Leg Strength: 14-Min Leg Power Flow for BJJ Athletes

Exhale down dog. Stretch your left leg up, exhale knee close. Arms up for crescent pose. Lower almost all the way down, lift your back heel, hug your belly in, stretch your arms up.

One breath. Stay this low and open up for warrior two. Left knee pointing forward, arms pointing straight forward and back. Make sure your back arm is not hanging, engage the right arm and squeeze the heels in towards the middle.

One more breath. Flying warrior. Left arm forward, right leg back, engage the back leg. Five pumps with the breath.

Keeping your balance and bending your knee. Two more. Stepping back to warrior two, reversing the warrior, inhale, exhale vinyala. Plank inhale, exhale low push up.

Inhale, look up, exhale down dog. Take a breath in down dog. Bend your knees down to the ground and stretch it up. Do a few quick squats like this.

And then engage your hands a lot. We're gonna jump up and down ten times like this. Jump. Use the power of your legs to kick up.

Three, four. When you land bounce back up. Three, six. I suck at counting.

Five, keep jumping. Seven, eight, nine. And on the tenth, land the feet between your hands like this. Sit up on your toes, knees pointing forward.

If this is hurting your knees, you have to lift up and stay in a higher squat. That's gonna be heavy, but that's exactly what we're gonna do all of us. Arms up. Let's do this together.

Everybody watching now. Lift your butt slowly up until your legs are straight and then even more slowly all the way down again. I'm not gonna tell you how many we're gonna do. We're just gonna keep doing this all the way up, all the way down and keep breathing.

All the way up, all the way down. All the way up and this time halfway down, stop and count to ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Forward fold.

Stretch your legs, relax your head. Take three breaths here. Raise all the way back up and step your left foot back. Heels in, sumo squat.

Grab your knees and push your knees away from each other so you're hanging in your arms. Your arms are doing the job of your back. If you place your hands closer to the thighs, you can get a really nice lower back traction here, especially if you have lower back problems. This feels super good, but that's not the point of this class.

What we're gonna do instead is lean forward and stick our butt back and then from here stretch our arms out and lower down even more. One, two, three, four, five. Stretch your legs, arms up, inhale. Exhale, one more round.

Butt back, arms forward. One, two, three, four, and five. One more time, arms up, inhale. Interlace your fingers behind your back.

Lower even deeper. One, two, three, four, and five. Arms up, inhale. This time hands on your knees.

Go from side to side. Maybe widen the legs even more. So you're staying with your butt at the same height as your knees. Bend your knees, straighten the other.

Try this with the hands in front of your chest. Spider sumo. Two more. And then from here let's take it into kung fu stretching going all the way down from side to side.

Start with a couple of slow ones and then remove your hands from the floor and go faster. From side to side. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Don't give up.

Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Stretch your arms up, straight legs. Inhale, exhale. Fold forward and take a few breaths here.

Straight legs. Relax your back. This was all warm up for the last and most intense, crazy exercise of all. Pistols.

Walk your hands forward on your mat. Step your both feet forward and sit down on your butt. Let's take a couple of breaths and just check out our arms and our feet. What we're going to do here, you might require blocks or something under your hands depending on your knee flexibility, but we place the left foot down, right foot forward and then we lift ourselves up to the ground like this.

Switching sides, left foot forward, lifting up and sitting back down. With or without the help of your hands, pistol squats. So it's a squat but with one leg. Pistol squat.

Keep going from side to side. If you need momentum, just roll back and come up like this and sit down again. Keep going. There's a hundred variations here.

We're just going to do this one today. If you want to play, maybe you want to stretch your leg back and sit down again, but keep it simple. Do three more on each side. Two more on each side.

And one more on each side. Keep breathing. It's supposed to be hard. Last one.

And now lower down to your back. Place your heels close to your butt. Lift your hips. Interlace your fingers behind your back.

Bridge pose. Feet close. Right leg up. Hold it.

Breathe. No complaints are valid. Lift your right hip higher. Use the power of your left foot and press the leg, press the foot down and lift everything up.

Right foot higher. And switch legs. Left foot up. Use your right foot.

Press it down. Lift your left hip. Lift your right leg. Lift your left foot.

Lift your left hip higher. Press. Squeeze. Lift.

Breathe. And lower down for happy baby pose. Take a couple of breaths in happy baby. Go from side to side like open guard.

There is a psychological, just like back pain, it really hurts in your soul when you have back pain. In Jiu Jitsu, when your legs are tired, you so feel like giving up. When you're in a fight and your legs are exhausted, it feels like you just want to lay down and die. So improving our leg power will help on our mental game as well.

So if you have weak legs, do this class again and again until it feels like a breeze. Take a stretching class now, one specific stretching and just stretch it all out. See you guys in the next video or see you on the mat.