 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke and today we're going to do limber up with Lance. We're going to do a total body flexibility routine here. We're just going to hit every problematic joint that you could possibly need to loosen up before some sort of athletic activity, whether it be, you know, you're playing a sport, a team sport on the field or you're lifting in the gym or even if you just want to like be ready, be relaxed for your next work outing or your meeting, your interview, whatever you got that's coming up, okay? So it's going to take us about 15 minutes. I'm going to demo everything and you can just follow along. Now one thing we can do for mobility is we can use a foam roller or a lacrosse ball or some other hard ball like a field hockey ball or something like that and you can essentially give yourself a massage. Now massage works, massage makes people feel better. It just doesn't last forever because you stop doing it and then it stops helping as soon as you stop doing it, right? Whereas if I'm moving very methodically, that's generally going to last a lot longer. So I could start doing some stuff on the foam roller. I could do the deep hip. I could do the quad, IT band then quad. I could do the hip flexor. I could even do some upper body stuff. I could do the lat like this. All that stuff is not necessarily a waste of your time. It's just maybe I don't think it's the most efficient use of your time. So I don't really do any of it. I give it to my clients very rarely. But if you do it and you have time to do it, you'll feel better. That's fine. Keep doing it. Our first exercise is going to be the quadruped rock back. Quadruped means knees and hands are on the ground. We want to start with hips right above the knee here. And what we're going to do first is we're going to round the back. So most of our life is spent extending, straightening your back. You want to be really vigilant so you can be focused on work or just to stay awake because you're under slept. That's why rest and recovery is so important. So what we're going to do, we're going to help out rest and recovery with movement by first rounding the back. Then you're going to rock the butt back. Hence the name. Rock the butt back towards the heels. You can go toes pointed or toes up like this either way. I like I usually do both in each set just to kind of feel it a little bit differently. Let's go toes pointed for now. So I'm going to keep my round. I'm not going to increase my round as I go. I don't want to round or I don't want to rock back with the back. I want to rock back into the hips. Right. So starting round, rock back. And then if I can, there's a lot of levels to this one. If I can, I want to bring my elbows to the ground. That hunches me over a little bit more, helps me sit into the hips, helps me keep my back nice and round. And from here, I'm just going to maintain this position and breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Nice long pause. Repeat. We're going to hold for five breaths. Now, so this one's kind of hit or miss. We're going to repeat this for three sets. If you're not feeling anything and you're not really doing it right, it's not supposed to be totally passive. You're not supposed to be totally relaxed. I want you to be sitting back, but not totally resting on the heels. Right. We're kind of holding like the bottom half of a squat, except we don't have to oppose so much of the gravity. So you should be able to hang on to it, keep a nice round position, and still breathe through your nose. Let's go round two. Nice. So if you're having trouble getting this one, right, we want to keep pressure in the hips. And when you breathe in, you want to think about breathing into your butt. That's kind of the cue that I give everyone. It just helps directed the air all the way down into your pelvic floor. It teaches pelvic floor to catch it. And if the pelvic floor is working, we can be sure that the pelvis is in a position that will allow for the hips to stay mobile. So this is all about total body flexibility, honestly, but really about hip mobility. Let's do one last one. If you're struggling to keep that pressure, don't put your elbows on the ground like I am. You can go straight arms, or you can even grab something like a block and put both arms up on that as a sort of interim step. One last one. All right, the second one we're going to try is the lower trunk rotation. You're going to lay on your back, knees bent up, and knees mostly together. I don't need them pinned together. I like to kind of hold something between the knees. So I'm going to get this full roller over here since it's nice and light. And I just hold that together. Feet are going to stay just in line, right? I don't want them spread out like this. I don't want to pin them in together. I want to keep them nice and in line. I'm going to make a T-shape with my arms, palms on the ground to start here. And this one's kind of complicated, but it's one of the best thoracic rotation exercises and shoulder mobility exercises that I can give you. So we did the rock bag. We kind of prepared the rib cage for this. Now we're going to take it the next step. We're going to add in a little bit of movement. So here, if my ribs are... I'm going to exaggerate it for you. If my ribs are sticking out and my knees start to