Sarah Draht · 12 min · 1,525 words
Previously titled: Video 4 - Quads
Hi guys and welcome back to the 10 in 10. Today we will focus on these muscles, the quads, one of the biggest muscle groups in our body. And like we talked about yesterday, doing both of these at the same time is going to be at least twice as hard. So let's start with the first stretch and we just do one at a time.
And it might feel inefficient because you might think that you save time by doing both at the same time, but it's actually the opposite. Okay. So sit down on your knees, knees more or less parallel and then hands behind you and put one foot in the ground like this. So now we're only focusing on the left leg.
So right foot in the ground, left knee bent, squeeze your butt and you can immediately feel the stretch on the front and also pull your belly in slightly. So it's like you're tucking your tail. If you had a tail, you would tuck it between your legs like a dog there. So you're stretching your pelvis forward and from here you can probably feel it all the way from your knee up to the hip.
So just keep squeezing your butt, keep tucking your tail and crunch your belly slightly as you're rounding your spine. I never meet anyone in Jiu Jitsu that has flexible quads because we don't take the time to stretch them out. And we use the quads so much because when we defend, when we play guard and when we are on top inside control, it's never that we stretch our legs out completely to attack or defend. It's very rare that you actually get this really long stretch of the legs.
If you were a professional runner, you would know how important it is to use your back leg when you run to really stretch it out to use the maximum potential of your muscles. But in Jiu Jitsu we're never like that. We're always crunched up, which is really, really bad for the lower back because when we're tight in our hip flexors and our quads, then we're getting our lower back pulled forward because the psoas attaches to the lower back vertebrae. And I met people who got herniated discs from just being so tight in the psoas and the quads.
So it really helps to stretch these muscles regularly. Switching sides. And if you have big knee problems, this is not the pose I would recommend because when you sit down and squeeze your knee together like this, you're really squishing your knees together. If you have any kind of liquids in your knee, any inflammation is going to make this very painful.
So I would avoid this one if you have acute knee problems. Stay here for half a minute more. And keep squeezing your butt, keep crunching your belly, keep tucking your tail and breathe. So so relax your face.
Try to enjoy even if you feel uncomfortable, try to relax and breathe because eventually you will get over that threshold and even the most excruciating poses will feel like home when you get used to them. Take another breath and then sit down on your butt and cycle your legs out a little bit. Let's try another stretch for our quads. Looks like this.
Left foot forward, hips down like we did yesterday where we did the half splits. This time catch your right foot with your left hand. This is probably going to be really hard for you if you're super tight. So you can use your belt.
So wrap your belt around your back foot like this and then suddenly your arm became much longer. So find a way to catch your leg and then pull the leg in. You can pull the belt over your shoulder or over your hips or stretch your hand back to catch like this. But now we get a nice stretch even if we don't pull the heel all the way into our butt.
So if you have knee problems, then this can be a better option because now you're using the weight of your hips to push down and you're only pulling your heel in slightly like this. What I really like to do from here is to inhale and lift and exhale my head to my foot. So inhale lift and exhale down. Inhale lift and exhale down.
And with these dynamic breathing movements I can regulate the intensity down to the smallest detail. Let's take two more. And let's switch sides. So now the right foot is forward, left foot is back.
Wrap your belt in any way around your left ankle. Make sure that you're not on your kneecap but when you bend your knee you should actually be on the bottom of your thigh. So the lowest part of your thigh should be in the ground, not the knee. Find a way to grab the belt and let's go slowly again.
Inhale up and exhale head down. Inhale up and exhale down. Keep going in your own rhythm. Try to follow your movement, follow your breath.
Two more. Now release. Find a way to stretch out your legs again so just freestyle your legs. Now let's do the opposite of what I said in the beginning.
Let's do both quads at the same time but we're not trying to lay all the way down to the floor. We're sitting on our knees and this is a classic, this is the basic meditation position that we use in judo. We always sit like this and bow into class and this is a classic seated meditation position in martial arts. So I would really want to for this one to come back to jiu-jitsu.
Instead the alternative would be this is the classic Brazilian jiu-jitsu position and as you would probably guess this is not helping us improve our posture. This is making us stiffer instead of more flexible. This is the classic jiu-jitsu position. This one however when we sit like this with a lifted chest and we just lean back slightly then we get this stretch in both quads.
We get a little tiny workout for our core and it's a really nice stretch for the front of the ankles as well. So anytime you have the opportunity which is always when you're not sparring when you have to sit out for some reason maybe you do under 70 kilos on the mat and the plus guys are resting instead of sitting on your butt and doing nothing sit in this pose instead and stretch the front of your quads. It's not just a tip it's a very valuable encouragement to start doing this instead. I was probably this is a guess that you're doing this but I was exactly like that.
I just were slouching all the time and when you slouch you're actually getting more depleted of energy. If you do qualitative stretching like this between the rounds then you feel like you have more energy when you start sparring compared to the guys that are just slouching. If you can place your fingers behind you and start squeezing your butt then this is not too much on your lower back. If you are super tight and you try to go deep here then you're going to start arching your back and when you don't have the good connection and control of your core then it's not a good position to do because you're probably going to feel it in your discs in your lower back.
But if you don't do that if you can keep your butt squeezed and stay like this I really enjoy this position when I don't go too deep. But of course if you stay here more than a couple of minutes then you probably have to stretch your legs out intensely after to feel good and the way I do that is I place my hands forward and I step back to a downward dog and just walk it out for a couple of seconds. And then as soon as I did that as soon as I get blood flowing back to my ankles and my legs I go back again and I sit here. So this is my default position because I have relatively strong legs to the rest of my body but I also have really tight quads which shows up in many yoga poses.
So I have gotten comfortable to do this even though I hated it in the beginning. This is something that has really helped me improve my posture and feel better about my legs. All right we're going to stop there short class today just try these two three poses and keep doing them the threshold might be really high if you have big legs and strong muscles it's going to take a lot of time but you have all the time in the world you just have to get started now. Thank you guys for today see you tomorrow!
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