- Hi, I'm Patrick Fulop.
This is Effective Martial Arts.
In this lesson, the shoulder roll.
All right, so the shoulder roll is a very important
basic movement for ground fighting.
So it has a lot of different applications
to retain your guard, defend your guard from being passed,
to escape different positions.
So, here's how to do it from scratch.
If you've never done it before,
here are the steps that you need to go through
to be able to achieve this roll.
So the first step is to be able to hold the final position
of the role.
To be able to hang out upside on your shoulders.
So you wanna be able to achieve this position here.
Like this.
So you wanna be hips over the head,
and toes in contact with the mat.
At the beginning you'd help yourself
by pushing with your elbows here to get your toes down
or grabbing your ankles
and pulling your toes down like this.
Sometimes when you start,
you're just gonna be able to go over here.
That's okay.
Just practice it regularly, a little bit everyday
until you develop your flexibility
and are able to hang out comfortably
with your toes on the mat.
The next step from this position
is to be able to rock from side to side.
So go from one shoulder to the other shoulder
smoothly like this,
while maintaining the weight on your shoulders
and not too much weight on your neck.
You wanna be able to go side to side like this
while dragging your toes across the mat.
Like so.
Once you're able to do that,
you wanna be able to transition
from your shoulder roll position to a sitting position
on both sides.
So, simply from here, bring your hips down to one side,
bum on the mat and rise up to a sitting position.
And then you wanna be able to do that
on the other side as well.
Here, final position to sitting on this side like so.
Once you're able to do that,
you'll understand the second half of the roll.
The first half is exactly the same thing in reverse.
So this is the sticky part of the roll
when you're starting off.
So you wanna start from the sitting position, like so.
You're gonna fall to your shoulder like this,
tucking your head in between your knees, like so.
Here you're gonna use your toes
to elevate your hips above your head.
Tuck your head even further between your legs
and then drag your toes across the mat, like so.
And then complete the roll as you just did
to a sitting position on the other side.
So it's very important to be able to do this move
slowly at first.
One, to protect your neck
and also to really understand the weight distribution
during your roll.
So very slowly is a good drill to do it.
So tuck your shoulder in like this, head,
go up on toes, elevate the hips, drag toes across
and all the way to sitting position on the other side.
It also helps if you breath out
in the middle section of the roll
and stay nice and loose and relaxed.
Progressively then you wanna be able to do it
faster and faster.
So going here, breathing out and here.
And again.
Here.
And here.
That's the full shoulder roll.
A nice variant of this would be to do it from your knees.
That's an important part as well.
So being able to go from the knees like this,
tucking one arm in between the legs,
going to your shoulder here and same thing.
We're gonna go shoulder roll here this way
and you're gonna go anywhere between 90 and 180 degrees
back to your kneeling position like so.
Again, from the kneeling position.
Get the one shoulder in between my legs here,
go to the toes, elevate the hips, slide the feet across
all the way to the kneeling position on the other side.
And again, keep doing that faster and faster
on both sides.
Like so.
Another cool application of the shoulder roll,
which is a little bit more advanced,
is to be able to do it on the wall.
So I'm here.
My feet are on the wall, hips are very close to the wall.
Touching.
From here I'm gonna use my feet to elevate my hips
up in the air, to be on my shoulders.
And then I'm gonna walk one shoulder
close to the wall, like so.
Tuck my head and use my toes to push off the wall
and invert my position here.
Head to the wall.
Very important to stay light on the wall,
to not be pushing off
because you don't want to fall this way.
You want to keep the toes on the wall.
And from here complete the circle, like so,
to get back to my original position.
And you wanna be able to do that on both sides.
So walk forward, push off the wall with the head in,
here, maintain control and back to the other side.
Similar to the basic shoulder roll from sitting,
you wanna be able to do this one slowly
to really know where your weight distribution is
and to control the movement as well as your breathing.
Then progressively you want to be able to do it
faster and faster.
Which is actually a little bit easier
when you go faster.
You wanna be able to do it fast and slow,
as with most exercises.
That's how you do the basic shoulder roll
as well as different variants of it.
So practice this move a lot.
This is really one of the fundamental moves
of ground fighting
and it has a lot of applications later on.
So, till next time, I'm Patrick Fulop,
this is Effective Martial Arts.
Remember, practice well, safety first
and use these techniques only for self defense.