slide away from me, I'm doing it wrong. I want to push the low back, mid back even into the ground. And I want to exhale so that my ribs are nice and flush in the front of my abdomen here. From there, I got my T-shape. I'm going to rotate my legs to the left and I'm going to turn my head to the right. It's kind of like, I like to think like you're ringing yourself out like a chamois cloth, right? And then when I do that, I'm going to look at the palm. I'm going to rotate my hand as much as I can and look at that palm. The other hand stays nice and palm down, okay? I'm going to hold there and take a breath. And as I exhale, that's when I switch. That's when I move. So my legs go to the other side. I turn and look at the other palm and I rotate my hands accordingly. We're going to do four on each side here, nice and slow. Trick is to keep the head and neck relaxed the whole time. Notice that when I rotate, my knees don't come to the ground. That's generally too much rotation. I can't keep the back nice and round while I do that. If my knees rotate too far and that defeats the purpose of the exercise. I'm a terrible counter, but I think we have one more on each. I think that was maybe one too many. That's good though. All right, next up, while we're on the back, we're going to go legs straight in the air. We're going to do the leg lowering. If you got sore hamstrings, this should kind of kick them on. This should make you a little angry at them. The idea here is we're keeping the leg totally straight. The knee is locked out. The toes are pulled up towards you. Now, if you're not super flexible in this position, it's okay to let your legs come away a little bit. And if you're pretty inflexible, it's okay to even keep one of the feet down on the ground for support. Cause it's harder to have your feet away from you, right? It's kind of like holding a plank. You got more leverage on your ab. So I don't want to penalize you if you're just not flexible. We're going to work on your flexibility here though. So knee has to stay locked. And then we pull the toes towards you just gently as much as you can comfortably, okay? Somewhat uncomfortably, let's say. I like to go palms down on the ground on my sides. I'm going to try to keep them on the mat even so they're nice and close in. And then I'm just going to lower one leg at a time, nice and slow. Don't worry too much about the breathing. Just don't hold your breath, okay? We're going to do 10 on each side. Two, six, seven. Nice, this is good for some hamstring flexibility. You can introduce dynamic mobility. So my joints are getting stretched. My muscles are getting stretched because I'm controlling my joint position rather than just sitting there and holding a hamstring stretch, right? We get a lot more done with this. All right, next up is the, depends on who you ask, what you call it. I call it the short side plank, genie twist. So if a long side plank is legs straight, a short side plank is legs bent like this. I'm actually going to bend them up instead of keeping my feet back behind me. I'm going to kind of bring everything in front of me. Now, when I come up into the side plank, first we got to get that one down, okay? So knees stay down, hips comes up. You're going to support yourself on your knee and on your forearm, just like this, okay? As I'm holding this position, I want to try to hike this ab up slightly so I can really feel the oblique on that side. And from here, I'm going to hold this. I'm going to make a eye dream of genie, kind of like make a wish pose here, cross my forearms so that they're parallel. And I suppose that means they don't cross, right? Keep them parallel and then I'm going to reach up towards the ceiling and then we're going to come back down like this. Okay, all the while I'm keeping a lot of tension on that bottom side oblique. And we're going to do 10 of these. That's two, three, four, five. Try to keep your upper back nice and round during this one. Six, we don't want to shrug the shoulders. Seven, eight, 10. This is another one where you just want to keep the head and neck nice and relaxed. Let's switch sides, do the other one. See if this side feels any different than the other one. So same idea, knees down, forearm down, ab is hyped, forearms parallel, make the genie and then reach up. Get the ab, nice. Two, three, four, six, seven. Check to make sure your knees are nice and stacked. Eight, we don't want them twisting. Nine, cause that tells us that your hips are twisting 10. All right, next up, it's called a couple of different things, depending on who you ask. Some people call it the world's greatest stretch. Kind of looks like something like this and you look up and you twist and everything. I don't like to do it that way. So I call it something different. I call it the groiner. The idea is I'm gonna bring my knee up, get my foot flat, but keep my knee between my elbows. If you bring the knee out, you're feeding the shape of the hip joint. So the hip has more mobility that way. But the idea with this one isn't necessarily to just use what you have, it's to help you get some more. So we can get some more by bringing it up and helping that position our hip bones. So this is gonna be a little bit better way to do this. Couple variations. This is the hardest one. I bring my, let's say, I bring my left knee up and