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The Bendy Blog: Flexibility Training Articles
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How To Get Your Leg Higher in Three-Legged Downward Dog
Feel like your lifting leg is a dead weight in Three Leg Down Dog (Tri Pada Adho Mukha Svanasana)? Does trying to lift your leg higher make your calves and hamstrings burn like the dickens? Then this post is for you!
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.
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!
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.
6 Exercises for Hip Internal and External Rotation
Hip rotation is one of the main actions of our hip (along with flexion, extension, adduction and abduction), so a healthy flexibility training routine should contain some exercises to help with your rotation. Flexy and strong hip rotators not only help in poses that require a lot of rotation (like the amount of external rotation required for pigeon pose, or sitting cross-legged on the floor), but they also help stabilize our hips in positions of flexion or extension (like our front splits!).
Hip Flexor Focused Warm Up
It’s always important to warm up your muscles before you do any serious stretching . The hip flexor focused warm up below is great to do before any kind of leg flexibility work, especially things like front splits where tight hip flexors can really limit your range of motion. These 12 exercises can all be done together, or you can pick a couple and throw them into your current warm up routine just for a little extra hip flexion practice.
Can’t Touch Your Toes? 8 Beginner-Friendly Hamstring Stretches
If you’re working on being able to touch your toes, but your hamstrings are so tight you can’t even sit up straight in a pike, stretching can be very frustrating - especially if you’re following “tutorials” written for bendier practitioners...
But never fear, there are plenty of legitimately beginner-friendly stretches you can do that safely and effectively target your hamstrings without stressing your low back.
Why Are My Hamstrings Tight? (and How to Fix Them)
If you have tight hamstrings, you’re not alone! Unless you have a regular stretching practice as part of your workout routine, odds are you can’t touch your toes. Don’t worry, that’s is a pretty “average” level of flexibility in our era of so much sitting.
But why are they tight? And what can you do to help loosen them up so you aren’t getting so much carry-over tension in your low back?