How to Improve Flexibility

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Virginia, and I'm here at Encore Gymnastics, and we are going to teach you how to increase your flexibility. Whenever you stretch any of your muscles, you want to make sure that your muscles are ready to be stretched, in other words, you want to make sure that you do some cardio activity first to increase your heart rate as well as increase your blood flow to your muscles to warm them up, make them a little bit more pliable, stretching cold muscles is not a very good way to stretch muscles, so make sure your muscles are ready to be stretched. One of the stretches we're going to focus on here is going to be the splits, since that is a major part of gymnastics, we're going to focus on that. So, when you do your stretches, you will start- lets just do a regular split first, you're going to go down on your knees, one leg out. And as you stretch, before you go right into your stretch, especially the splits, you want to make sure you get your muscles ready for it, starting out, stretching forward, you want to make sure that your quads and your hamstring are ready for the entire split, and then stretch back, reaching your arms forward, getting your muscles ready, and then- now your average way to increase your range of motion, would just be go into your splits, (go ahead and just slide on out) so, now, of course this is definitely a great way to stretch and increase your flexibility, but we have an extra step for you which will really get you all the way down. See this here, we've got a little bit more to go, so it's hard to get to that very last spot, so what we do is take a mat, and we get to do over-splits. Now you can also do this with shoulders, you can also do this with ankles, anything where you raise the surface is going to help your range of motion. And for splits, you just pop that heel right up, you want to make sure it's on your heel and not your toe, and same thing, you want to make sure everything is in alignment, and now we have much more leverage for her to push those splits all the way down. (How does that feel? good times? Okay, now lets see it on the floor). Then we move this, and then when we go down, we get a little extra stretch than when we would of had we not done the over-splits. And this is how you increase your flexibility."