Jackknife

Let's talk about the jackknife. The jackknife is an a very advanced exercise that puts a lot of pressure on the cervical spine on the neck. So we wanna be careful in choosing to do that with people who might have some sort of dysfunction in that area of their body or who are just not maybe strong enough to hold themselves up on your neck because that's essentially what you're doing here. So the exercise is asking us to create a pretty vertical line with our body with the weight of the body on the neck. So in order to perform this exercise well, you need a few skills.

You need some flexibility, enough flexibility and skill just to perform a simple roll over. And then you need some hip extensor strength hamstring glute to achieve that vertical line. In addition to the legs, you also need a lot of arm support to help balance the body over the with the weight of the body when it's over the neck and also to help control the stabilization of the shoulder blades as your body is going rolling up and down off the mat. So all of that being said, let's do the exercise. Okay. So we'll come to the mat.

And we'll start on our back. So useful here too before anything even lifts off the floor, find a good upper back and shoulder position. So For instance, if someone's very rounded in their upper spine and it causes their head to pull up like this, this is not an appropriate exercise for that human. We wanna make sure that we can, have a nice support system in the upper back and the neck and the head to be able to hold the weight of our body. When you're ready to go, you lift one knee and then the other. The legs go out and up.

So as stated a minute ago, just that simple rollover to bring the body into position to be able to start lifting is an important skill to have. From that place, the legs first go down, and then they go up. We reach up with the back extensors, and the legs and we feel that we're pushing up with the legs and also away from the face and all the while pushing down with the arms. The spine then comes down And the legs can just travel back over the face and back to that start position. The only modification that I can think of for this exercise would be to, instead of looking to achieve that vertical line, take the legs down, and keep weight on the shoulders, but just there's no way that you're gonna be able to lift as high. But this creates a significantly less pressure on the neck.

So I'll just come down. That's the modification. And then down. So if someone Not every advanced exercises for every moving human. So we just have to be careful when we get to these difficult things who we're choosing them for. And then there's a tempo to this exercise.

We go up and over. And don't hang up. And down. And, and up. Rolling over finding the parallel way down then up and down with control with good shoulder stability. And then we bend in.

And that is the jackknife in a nutshell.