Stretching will help to enhance flexibility and mobility by reducing muscle stress, rising blood movement to your muscle tissues, and easing your muscle tissues again into their pure resting state.
And as a result of rigid muscle tissues have a tendency to tire extra rapidly — inflicting neighboring muscle teams to work more durable from selecting up the slack — an everyday stretching routine could enable you to get extra out of your workouts.
Read on for 5 easy tips on how to improve flexibility.
1. Be Consistent
Genetics, biomechanics, and structural alignment can all restrict flexibility, says Wayne Stewart, NASM-CPT, RYT-200.
So if you need to improve flexibility, laborious work, and consistency are essential — identical to they’re for every other fitness purpose.
Create a fitness plan that includes stretching together with relaxation days to give your muscle tissues an opportunity to restore and rebuild.
A program like XB Stretch will help you stick to a constant stretching schedule.
2. Vary Your Stretching Styles
Stretching alleviates stress inside our our bodies and should cut back the stress related to frequent illnesses like again stiffness and muscle soreness.
If you’re questioning how to improve flexibility, Stewart recommends incorporating every of the next stretch methods:
Passive stretching
In this method, you’re relaxed and you don’t actively pull your self right into a stretch.
For instance, you passively stretch whenever you use a towel, band, one other person, or gravity to lengthen your body.
Active stretching
In lively stretching, you assume a stretching place and maintain it with zero help aside from the agonist (actively contracting) muscle tissues’ strength.
Try lifting your leg into the air and sustaining an prolonged place. The stress of the agonist muscle tissues holding your leg in place relaxes the stretching muscle tissues.
Dynamic stretching
Dynamic stretching consists of managed leg and arm swings that deliver you to the boundaries of your vary of movement.
Dynamic stretches are usually shorter in size and contain shifting out and in of stretches and delicate twists.
These sorts of stretches are notably helpful throughout an lively warm-up.
Static stretching
Remember these ahead folds, facet bends, and hamstring stretches you probably did in fitness center class? Those are static stretches.
This method includes sitting or mendacity nonetheless whereas positioning a joint so far as it could actually go, then holding the stretch for a bit — often 30 to 90 seconds.
3. Drink More Water
Water makes up 76 % of our muscle mass — however, as talked about in this 2019 research, there’s a decline in water in our our bodies as we age.
“As we age and become more sedentary, we lose flexibility and range of motion in our bodies,” Stewart says.
Proper hydration could assist cut back this danger and preserve muscle tissues versatile and performing at their utmost capability.
4. Take a Yoga Class
Yoga focuses on strengthening, stretching, and lengthening the muscle tissues with completely different poses that concentrate on giant and small muscle teams at a time.
Being guided by means of numerous poses will promote flexibility all through the body, Stewart says, and every posture could also be tailored to fit your private wants.
If you’ve restricted mobility — otherwise you’re simply caught at a desk all day — attempt easing right into a yoga apply with easy chair yoga poses.
5. Focus on Your Breathing
People usually maintain their breath whereas lifting weights with out realizing it. Those shallow or brief breaths preserve oxygen from making it to your muscle tissues, which may contribute to muscle fatigue.
When doing strength training exercises, analysis suggests the best respiration method is to take a deep breath firstly of every rep, then forcefully exhale throughout exertion.
While stretching, apply big-belly breaths or diaphragmatic respiration to gas your muscle tissues.
