Improve Your Punches with Turbo Dog

Hi, I'm Kristin Iris, founder of the Fighter Recovery Project. If you have ever had a training related pain in your shoulders or an injury in the shoulder I am going to show you something that you can do about it. In this video I will share with you a technique straight from Module 3 of my Online Injury Recovery Training that will help improve your shoulder health by firing up some of the weaker rotator cuff muscles. So this next one is called Turbo Dog Prep and I learned it in Forrest yoga so I'm going to show you how I teach it. Turbo Dog Prep helps to teach these muscles over here, your serratus muscles to turn on. Which for a lot of people, not just martial artists, just a lot of people in general those muscles are just--they're kind of dead. They don't really do anything. But they're actually really important muscles in keeping your rotator cuff muscles very safe and stable. So you help prevent rotator cuff injuries. So we're going to turn those muscles on and get them nice and hot and active. This one can be a little bit literally heating and a little intense. Coming down to hands and knees. Hands under the shoulders, your knees are underneath the hips. From here, I'm going to have you relax the head, so your head hangs, as you inhale spread the shoulder blades away from each other. So this is where they squeeze in. This is where they spread apart. So your upper back is reaching towards the ceiling. Now, I want you to give a little bend to the elbows toward the mat. Alright, so you're not coming all the way down, and you're not all the way straight. It's just a few inches toward the mat. And then squeeze the elbows in towards each other. So you're turning on your chest muscles. That bend of the elbows and that squeeze in that's what turns on your serratus muscles and if this is hot for you and intense then stay here. If you're like "yeah this is kinda easy" or "I could do more" then you're going to do full Turbo Dog. Turn the toes under, inhale, as you exhale you're still squeezing the elbows in - that's a really important motion - lift the knees, press the legs straight, reach the heels down, reach the sit bones back and up behind you. Let your head relax. You're still squeezing the elbows, still pressing through the hands. And again this starts to get hot very fast so sort of negotiate how many breaths you can do. Aim for three and if you can stay for more then stay for more. And if three is too much then maybe just start with two and then come down. So after your allotted number of breaths, whatever that is for you, just gently bring the knees down. To help repair and especially protect the shoulders from rotator cuff injuries, which are very common for martial artists who do BJJ, MMA, muay thai or boxing it is important to activate all the muscles in the area to get them working the way they need to. Turbo Dog Prep is a great technique for doing that. So if you liked this video make sure you subscribe to the channel. If you are looking for more ways to repair your body, make sure you get your free 10min snippet of Module 1 of my Online Injury Recovery Training. In that snippet I will reveal some easy and fun techniques that you can do to help repair and prevent injury to the knees so you can get back to train BJJ, MMA, Muay Thai or other martial arts the way you need to. So to get your hands on it simply click the link that's right here and you'll be able to get it. Thanks for watching.