Yoga Uniao Series 1 (Part 3): 17-Min Deep Squat & Core Flow for BJJ

Okay, but the goal is of course to jump as high as possible without landing hard. So this is the ultimate goal. Landing in a squat, hands in front of your chest, pushing your knees wider, taking a breath in a squat. Okay, from the squat reach your arms forward again for counterbalance, round your spine and try to sit down on the ground.

Depending on how your ankles are designed, you might always fall down the last part. Don't fret over that. Just accept where you are and work as much as possible with rounding your spine because even if I can't get my heels down to the ground, I can go really deep by stretching my spine and then sitting down with a slight bump. Okay, from here, hands in front of your chest, flex your feet and kick your legs out and try to roll down one vertebra at a time without having your actual heels in the floor.

When you get down here, arms overhead, slowly lift your legs as far back as you can and if you feel that you want to use momentum here, don't. Just stay where you are and work the strength of your core there. Okay, so don't do this because if you're not flexible enough on the back side and if you're not strong enough on the front side, you're not going to improve either your strength or your flexibility by rocking back and placing a lot of tension in your neck. Okay, so I want you to do this and then stop where you are, take a breath and then engage the legs and roll up to both pose.

Both pose is straight spine, try to back bend, knees bent, arms straight in front of you. From here, place your heels down to the ground, maybe throw a ball overhead, rock a little bit and try to get off the floor. Okay, so when you sit down, you try to sit down as slow as possible and then when you try to get up, you also go as slow as possible but realistically, we probably need a little speed to get up off the floor. Okay, time for balance.

Move into chair pose, arms overhead, bend your knees and then place your right foot on the inner thigh or the inner calf without actually using your arms. So you're not allowed to grab the hand, grab the ankle and place your foot on the inner thigh. Keep your arms up and try to do that by just using your leg muscles. Okay, this is tree pose, a classic yoga pose.

Move your arms out to the side and twist right and twist left, only using your chest. Don't twist your legs, just twist your chest. This is super hard balancing, twisting tree pose, back to chair pose, switching sides, just using the thigh muscles, twisting left, twisting right, without twisting the actual hips or legs, just twisting the spine. So we did both sides, working our balance, feet down, inhale, take a deep inhale and as you exhale, you sit all the way down to the ground.

You keep exhaling, you keep exhaling, you keep exhaling until you're back in upside down or plow pose or wherever you stopped in the beginning. Okay, so one more time from here, you roll up into both pose first and then chair pose and then tree pose, twist left, twist right, chair pose, tree pose, twist right, twist left, and then standing up, take a deep inhale and exhale for five, four, three, two, one, and you're back on your shoulders. Okay, that's the first part. First the float, then we roll slowly as far back as we go and then we come up into a standing position from our spine up, from our back up to standing and then back and the next part looks like this.

We're going to go classic Jiu Jitsu technical stand up or more or less or a three-point base. So you roll up and then you pull your left heel to your butt, place your knee down into the ground and use your straight leg to pull yourself off the floor. So you're not allowed to use your hands in the ground, you only use your arms in front of you and you stand up with a three base. Okay, so a technical stand up would be that you place the hand down in the ground and do like this, but assuming that I need both hands to defend or attack, I should be able to get up, get off quickly from the floor without spending any energy with a stable base.

So it would look like this, upside down guard, lifting myself up like this. Okay, and from here I'm going to do something not very Jiu Jitsu like, but that is very relevant anyways and that is headstand. So from here, hands far in front of you, head far in front of the hands, hands, left leg up and look at your right big toe as you lift it with control of the floor. So I'm tensing my legs, I'm tensing my core, I'm not suddenly lifting both legs.

If you notice that your legs are suddenly lifting, it's because you are not breathing properly and that you don't have control of your core. So the reason we're rolling up into a headstand is not to make our, is not to harden our skull, it's to have control of our core even when we're in a completely new position that we're almost never find ourselves in. So control your breath and control your core and look at your big toe as it's lifting off the floor, not involuntarily. You should decide exactly when the foot is lifting.

