Inversion & Plow Pose: 7-Min Tutorial for BJJ Neck Safety

You should work more one-legged stretches and stretch both your butt, your hamstrings and your lower back before you start doing the upside down guard. So it's perfectly okay to be here but you're not going to get much more flexible from just stretching here. If you had a big Pilates ball or something that could you could make it work for you. But when you're here if you can lift your head off the floor so that all the weight is in the shoulders you're absolutely fine.

What I like to do here is bend one knee and place the hips, place the hand under the hips and go from side to side so I get a nice side stretch both in the hips and in the lower back here. So instead of just staying here this is a very nice neck stretch but if I want to work my mobility in the upside down guard then I do stuff like this leaning all the weight into one elbow and moving my legs around. This is my daily maintenance for my upside down guard work. Alright so that's number one.

Number two happy baby pose, everyone can do this. If you can't catch your feet here, if you're a rock you should go ahead after this startup program you should go ahead and do the yoga for rocks series. It's great for stiff people. If you can catch your feet then just hold on to them and pull the feet down.

You should feel a deep stretch in the inner thighs and the hamstrings here. You can cheat and take a belt and wrap around your feet and pull the belt instead that's also absolutely okay. But what you want to do is to try to pull your butt and your lower back. Pull your sacrum down to the floor while you're pushing your head down.

So it's not a back bend but you're trying to flatten out your back as much as you can. You don't want to be here, you want to be there. It's okay to have the feet together, it's kind of a different pose but you can start there and then work your feet wider and your knees wider and if you're super flexible and want to get even more flexible you can start straightening your legs. But when I say happy baby I actually mean that's the yoga name but in Jitsu it's just an open guard, someone is really trying to pass you and if you get comfortable not only to be here but to have your knees there you leave no space for him to place a knee inside or drop his weight down and pass your guard to side control.

So working the happy baby every day will keep the three points and the guard pass away. So every time you lay down on the floor use the opportunity to stretch and work the mobility and flexibility of your hips. Final pose that I'm going to teach you is half moon which is an advanced balancing pose. We set it up usually from warrior 2.

So this is warrior 2, turn your thumbs upwards and then lean forward into your front leg, so I'm going to do the right one. Lean on your right foot, flex your back foot so keep the legs strong and straight, try to lift the foot as high as your hips and then lower your hand down until your spine and your back leg is in a water line, horizontal. So don't do this, this is a bad pose, I think this is a good pose. When you have open hips your foot is pointing forward but your hip is pointing sideways so there is a bit deeper rotation in your standing hip.

You try to keep the balance and you breathe and you stretch out, your arms are long, your back leg is long, your standing leg is completely straight so it's both stretching and straight. Since you're trying to be super straight it's strength and static strength training for your small muscles and it's a lot of balance and focus to stay perfectly still there. So this is how it would look like if I did it without talking. Could you hear my, maybe you didn't hear but my hip snapped there, it cracked and it always does.

This is the first half moon I did for today and this is the perfect way for me to crack my hips open in a gentle and effective way. So there you have it, you have the plow pose, the happy baby and the half moon. What we're going to do now in the next final flow is put together many of the things that we learned throughout this program and put it together into a nice flow. So see you in a second.