Sebastian Brosche · 10 min · 1,160 words
Previously titled: Vimeo Video 3 Yoga for Rocks Head to Toes - Front of hips & Lower back
Hello guys and welcome back to video number 3 of the Yoga for Rocks series. We will do a very simple class now focusing on the front of the hips and the lower back. A place where everybody is super flexible and mobile. No one has a problem with this.
Start on your back. And by that I mean everybody has a problem with the front of the hips and lower back. Hold on to your hamstrings and start rocking up and down. Me before yoga looked like this.
Completely flat in the lower back. Prolapses and everything. With time you not only learn the technique to do this smoothly but since you are holding on to your hamstrings with your arms your biceps are doing the work of the lower back. The goal here is for the lower back to be able to let go of its tight grip and get some god damn fluid into the discs in the lower back.
Something that for some of you might haven't happened in years. Rock and roll, rock and roll a few more times. And then stop when you are down, arms out to the side, twist your knees from side to side. You can start faster because faster means you are cheating more.
So that's fine as a tool to get into it. So you can cheat in the start but for every repetition you do you can pay more attention by slowing down more. Instead of trying to go deeper every time try to stop when you feel like it's enough and sometimes you are even rewarded with a little crack in the lower back. We are literally lubricating our joints by doing movements like this.
Sometimes I feel like I need more leverage then I stretch one leg and the weight of the stretched leg gives me more momentum, more leverage to go a bit deeper but not too much. You are of course working your core muscles indirectly by doing this but that's not why we are doing it. We are doing dynamic poses to learn and it makes it much easier to breathe also when you are moving from side to side instead of holding it static. Let's come all the way up to all fours.
Throw your left foot forward and either straight line from knee to head through the hip and the shoulders, King Arthur's pose. Catch the knee, catch the hip and lift your chest and twist. And if you squeeze your right butt you are probably going to feel a big stretch on the front of the hips but we are not lowering down like this, we are staying up, chest straight and twist. Alternatively you could catch left hand in the knee, the right hand down and slide back and do it like this.
This would be the same effect, just much more intense but it all comes down to proportions. The length of your arms compared to your legs and many other proportions in many different ways will affect which pose you choose and how you do the pose. So there is no pose that fits everybody. Everybody is different and needs a lot of experience to figure out which poses should be avoided and which poses should be done every day.
Take a couple of breaths. Take a couple of more breaths. And then hands down and if it is hard to get both hands down keep one hand on the knee, lift the back knee, straighten it and bend it. You don't have to tap your knee all the way down even though you can.
Just go up and down so that you get a... if your hips become heavy here you will feel a huge stretch on the front of the hips. Some of you might feel it in the left hamstring and that is a nice side effect. But just up and down, up and down, up and down.
What is nice about a pose like this is that even the most flexible people in the world curse their souls. They also complain about feeling stiff when they do this. If we compare with them we will just feel miserable because we are never going to be as flexible as the most flexible people in the world. But it should be motivating that even they can push themselves to a limit where they feel inflexible.
So it is all a matter of perspective. It is not an empirical... being inflexible is not an empirical fact. It is more an attitude and a state of mind.
Even though we are inflexible as shit, empirically that is not what matters. What matters is if we feel less or more flexible. It is subjective. Alright switching sides.
Felt pretty good, yeah? Start in the King Arthur's pose. Boom with a twist. So just basic King Arthur's pose is just pushing the hips forward without actually moving forward and then we add in the lower back twist.
So we get two for one. Lower back and front of the hips. And my proportions, I have really long arms and really short legs so for me this is very easy and gives me an extra twist deep deep in the hips and lower back. If you are doing shallow breathing or holding your breath, stop it you fool and breathe deeper.
Hands down. Keep your hand on the knee or hand to the ground. Up and down. For eternity.
Two more up and down. And, oh, head butt. Lay down on your back. Let's do the whole sequence again just for a shorter period of time.
So we are going to do the whole sequence again. So we are going to do the whole sequence again. Lay down on your back. Let's do the whole sequence again just for a shorter period of time.
Roll five or six times up and down. Now when we do it the second round you are probably going to feel the contrast much better. Lay down on your back, go from side to side a few times. So the subjective experience of this is hopefully and likely, ah, still stiff but not as stiff.
Roll up. King Arthur's pose. Either leg. Twist.
Hands down, go up and down a couple of times. And this minuscule, this minute, this tiny, tiny part of everything we do that we just did might be enough to prevent a serious injury in your next training. Switch sides, King Arthur's pose. Hands down, go up and down.
Find any position. So this was about ten minutes of this. Imagine an accumulated ten hours of doing this over the course of three or six months. Imagine doing this for a total of ten hours.
You will feel like you have went to eBay with a gift card and you bought a brand new body. See you in the next video.
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