Yoga Uniao Series 1 (Part 2): 17-Min Warrior Flow for Grapplers

The foot is close to your left leg. So not super close but close enough so that you have structural integrity in your right leg. The arm is stretched out and turned downwards so your palm is facing down. Most people do it like this with a bent elbow.

I don't think this is pretty at all. What I want is maximum extension through your right side and I actually want to track my palm with my gaze. So in the series we do this three times. So from the three legged dog we start in the position we call flip dog and then we lower down and then we do the flip dog two more times.

Inhale up and exhale down. Last time inhale up and then the way back you actually try to make a bow from your foot to your hand and make that bow as long as possible. Look what I'm doing now. I keep the heel glued to my butt as my hand touches the ground.

I keep this extension to three legged dog and then I do the rolling knee. This is what everyone does when they try it the first time because of balance problems. So I did the third time and then as I'm going down people lower the butt, they pull their knee to the chest and they flip over. And if you do it like that you will have absolutely zero benefits from the transition.

It will just make you slightly more tired. What I want from you is to do a flip dog with maximum extension and then you keep lifting as if you could lift unlimitedly high and then heel to butt, turn without pulling your knee to chest. So look my heel is to my butt all the time. I never do this.

So not until I'm in a perfect three legged dog do I start the rolling forward. And these small things makes a huge difference when you accumulate things from one time to another. So if I would do 50 of these it wouldn't help me at all. But if I do 50 of these I would see some massive benefits.

When I've been teaching workshops for beginners with this I can see the improvement from the first try to try number five and to try number ten. And after 10-20 tries I see some people getting it if they pay enough attention and they're really present while they're doing it they can absolutely feel the difference. And I know you will too if you really believe in what I'm saying that these things really really matters. These tricky transitions if you pay enough attention to them then Jiu-Jitsu techniques are going to feel so much easier because you never have to be this precise with a Jiu-Jitsu technique with a guard pass.

You can be really sloppy and still manage to pull it off but we want to exterminate all sloppiness in these series. So what we did was right leg out behind you, lean back to a flip dog, go up twice and a third time and from here from flip dog to three legged dog as slow as you can and then a rolling knee placing the right foot between your hands. That's the start of this part. From here you move your right hand out slightly to the, you lift your right hand and move your foot slightly out to the side because we're setting up for warrior one.

So your left heel is in the ground, your back leg is straight and then you lift all the way up arms pointing up. So your chest is twisting forward but your left leg is pushing back so that your hips are moving sideways but your chest is moving forward. So you're definitely twisting your chest away from your hips. Lifting the back toes, make sure your leg is 100% straight, no sloppiness in the knee is allowed and if it's hard to straighten the leg then you probably have your feet on a line and you need to use the full width of your mat so you actually have to be standing quite widely like this.

If you stand like this and step straight back then your warrior one will feel good. If you're standing with your feet together and stepping your foot behind it's gonna feel really wonky and awkward in your groin. So the big difference between warrior two where you're standing on a line and the hips are open and warrior one where your hips are only halfway open is the width of your legs. You can't be standing really far back with the leg either, you need to shorten the stance and widen it a little bit for warrior one.

Take a breath here and then as you lower your hands down to your chest you lift your knee out in front of you. So warrior one and as your hands are coming down you're lifting the left knee out in front of you. And then from here as you're kicking your leg out you lift your arms trying to synchronize those moves. Take a breath here, both knees are straight and then left leg out behind you, arms out behind you and imagine that you're laying down on the belly like this lifting your arms and legs.

So the exact same position that I'm in here I'm doing standing on the leg. Okay so you're engaging all the muscles in your back, you're turning your palms facing down so your thumbs are pointing out and you're trying to lift your left foot as high as possible without actually swaying your back. Okay so you're engaging the back muscles but you're trying to stand kind of horizontal with your head and your foot. This position is called warrior three and we just hold it for a second, we just try to get into the pose and hold it for a second and then we move on.