then I reach up with my left hand like this. If you don't, if you can't get this foot all the way up, what I would suggest doing is try to hike your hips up, pull your knee up, put your toe down, and then find your heel in the ground. It's very important that your heel comes down in the ground. It's less important that you bend your knee all the way up. And then the other way we can make it a little easier is you can elevate your hands. So this block is gonna help me a lot. If I have more than one block or I have a couch or a table or a bench or something, use that instead. So what this will do is it'll position our hips and then we'll throw a twist in like this. It's good for, we call it the world's greatest stretch because it does everything. It gives you shoulder mobility so you can prep for unstiffening yourself after your bench presses or stabilizing yourself before your bench presses and heavy stuff, lower body stuff, squats, deadlifts. We're gonna do 10 on each side, which is kind of a lot, but stick with me, okay? Make sure your hands stay nice and flat the whole time. We don't wanna compensate with the neck and the shrugging. So you wanna hold a really good plank position here. Nice long neck, nice relaxed face. Oh man, I lost count. I think this is seven, eight. Try to keep that straight leg in back, really straight. You get a good quad stretch out of that too. Next up, we're gonna do a goblet squat. This is gonna provide you a counterweight to teach your hips where to go and teach you how to manage your weight. So I've got just 20 pounds here or so. And it should be a comfortable weight, not anything too heavy. If you're really tiny, you could do 10-pound weights and if you're a little bit bigger, you could do 20, 30-pound weights, whatever. Underneath hips, okay? We don't want a nice wide, kind of like sumo stance on this one. I want feet about hip width, okay? Again, this is just like the groiner where we're really trying to keep you in a narrow spot to help position the hip bones. We're not necessarily forcing depth here, but I do want you to get as low as you can without compromising your back position. So we're gonna start here with the weight in front of your chest and with a slight hip tuck, okay? So the opposite of a hip tuck would be sticking your butt out like Daffy Duck, like this. And we wanna put it away. We don't want that to happen. So we're gonna keep the weight in front of the chest. We're gonna try to not let the elbows come out too far. Keep the elbows underneath the weight. And we're gonna hold that, hold the weight while we squat down. Make sure you keep the hip tuck and make sure you keep the heels down, okay? We're gonna do 10 of these. That's one, two, too hard for you. We're gonna transition right into a different kind of squat that I call the offset squat. So offset meaning, not necessarily I'm holding a weight on one side, though you can do that and it works pretty well. We're gonna do an offset stance. So I'm gonna let you go a little bit wider on this one. Not super wide, not super comfortable, but about shoulder width now. And we're just gonna offset one foot back behind the other one. So maybe like the length of your toes and that's it. So I'm gonna squat down from here, make sure both heels stay down on the ground and then I come back up. We'll do 10 and then we'll switch sides. That's three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Now take inventory as you switch sides is one side easier than the other. It might be two, three, four. Make sure that back heel stays down. Six, seven, eight, nine, 10. So this offset stance introduces a little twist in your entire body. Really helps teach you how to load your hips in different positions. Not all of our squats are in this perfectly symmetrical stance like ideal scenario thing. So we wanna train the body to be able to receive different positions and still be strong there, still be able to produce force. And then our final exercise here, now that we're standing up or moving around, we should be sweating a little bit more. I turned the air off, so I'm sweating a lot. But last one is gonna be an alternating a single leg activity. We're just gonna do a march in place, but I want your elbow and your knee to touch each other on each one. Every step, drive that other elbow back, really get a nice turn in the shoulder. This is gonna turn on your glutes when we straighten the straight leg, and it's gonna keep giving you that upper body twist that we've been harping on the whole time. That thoracic rotation and that hip tucking, that like flexion through your midsection, it's all really important. We're gonna do about 20. Totally lost count though, so we're gonna memory ball it, eyeball it. Really try to straighten the straight leg. You should feel the glutes start to turn on. Nice, all right, so this is just a sensible warmup. Very gentle, nothing particularly specific. But what we do is we hit all these commonly problematic areas. So commonly the upper body has trouble turning. So we've done a lot of thoracic rotation stuff. Commonly the hips have trouble staying tucked and the heels down in the ground. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to loosen up your ankles by keeping the heels on the ground, trying to loosen up your hips by keeping the hip tuck while we do our lower body exercises.