Tabletop Kick Variation: 11-Min Challenge Flow

Back to tabletop floating and start flowing from side to side, kicking left. Back to center, kicking right. Remember those things we talked about. Shoulder over wrist, knee over ankle.

Don't let your foot fling up in the air. And if you want to exhale hard when you kick, you can get some explosiveness into here. Sorry. Three and two and one.

One more ending up on the other side with your right leg straight. Sit down. Same stretch here. Foot inner thigh, arms up.

Inhale, exhale folding forward, taking a few breaths, calming down. Let's talk about what we did and why we did this because this is how we teach this kicking from side to side the sequence. First you cue the details and then you let them flow freely. But there are many, many layers to this and we've been teaching stuff like this for many years and still it can be difficult for us to when you start confusing things.

So making it distilled into the adductor muscles, so making it distilled into the absolute essence of what to say is very, very essential when you're doing something that has a little bit more action and fast paced. Can you show one time where you try to over cue it? Oh yeah. Where you try to tell them everything at once.

I know exactly how to do that because I've been doing that for years. Okay, so from dog, walking your feet forward a little bit but not too far forward. Leaning forward so that you're in plank but a shorter plank and bend your knees. Hover the knees off the floor.

From here look to the right, kick your left leg under towards the right, flat leg and then make sure that the foot is closer so that the hand and foot is not too far away from each other. Keep your legs straight and then back to center so you're back in tabletop with the floating knees. Now we're doing the same thing on the other side. So first lift your left hand and right leg and then kick your right leg under towards the left.

Make sure your shoulder is over the wrist and the knee is over the ankle and the leg is straight and parallel to the floor and then from there. It's annoying. It's really annoying and those cues might be appropriate in a workshop when you're not in a position where you're shaking but you have to, this is one of the hardest things to to teach because it's supposed to be short and snappy and feel good from side to side when you're going like bum bum bum bum. So you you have to practice exactly how many words you can cut out and just distill it down to the essence.

But things tend to happen here so it's just some things you need to look out for and a good time to correct that is when you allow them to flow on their own. Then you can go and help the people who are struggling and the people who are not struggling they can just keep going. The reason we have something hard to teach in a sequence like this is not just so that you can practice something difficult to teach. It's a nice challenge for you but this is an extremely yoga relevant yoga thing that is relevant to jiu-jitsu.

But when people get injured in jiu-jitsu it's because they try advanced things like this with bad alignment and bad technique. So this look at this. This is usually what just go from side to side. Yes this is exactly how it looks like and if you start to go fast with that technique luckily you're just going to fall out of it.

But if you go really hard in a technique like this with the shoulder completely crunched up in bad alignment you will tweak something or maybe injure something. So let's look at the basic main things that usually always happens that you have to try to correct it early. But then like Stine said people are not going to do everybody is not going to do it correctly. You have to kind of walk around and correct people individually when you see the worst case scenarios.

So kick to one side and just pretend that you're just kick whatever you want. Stay there and sit down on the butt but show all the bad alignment. So stay in really bad alignment just pretending that you're hovering. Yep so when I don't say shoulder over wrist or if people don't listen all the weight from half of her body weight is going down through the shoulder.

And if it's internally rotated then it's all pinching in the front of the shoulder. The other thing that happens is that the leg goes up and that's not dangerous it's just that you don't get the core connection here. The leg has to go straight out from the hips the foot should be flexed and turned like this. So the toes should not be pointing up into the ceiling it should be flat and straight.

This could be relevant for a knee cut you would never do a knee cut like this. When you do a knee cut you go you have to go really low with the hips and slide the hips out like this without losing the shoulder. The other thing that always happens is that the knee is baking in we've talked about this in many poses like warrior two this happens and here especially here it happens a lot that people are lifting the small toe the pinky toe and pushing all their lower body weight into the meniscus. Anything else that always happens?

If I did a good job earlier in the class talking about side plank then I can use that as a heuristic like a shortcut and just say side plank in the left side nice. You should be able to lift your hips up and down without hurting your shoulder back to center second side so shoulder over wrist knee over ankle strong knee strong shoulder back to center. Anything else that usually happens there? People stop breathing so after you queued a couple of rounds people are gonna forget that they're breathing that they should breathe so that's always a nice reminder in an explosive sequence like this one but we talked about how to over complicate teaching so let's look at why we do it in the beginning.

To make it easy for yourself you start in a hovering tabletop look right kick your leg under towards the right good. When I just say good in the first round I pretend like this really advanced and complicated thing is really simple and that helps because then people say oh we're just doing this but then they realize down the road that there are many details to it but you always start by saying good so that people are like okay we're just gonna do this from side to side. Back to center kick towards the left shoulder over wrist back to center kicking right knee over ankle back to center kicking left keep your legs straight and parallel with the floor. So one repetition one cue since you're doing many repetitions you're breaking the flow if you add on several cues in one repetition so right one cue left one cue and then on the second round you can repeat yourself whenever because you tell people you can flow freely from side to side go in any pace that you want just keep the integrity good and then you can walk around and help people if you want and if they need it.

Foot in your thigh good posture inhale exhale fold over your straight leg and take a break and since people probably forgot to breathe they're gonna be like so they need a moment or two there just to calm down and they don't want to hear constant chatter so just say what you want to say in the beginning and give them a brief moment of quiet time. This was a ban ban.