Sebastian Brosche · 7 min · 838 words
Previously titled: Video 5 - Yoga Uniao Series 1
Welcome back to part five of the Yoga in the Hour first series. These two things that we're going to do are super easy. You can teach them at a kids class and everyone can do them at the first try, but doing them perfectly or just with a lot of control is super hard. Down dog, no surprise there.
Walk your hands back so that you're in a squat further back. Deep squat and then you remember in the part three where we floated forward, we're going to do the same now but not as long. So we're not going to down dog, we're just placing our hands slightly in front of us and then we're leaning forward and doing a tiny gorilla float like this. And the focus now is not to float and stay in the air, it's to do the whole thing with flow like this.
So butt is lifting, butt is lowering nice and slowly. Look at this. That's what we're aiming for. Two jumps forward.
So again, one, two and then hands turn 90 degrees and place them between your feet. So you're more or less creating a square here or a diamond shape. You're not placing the hands behind your outside, you're just squatting down, turning your hands 90 degrees and then you're trying to do a spin with the same flow as you just did. So two floating gorillas and then a spinning gorilla smoothly like this.
And that is much, much harder than I made it look. Spinning and floating is really hard. How can this be applicable to jiu-jitsu? Imagine you're in mount, the guy is pushing you and hip bumping you, so you need to be able to lift your butt quickly, place your weight into the hands and spin around 90 degrees for an arm bar.
That would be fucking smooth if you could do it, Simon. You're mounting them, you're basing down and as they're hip bumping, you go straight to arm bar in a second, in a half a second without actually touching your feet in the ground. So getting this spinning core control can make you a legend and your highlight drill will just be instantly taken to the next level. So spinning gorilla and then we do the reverse, one, two and then spin the other way.
One, two, turn your fingers the other direction which is the right, spin around and you're back where you started. Now all fours and when I say lift the knees slightly off the floor, I really mean slightly, not more than two millimeters off the floor. You should feel the hairs on your knees should be touching the mat still. So barely lifting your knees off the floor and then lifting your right arm and your left leg simultaneously moving forward.
Lifting diagonally, moving forward. This is ultra hard because you're using your obliques and your diagonal core muscles and that just shuts your chest and your belly off and it makes it super hard to breathe. So you can make this easy by lifting your butt and do it like this but then that's basically for kids running backwards and forwards over the floor is something we got tired of many years ago. Kids still love it and I always teach that in kids class but for a grown up we only have a few seconds so we need to make this insanely effective to have a reason to do it.
So from all fours we take four steps with everything, with the knees and hands, everything is just above the floor. Super hard. And when we've taken four steps we jump forward and then we try to explode up not with the arms just with the legs so the arms are just hanging but you explode up and spin around 180 degrees like this. Just boom straight up turn around but don't use your arms your hands are hanging and you're just spinning by using the force of your legs.
All fours again do four more and this time start with the left hand and the right foot so you're always starting with the opposite from the first side. Jump forward jump around and that's it for part five. This fifth part just takes a minute but it can be enough it's probably enough to make your heart beat really fast and you have so many small things to work out in terms of control to keep this interesting. So make the floating gorilla really smooth and really quiet make the spin really feel Like you're using your arms and really pushing the floor away and when you're walking on all fours try to just keep your knees as low as possible and when you jump jump really really high.
So even though this is not a big challenge for an outstander who is looking on when you do this with intention it's tough enough. See you in the last part, part six.
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