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The Bendy Blog: Flexibility Training Articles
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Help! My Knee Hurts in a Lunge
Knee discomfort - especially in the back knee - while doing a lunge is not uncommon for folks with tighter hips. There are many reasons you might be feeling some knee pain while in a lunging position: weak quads, tight quads, improper patella tracking, too much pressure on the patella, etc. Thankfully, there are several modifications you can try that can alleviate some of the pressure on your knee so that you can still stretch comfortably!
Wrist Warm Up for Handstands
Warming up your wrists should always be a part of your handstand training (or really any training where your hands are bearing body weight, like pole dancing, bodyweight calisthenics, or contortion). Warming up your wrists will not only make your handstands more comfortable and help prevent wrist injuries, but you can include conditioning exercises to strengthen your wrists to make your balances stronger!
How to Get More Open Shoulders in a Bridge
If you feel like most of the bend in your bridge comes from your low back - you’re not alone! For the vast majority of the population, a bridge (or “full wheel” in yoga) is a low-back dominant pose, taking advantage of the natural curve of your lumbar spine. If your bendy aspirations are to even out your bend (and progress to deeper backbending poses), you’ll need to learn to recruit your shoulders and upper back.
30-Day Toe Touch Flexibility Challenge
Calling all toe-touching wannabes! Join me and my lovely very-average-flexibility assistant Nate to learn a beginner-friendly stretching routine aimed to help improve your hamstring flexibility to help you touch your toes.
How to Fake a Split: The “Illusion” Split
Whether you are oh-so-close to flat splits, or still quite a ways away from the floor - anyone can fake a split if you do it at the right angle! And “faking” your split is easier and more comfortable than your regular split, so it’s fun to learn how to do.
4 Active Hamstring Stretches for Beginners
If you have tight hamstrings, you may have heard this could be because either “short” (which would imply you should stretch) or that they’re “weak” (which would imply you should strengthen, because stretching would only make them weaker…). So what’s a toe touching wannabe to do? The short answer: do both. Strengthen while your hamstrings are being stretched! These 4 hamstring stretches are my favorite active flexibility exercises for strengthening both your hamstrings and hip flexors to support a deeper hamstring stretch.
Got Tight Calves? 3 Beginner-Friendly Calf Stretches
As someone who’s gone through several “do a lot on your toes” hobbies (cross country running, Latin dance, pole dance…), I’ve had tight calves virtually all my life. Thankfully calves typically respond very well to stretching (especially loaded/active stretches), so if you have calves that feel like rocks - there is hope!
Gentle Sciatic Nerve Glide for Happier Hamstrings
If you have sciatic nerve tension holding back your flexibility training any time you try to stretch your hamstrings, adding some nerve mobilizations like a glide and a tensioner during your warm up can help alleviate some of that tension so you can make sure your later stretching as addressing the muscle, not just tugging and tensing your sciatic nerve even further.
How to Tell if Hamstring “Tightness” is Nerve or Muscle Tension
If you have been trying to stretch your “tight” hamstrings but have seen limited progress, or if you often feel hamstring stretches in your calves or low back - it may not actually be your hamstring muscles that are the problem - it may be your sciatic nerve!
“Diagnosing” Muscle Tightness vs. Nerve Tension
The role of our nervous system on flexibility training is something I wish I learned about way earlier in my training (because, spoiler alert, it needs to be treated totally different from our muscular system). This post is aimed to help get y’all up to speed on the basics of “neurodynamics” in flexibility training so you can start to understand the role your unique nerves play in your own personal training.
6 Active Flexibility Drills for Your Straddle Pancake
Looking to embody a flatter flapjack in your straddle pancake stretch? A straddle “pancake” (forward fold) requires a combination of inner thigh flexibility (to widen your straddle) and hamstring flexibility (to fold forwards). This post will specifically focus on active flexibility drills to strengthen our hamstrings and hip flexors to support a deeper wide-legged forward fold.
5 Beginner-Friendly Quad Stretches
There are a lot of activities that require you to really exercise your quads - literally anything that requires bending and straightening of your knee! Running, cycling, and weightlifting are all great at building quad strength, but without stretching after exercise could lead to tighter quads, which can eventually lead to knee pain.
If you’re looking for some beginner-friendly (and knee-friendly!) stretches for your quads, read on.