What is flexibility training

It is not an independent sport, but a general basic ability training that covers all scenarios of competitive sports, mass fitness, and rehabilitation physiotherapy. The core is to increase the range of joint movement and the extensibility of muscles and fascia through different modes of stretching movements. To put it bluntly, it is like loosening a rubber band that has been tight or frozen for a long time to help it return to its original stretch space. It is a training content that almost all sports people and even ordinary sedentary people need to be exposed to.

Many people may still have the impression of leg presses and lower back exercises in yoga studios, or temporary squatting and forward bending exercises before physical examinations. If you have ever been exposed to different sports, you will know that CBA players’ hip circles and dynamic lunges before games are flexibility training, marathon runners leaning against the wall and pulling their hamstrings after games are flexibility training, and even when an old man recovers from a broken leg, the slow hooking and stretching movements taught by doctors are essentially flexibility training.

I once led a CrossFit enthusiast who was focused on strength and never stretched. During the deadlift, the hamstring muscles were not extensible enough, and the waist was forced to bend a lot, which directly tore the lumbosacral fascia. It took him more than two months to dare to touch heavy weights. There is also a girl who is obsessed with soft opening. She wears the crossbar at home every day. She is flexible enough and can easily split to 180 degrees. However, the stability of the hip joint has been greatly reduced. She can sprain her feet when walking on uneven roads. Later, it took half a year of strength training to make up for it.

Nowadays, sports circles have different views on the scale of flexibility training. In the past, everyone thought that the higher the flexibility, the better. Now, more and more studies and practical cases have proven that excessive pursuit of flexibility will reduce joint stability and drag down the performance of strength and explosive events. To put it bluntly, you still need to adjust as needed. If you practice rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, and other sports that require extreme joint mobility, you must go to "softer" training; if you usually run or play iron, as long as you can squat until your thighs are parallel to the ground without arching your back, and your shoulder joints are not stuck when swinging your arms, it is enough, and you can't be stuck with the horizontal cross and vertical cross.

If you don’t have any exercise habits at ordinary times, but you have sore shoulders and back pain from sitting in the office every day, you can actually practice some simple flexibility training. When you are fishing at work, raise your hands above your head and hold the partition of the work station to do side pulls for 20 seconds. When you get home from get off work, lean on the wall and do chest pulls for 30 seconds. Sit on the sofa and hook your feet and do calf pulls for half a minute. It is much more comfortable than rubbing your shoulders and neck for half a day. By the way, don’t believe what is said on the Internet: “The more painful the stretch, the more effective it is.” Just control the pulling sensation to a degree that is a little sore and completely tolerable. If the pain is so painful that you grimace, it’s most likely that you’re straining because you’re exerting too much force.