#additional flexibility

Having flexibility issues puts you at an increased risk of injury during both daily activities and sports or gym workouts. This is why having a normal flexibility for basic human function is extremely important for you. If you do a movement and your muscles are too stiff to perform the movement properly you are extremely likely to do it with a bad form. Doing something with a bad form immediately puts you under increased chance of injury.

The look at stretching starts with your ability to perform basic human movement patterns without muscle stiffness interfering. A lot of our daily activities and sports involve leg and hip movement. Be it picking up a box, groceries or just playing basketball outdoors with your friends or child.We will do three tests to see basic flexibility necessary for a healthy life.

Test 1: Squat

Te basic measurement of your hip and leg muscle flexibility is important. Below you see two people squatting. The squat on the left side is a squat that a person with normal and healthy flexibility can do. Your back is straight, you look straight forward and your ass is almost down to the grass. On the right side we see a person who could have stiffness in quads, ankles, hamstrings, glutes and hip muscles or even all of them. This means that he is more likely to have knee pain, hip pain, ankle injuries and back issues when doing any physical activity.  How does your squat look?

Test 2: Hands Overhead

The second basic movement pattern is the ability to lift arms over your head.  Try doing this to see how flexible your shoulders are. Start by standing with a normally straight back. Try to lift your arms over your head without any alterations your back arch. If your back starts arching our you cannot lift your arms directly over head your shoulder flexibility is below normal.

Shoulder flexibility is extremely important as we use our shoulders in almost everything we do. When we write on the keyboard, throw a ball, move objects in the kitchen and shake someones hand we are using our shoulders. So having bad shoulder flexibility can put you under risk of upper back and shoulder problems.

Test 3: Spinal Extension

The third test is the spinal extension test. This tests your spine and back flexibility. If you can keep a straight back while bending your hips over 90 degrees like in the picture below everything is good. If you are feeling pain, can’t keep your back straight or need to bend down from knees too much then your back and spinal flexibility is below normal. Spinal extension tells about ability to pick up items, play ice hockey and do useful exercises such as deadlift at the gym. Again it is something that measures your basic flexibility and if you cannot do this you are likely to injure your back or have back pains.

Passing these three flexibility tests is enough for most of the population including people who go to the gym. As long as you can do these you can squat safely, push the bar over your head, do barbell rows safely and many other common exercises. This is also enough for common sports such as basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. You have normal levels of flexibility in around your leg joints, hip and back joints and shoulder joints. That is usually enough.

If you are doing high flexibility demanding sports such as gymnastics, taekwondo or Olympic weightlifting you may need some additional flexibility. These are sports specific and your coach should be educated on your flexibility requirements for these sports. For Olympic weightlifting having a great wrist and ankle flexibility in addition to the three basic flexibility tests is important.

For taekwondo and gymnastics practitioners the ability to lift feet far above your head, do back spins with feet high above head for example become important. This will require additional hip, leg and spinal extension flexibility. You are usually able to do these sports with suboptimal flexibility and improve the flexibility over time in order to do more advanced movements. Below are examples of flexibility requirements for gymnastics and taekwondo.

China’s Wu Jingyu, center, delivers a kick to Thailand’s Yaowapa Boorapolchai, right, during the final of the women’s 47kg taekwondo competition match for the 2007 Beijing WTF World Taekwondo Championships held at the Changping Gymnasium in Beijing, China, Friday, May 18, 2007. Wu clinched the women’s 47kg taekwondo gold medal after defeating Yaowapa Boorapolchai 5-0.(AP Photo/Color China Photo) **CHINA OUT**/2007-05-19 19:00:03/

Flexibility Training Principles

Flexibility training involves two different types of flexibility. Static stretching involves stretching where you don’t move around too much. Dynamic stretching involves continuous movement. On the left below is a static stretch and on the right is a dynamic stretch.

Dynamic stretching is ideally done before workout or sports activity as a part of the warm-up. Dynamic stretching helps your muscles get warm and flexible enough for the activity that you are about to start doing. Dynamic stretching before a workout should involve movement patterns that are relevant to the sport or gym movements you are going to do in addition to general movements.

Dynamic stretching helps you prevent injury as your body will be ready for the demanding movement patterns you will be performing at gym or on the sports field. Spending 5 minutes doing dynamic stretching at the start of a workout is more productive than dealing with shoulder pain or back pain for the next 6 months or longer. 

Dynamic stretching movements generally can be done for 3 sets with 10 reps in each. If you do several of them you can do leg swings first and then wave your arms around while your legs get a moment to rest. This allows you to save time and get down to the actual workout or sport faster.

Static stretching is best done after your sport or gym workout when the muscles are warm. This helps your muscles stretch more easily and the static stretching will not interfere with your main workout. Static stretching can also be done as its own workout. Doing static stretching as its own workout becomes especially important if you want to do a sport or gym movement but have insufficient flexibility for it. Think of squats, snatches, gymnastics or ballet for example.

Static stretching is ideally done for 10 to 120 seconds. The duration of a static stretch is very flexible. Doing 3 sets of static stretching movement each lasting for 30 seconds will usually produce a good enough flexibility increase in two weeks.Again doing one static stretch for 30 seconds and then doing a second one while your already stretched muscles get a moment to rest is a good idea. 

Ideal Flexibility

The ideal flexibility depends on your chosen sport or gym exercises. The three general stretching tests should be passed regardless of what you do. Ideal flexibility is the flexibility that you need to perform a sports or gym movement with the correct technique. It is no more and no less. If you are inflexible you cannot perform the movement pattern with correct technique. This will put an unnecessary strain on some of your joints, bones and muscles. Unnecessary strain due to inflexibility increases your chances of getting injured greatly. 

Overflexibility can also be bad for a sport. Overflexibility increases the chance that you will perform the exercise incorrectly as your flexibility allows you to go “overboard” with the movement pattern. Slight overflexibility is still preferable to inflexibility. Below is a graph illustrating ideal flexibility. Ideal flexibility is at the top and minimizes your risk of injury. 

Inflexibility is on the left side of the graph. Improving inflexibility decreases your chance of injury very fast. On the other hand slight overflexibility increases your chance of injury much slower. If you can squat all the way to the bottom with a straight back at the gym or kick to the height of your head in taekwondo that is enough. You don’t need more than  that. Then it just takes 5 minutes of dynamic stretching before workout and 5 minutes or 3 minutes of static stretching after workout to maintain the ideal flexibility.

I will get down to generally useful stretching routines for flexibility in part 2. Please leave a comment below. :)

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