Tight Quads? 15-Min Quad Stretch for BJJ (10-for-30 #4)

Hi guys and welcome back! Grab your jujitsu belt if you don't have your belt available just grab a t-shirt or a towel or whatever you can find. Lay down on your back and wrap the belt around your right foot and stretch the left leg out. It's completely okay to have a bend in the knee but make sure you don't do this.

This is normal that you bend your elbows and pull with your biceps. Instead stretch your arms as far up as you can and then do a little sit-up and catch the belt so that when you relax your upper body that weight is what's stretching your hamstrings because we're gonna work our hamstrings attaching from the knee all the way up to right under our butt today and I encourage you deeply to not use force but rather time so we're just gonna do a couple of poses today and you might think that you can get flexible hamstrings in a month or two but unfortunately I'm here to give you a reality check that for many of us the hamstrings are notoriously tight which means we need a much longer horizon to actually be able to loosen them up and the hamstring attachment where your hamstrings are actually starting under your butt is a place where if you get injured there if you would pull here and really try to be impatient and be flexible fast in your hamstrings if you hurt your hamstring attachment it's gonna take a long time to heal so this is the caveat here this is a warning that if you want to stretch your hamstrings and get flexible hamstrings which is of course great in jiu-jitsu to have a wide open guard and being able to put your feet close to your head is gonna help your guard tremendously but in order to get there you need a sober perspective and that can be half a year a year two years but if you start it will feel good all the way if you don't go to 100 intensity if you stop at 60 and you stay there for a bit longer then it might be quicker than you think but the quicker you want the progress to be the longer it will take so stop stressing and start relaxing and your hamstrings will follow take a breath and let's switch legs we're just doing 10 minutes today so we're not gonna stay for super long but you can probably already feel that after those two minutes on the right side you can already feel a tingling sensation in the back of your right leg like i said the bent knee is fine but make sure you're not sickling your foot so that your big toe is closer than your left than your pinky toe so try to keep the foot flat as if you were standing in the in the ceiling with your foot and don't use the power of the arms again but rather use straight arms and fall back so the body weight is stretching not your arm power and if you're if you don't want to train if you don't want to train your grip here you can also wrap the belt around your wrists if you're gonna stay here for a long time that that can feel even better close your eyes and breathe in and out through your nose five times so take one more breath here and a bonus breath and then release the belt and stand up on your feet and wide legs like this straddle pose and catch your shins with your hands if you have really inflexible inner thighs and if your arms are shorter than your legs then it might be hard to place your hands in the ground but if you can find your hands to the ground keep them there or stay with your hands on your chins let's do some push-ups here so inhale lift your chest look forward and exhale drop your chin to chest and relax down so inhale up exhale down let's do five more in and out in and out in and out nice sit down on your butt so those were two different ways to practice the first we did a static long hold and now we did the dynamic up and down thing that they work together they complement each other really well so we're gonna try the same seated first a static and then a long hold and then a long hold and then a long hold and then a long hold and then a long hold first a static pose so bend your knees and hug your legs as much as you can if you can catch your elbows fine if you can catch your wrist that's also okay but make sure that your chest is connected to your knees and that you can relax your forehead and head and neck down try to be as sloppy as you can here so no tension in your back your lower back and your upper back should feel like those muscles those muscles should feel like they don't have to work at all try to breathe so deep that you can feel your muscles stretching when you inhale try to relax completely and if you feel that your heels are slipping forward that's absolutely perfect that means that your hamstrings and your lower back are letting go and releasing tension if not just close your eyes and keep breathing let's take three more breaths here i refer to this pose as a bent knee forward fold all right let's sit up so this stretch where you try to touch your toes if you have really inflexible hamstrings this tactic this strategy is a really bad one because now you're trying to be efficient by stretching both hamstrings you have two hamstrings right you're trying to stretch them both at the same time this means that you have twice amount of the resistance in your in your hamstrings than if you would be doing one at a time so let's try this bend one knee and relax the knee down if this hurts your leg just place your foot in the ground now let's try to do some dynamic stretching for the right hamstring so inhale lift your chest and exhale forehead to me inhale up and exhale forehead to me inhale up and exhale down let's do two more inhale and exhale let's do three more inhale and exhale stay down here for three breaths and sit back up one quick thing if you didn't feel this in the hamstring that's okay because if you're tighter back here in your lower back then that is what automatically is prioritized in your body so you might think that your hamstrings are the tightest part of your body but if you do an exercise like this a typical hamstring stretch and you don't feel it there perfect keep doing it until your lower back opens up enough for you to actually feel it in the hamstring let's do the second side switching legs so lift your chest good posture inhale forehead to knee exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale two more inhale and stay down here for three breaths and let's sit back up let's do one final exercise the splits so when i say splits you probably immediately get the picture in your head that you want to get your legs straight away from each other with your hips all the way down to the ground something like this so instead of trying to start there and blow out our hamstring attachment let's start in a low lunge which is your foot let's take the right foot between your hands and then drop your hips down as much as you can this is a stretch for the front of our hips something we're gonna work tomorrow or in the next video but we can combine the front of our hips with the back of our hips like this you stretch your front leg as straight as you can engage your quads and flex the foot like this so pull your toes towards your knee and then lean down so you feel a nice stretch in the calf all the way up through your hamstring and then we do it dynamically so we go forward inhale drop your hips down and when you exhale you walk your hands back and try to get your toes to your face and your face to your knee inhale forward this is called the half split so we're working a few thousand repetitions with this exercise before we get all the way down to the floor so this is the way to start your journey towards the full splits but inhale forward and exhale engage your leg but relax your your neck so inhale and exhale inhale and exhale and if you feel like your hands can't touch the ground if you feel like you you can't even be close to the ground with your fingers grab something some books or whatever you have around you pillows to reach down to the floor because if you're that inflexible that you can't touch your hands to the floor then you will have really fast development in the beginning because you aren't really that inflexible it's just your nervous system that is telling you this like it's so unused to do stuff like this so after a few hundred reps of this you're going to feel a tremendous difference your hands are going to get down to the floor much faster than you think switching sides left foot forward just go slowly back and forwards inhale when you move forward and exhale back so getting all the way to the floor with your hips is going to take a long time but getting your hands to the floor is going to be quick but don't try to be quick try to be super patient because the more you stress the longer it's going to take the more you hurry the longer you will have to wait so the more patient you can be the quicker your results will come let's do two more and sit down and that's it for today i gave you some new tools you can use the belt you use the dynamic stretches up and down and you use the static stretches and that any tool doesn't matter how good of a tool you have if it's just there in the toolbox you don't get any work done so you actually have to take these tools that you learned today and apply them you actually have to put in the time 10 minutes every day from now on indefinitely like if you can put on have the discipline to actually put off these 10 minutes in a day that's 24 hours 10 minutes is one six 24 hours 10 minutes is one six one sixth of one hour of 24 hours it's not much time in a day so you just have to put in the discipline to do these 10 minutes and you are going to be amazed at the results after you make it a habit see you guys tomorrow we're going to stretch the quads tomorrow