Of course, if you're inflexible, you might have to bend the knee and that looks like this. So I'm bending but I still have control. Okay, straight, control, bent, control. Okay, when you finish the headstand after two, three breaths, then you come back the exact same way you come up.

Foot down, lift your head, don't place the ankle behind your foot because that's not how you got up here. You place the foot far behind you so that when you sit down, your leg is straight again. You get up this way, you come down this way. This is what I see everyone doing the first time.

You get up like this, you place your hand and your head too close and it's impossible to get up and I have to switch and then when I get back everything is clumsy. I fall down and I just feel like a moron. Okay, so if you don't want to feel like a moron, use the length of the mat, use the space behind you and in front of you so it looks more like this. Okay, I've practiced this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times so I know that a yoga mat is probably not enough.

A jiu-jitsu mat is much better because then you don't have to think about that you're restricted lengthwise but what we're looking for is that control of all the small transitions both backwards and forwards. So you're trying to get up into headstand and when you're getting back you completely reverse the process so if I was making a gif of you and looped it over and over I would not be able to tell if you're moving up or if you're moving back. That's the goal with this exercise, okay, making a perfect gif. Same thing on the second side, you roll all the way back, you bend your right knee, you roll all the way up to headstand, you bend your left knee, you roll all the way back, you bend your right knee, you roll all the way up to headstand and you roll back.

Okay, nothing different on the left side from the right side. When you've done this and you're back in plow pose or upside down guard you catch your heels and you try to roll down to your lower back. If you can keep holding on to your heels do that. If you have to let go to get past the knees do that but ultimately you want to be able to hold on to your knees and place your heels down in your palms and I know that this will be completely impossible for some of you then you just hold on barely to your ankles with your hands.

Okay, so touch your legs in any case if you can stand with your heels in the palms do that and then lift your chest and lift your hips, lift your belly, take a breath in bridge pose and make sure your knees are not splaying out but keep the legs more or less parallel and then lower down and if it's possible hold on to your ankles as you're leaning back so the reason we're holding on to our feet here is to destroy the momentum so that we cannot fling our legs back but we have to use our core power to lift back to upside down guard. Okay, it's time to wrap up by rolling all the way up to where we started, a squat placing our hands in the ground leaning forward bending the elbows feet together for crow pose. Okay, the placement of the knees on the elbows are crucial and there is no recipe that works for everyone so some of you might start in a more of a frog position here with the knees really wide but you will never be able to jump back from there so you only start with wide legs and wide arms until you learn to lean your head forward so if my head is too high again just like the handstands if my head is too high and I'm not leaning forward my legs and butt are heavy if I lean forward and lower my head whoop the feet lift almost involuntarily. Okay, so from a squat on the front of your mat spread your fingers lean forward feet together and then this is really hard because you don't want to be landing either you want to land on your belly or in a low push up and low push up is obviously an order of magnitude harder than landing on your belly but what I don't want you to do is land in the plank so from low from crow don't do this to plank it has no value it's just for the sake of doing it quickly and you can actually repetitively hurt your lower lower back if you do that enough times even you you don't believe me I know because hey I lift 500 pounds or whatever if you do repetitive things are so much worse than heavy lifting like if you lift heavy ones you can injure yourself but you know that and you're prepared for it you're not prepared for small things like that just being a little bit sloppy here and there can actually put a tremendous stress on parts of you that you didn't know existed until they start hurting so don't jump back to a plank jump back to your belly or if you're strong in your triceps land in the low push up so alternative one looks like this inhale exhale alternative two which is much harder inhale exhale and from either of those either on your either if you're lying on your belly or from low push up get into up dog okay so from crow jump back to your belly or too low push up lift up for up dog and on the exhale roll back to down dog and that's part three of yoga now first series okay we floated forward we rolled back got into chair pose did a three twist on each side all the way down to upside down guard headstand right headstand left bridge pose crow vinyasa and that's it see you in part four this is the end of of the yoga this is half of the series and this is the end of the yoga part now begins the jiu-jitsu slash capoeira slash everything much more action and flow there all the deliberate slow things are gone and now we try to be more integrated with speed see you in part four