The next pose from warrior three is one we did already, it's warrior two. So we started in warrior one, we came all the way there to warrior three and now as I'm bending the standing leg I'm reaching the left arm forward for counter balance so that I can reach really far back with the left foot and then get into a deep warrior two. So in the first part of this series we did a warrior two but we had a little bit shorter stride so we could get down into the kung fu stretching but now we want a much deeper, maybe even the front thigh is parallel to the ground like a super strong warrior two. Take a breath here and then slide your left hand down your left thigh, open the palm again, the right palm and then stretch back for a reverse warrior without straightening your right leg.

The tendency here is to as soon as you stretch the right side you lift your hips but I want you to go deep into the knee while you're stretching back. If you feel this in the inner knee or in the hips you probably should place your hand on your thigh and try to do everything a little bit higher but if you can go deep, go deep. So your right hand wants to point all the way back and you want to get as deep and as long into this pose as possible. From warrior two, reverse warrior and then back to warrior two.

And you try to keep this length through the right side for the next pose which is flying warrior so I don't come back to warrior two and shorten everything. I go from reverse warrior to warrior two and I try to keep this length from the left foot to the right arm and I lift up and balance again but this time I balance with open hips. So it's almost like the half moon we did in the first part where the arms were vertical but now the arms are horizontal but everything else is more or less in the same plane. So left foot back, right arm forward, look at the right hand, keep your balance for a second and then hands to the ground for standing splits.

So your head should be in front of your hands in standing splits and you can jump your right leg back a little bit and stand on your toes. It's too hard here if the foot is between the hands. So your foot should be more or less under your hips or under your belly. Then we do three handstand jumps like this.

Notice that I'm never bending any knee. Three jumps with straight legs and then we step back to a three legged plank and we do our first proper vinyasa. Low push up, up dog, back to down dog. Ok, so quick recap.

We do the second side, left leg out behind you, open up as much as you can for three legged dog, heel to the ground, get this stretch through the whole left side, step into a flip dog which is a side plank with a training wheel, lower down. As you inhale for the second flip dog, stretch. As you exhale, sit down all the way to your butt. As you inhale for the third flip dog, stretch to the maximum capacity and then keep your heel glued to your butt.

Move into three legged dog and get this super stretch on the inhale. As you exhale, crunch your front body and place the foot between the hands and move it out to the side a little bit. Setting up for warrior one, arms sweep up and as your hands are coming down, your right knee is more or less meeting your hands in front of you. Straighten and lift everything, inhale.

As you exhale, warrior three, you can think of it as airplane pose with the wings back. Hips are parallel, you're not lifting your right butt, you're keeping everything parallel. Right arm in front of you, bend the knee and then back to warrior two. Take a breath in warrior two.

Then you reverse the warrior, get as deep in as you can and then flying warrior straight forward with the left hand, right arm behind you. I just realized I forgot one pose on the first side because I was talking so much. The last pose before we do standing split is actually crescent pose. Just add that to the first side.

We step back to crescent pose, hand in front of the chest and from here we inhale and we move into standing splits. I just forgot one pose, after flying warrior you do crescent pose. Take a breath in standing splits and then three handstand jumps without bending any knee. One, two and three.

Stepping back to a three legged dog, inhale and exhale, low push up, inhale up dog and exhale down dog. The reason we finished now and the reason we made this part as tricky as it obviously is is so that by doing this series, this whole first series of the yoga nial, you should get to know all the standing poses. That's why I wanted to add that crescent pose. I knew I forgot it but I wanted to add it because when you have crescent, warrior one and warrior two, you have the foundation of the standing poses.

When you have half moon, flying warrior and warrior three and standing splits, you have the foundations of the balancing poses. Even though it's a lot of poses, often another that are not really similar to each other, when you get to know, you make sure you don't favor one type of pose over the other. You get to do all of the basics over and over again and that's one of the reasons why you learn so quickly when you're doing this. One of the biggest struggles are to do the first transition from three legged dog to flip dog and get that flow really nice and doing things properly.

That is probably going to take many, many tries before you feel like you master it. Then the standing poses, you don't have to memorize this sequence. Eventually down the road you will do that anyways but you don't have to think about memorizing it. You can just do it with me over and over and it will become automatic eventually.

This was the standing part. This was the second part, the standing and the balancing poses. I'll see you in the next video, the third part.