your hands and try to make small jumps off the floor while you're breathing. Last and final pose for this tutorial, turtle pose or child's pose we call it in yoga. So it's basically just being in plank pose, placing the knees down, tucking the toes and trying to get your chest to your thighs.

Forehead rests on the floor and what you're trying to do is to get your knees as tight to your ribs as possible. In jiu-jitsu the benefits are obvious. It's really hard to put a hook when you're really tight here. And if you're up here, you have a lot to work on.

So every time you do a turtle or child's pose, try to be as flat as possible. And we use child's pose or turtle as a resting pose in yoga. So if we did a lot on our arms, side planks and vinyasa and handstands, we take a few breaths in child's pose as a reset. So I think of a reset button in my forehead.

So whenever I rest my forehead on the ground in child's pose, I take five breaths and I kind of reset whatever came up emotionally or in my thoughts. I try to leave that behind and move on with the next thing. And that's very common in modern yoga to take a few breaths in child's pose and reset. So there you have it.

You have the standing split, which is a great flexibility and strength pose. You have handstands which combine perfectly with the standing split. When you focus on lifting up and lowering down slowly, you're learning the body mechanics for a really good pushing action in your arms. And you learn to control your core while you're breathing because jumping up and down and holding our breath in handstands are quite easy.

It's quite much harder to do it while you're breathing in and out. And child's pose slash turtle is a great reset pose and also great for the flexibility in the knees and hips. Let's get on with today's flow class. Us!