3 Tips to Improve Shoulder Mobility Exercises

Mobility exercises for your shoulder joints are essential for preventing shoulder pain and tightness. The shoulder joint is prone to injury and chronically tight muscles. Without mobility training it is easy to end up with shoulder pain.

And shoulder pain isn’t fun!

I have torn both my left and right rotator cuff muscles (the supraspinatus tendon on both sides) and suffered shoulder dislocations during my years as a contortionist. Now I do daily shoulder mobility training and strengthening for the rotator cuff. This keeps my shoulder pain at bay.

I do still stretch my shoulder extension, but I always incorporate these three techniques to make sure that I’m maintaining stability and strength in the joint.

Mobility = flexibility + strength + control

Flexibility without mobility runs the risk of destabilizing the joint, especially for us folks with hypermobility.

Improve Shoulder Mobility When Stretching in Extension

Tip #1: Maintain shoulder alignment

If you can go really deep into a stretch but your alignment falls apart, don’t go to your end range. Hold your form even if the “stretch” feels more like a strengthening exercise for now.

Example: When in shoulder extension try to keep your arms externally rotated and your shoulder blades apart. You can go deeper with internal rotation and squashed shoulder blades but it wont be strong or stable.

If you are having a hard time finding this position, check out this video on using overcoming isometrics for increasing shoulder stability.

Tip #2: Don’t “Relax into the Stretch” when focusing on mobility

Relaxing too much will cause you to increase your range past your ability to control it, and this can lead to instability and injury. Instead, focus on low intensity resistance stretching where you gentle contract the muscles that are being stretched. That will teach your body to have control in this range.

Example: In this same overhead shoulder stretch, if I scoot my knees back a little I’m having to use the muscles that are being stretched (the latissimus dorsi) to hold my body weight. This means they are stretching AND working which builds stability with mobility.

Tip #3: Alternate stretching with active shoulder extension exercises

AROM exercises teach your body to move into the range you have created. This is building flexibility that you can access and use for cool stuff like aerial, pole, yoga, handstands, and getting the cookie jar down off the top shelf

Example: After holding the gentle resistance stretch I can scoot my knees back in and switch to small lifts into that shoulder extension. I definitely wont be able to go as deep (active range is almost always less than passive) but this is expanding my useable, accessible range and keeping that shoulder healthy and badass. Read here to understand more about the difference between active and passive flexibility).

Please note that these techniques can be applied to any stretch, not just shoulder extension!

For a visual on how all of these tips look in action for a shoulder extension stretch, check out the video below.

And as always, happy bendings!

Pilates Breathing for Spinal Health and Flexibility

A dedicated Pilates practice can be a powerful tool to increase spinal health and flexibility, particularly when Pilates-method breathing is included. I struggled with back pain starting at 9 years old. I am hypermobile and my spine was like a Red Vine in the back of a hot car, all goo and no structure. I was able to touch my butt to my head, but not stand up straight.

Kristina in a deep backbend grabbing her ankles from behind and smiling

My backbend at age 36 was still pretty bendy

My posture was my primary struggle, cutting short my foray into gymnastics as a child and forever frustrating my dance technique. I just couldn’t hold myself up well, and it resulted in such intense lower back pain that it kept me home from school some days, laying on the floor with a heating pad.

As a kid in the 70s and 80s there were very few resources other than my pediatrician who gave me aspirin and some exercises that did nothing at all. I assumed it was something I just had to live with.

Pilates Improved my Back Pain

Nothing really made a huge difference until Pilates. Pilates entered my life when, at 32, I was training contortion 6 days a week at San Francisco Circus Center and manipulating my spine in all sorts of creative ways. Contortion had actually reduced my back pain by giving me an impressive new set of muscles, but I focused almost exclusively on back bending since we all like to do what we are good at.

Tiffany Parish, a member of the cutting edge circus and dance company Xeno and founder of Bodicraft Pilates, with the first person to teaching me Pilates breathing for spinal health. She showed me how changing my breathing patterns could unload my spine and get my hip flexors to chill out, helping me counter the compressive forces of contortion.

The Importance of Spinal Health for Longevity

While my struggle with spinal health and flexibility is extreme, it is not unusual. According to the Center for Disease Control, 30-40% of folks in the US have back pain at least once a year. Untended, postural issues and immobility can lead to a host of unpleasant structural issues that don’t get better with neglect.

The good news is that it’s never too late to start working on improving your spinal health and flexibility!

Numerous studies have shown that regular exercise is an important part of preventing and even reversing lower back pain. No one form of exercise has emerged as the silver bullet because the root causes of pain and the application of exercise is so varied, the important thing is to move, try out different forms of strengthening and stretching, and find what works best for you and your body.

Pilates Breathing for Spinal Health

Pilates breathing patterns that emphasize diaphragmatic and rib cage breathing. That means that the rib cage expands on the inhale and relaxes down on exhale. Diaphragmatic breathing gives us more access to our lung capacity and, importantly, it helps our back muscles to relax so that we can get some ease and movement into our spine.

As I explain in my post on diaphragmatic breathing and posture, this breathing pattern gives us more access to the “meat corset” muscles that support our spine and upper body. These muscles wrap around our waist and protect our spine while also supporting its natural flexibility.

This postural shift has potential benefits for folks with upper back and neck pain, since the muscles in those areas can sometimes take over if the diaphragm is sticky or sleepy. Last month’s post contains a breathing workout specifically designed for folks who suspect they may be breathing with their neck and shoulders.

Below is a slightly 20-minute workout with a series of simple but very effective Pilates exercises that focus on using diaphragmatic breathing to access the “meat corset” core muscles that help to lengthen, support, and stretch the lower back. I hope you find them useful.

Happy Bendings!

Improve Your Diaphragmatic Breathing

The diaphragm is a large muscle that bisects our bodies at the base of the rib cage. When it is relaxed it forms a dome shape that arches up inside the ribs, and when it contracts it drops down, pulling air into the lungs. It is our primary breathing muscle, yet many of us struggle to improve diaphragmatic breathing. We can gradually reset this relationship by understanding diaphragmatic breathing and how it works, and by using seated exercises and self-massage to change the way that we breathe.

What is the Diaphragm Muscle?

The diaphragm is the top part of the soup can of core muscles that make up our mid-section and dictate the posture of our upper bodies. We often think of posture as a static position, but because we are always moving through our breathing patterns, our posture is always moving too. The way that we breathe has a profound effect on our posture and therefore on our flexibility too.

The diaphragm muscle

Because the diaphragm is on the inside of our body and most of the time it works without us paying attention to it, it’s easy to lose track of our relationship with diaphragmatic breathing. Just as breathing affects posture, so posture affects breathing and the way that we sit and stand influences our diaphragm. Especially if the rest of our core muscles are sleepy, the diaphragm gets neglected, and can become tight and over-active. Read more about that in my last post on how breathing affects posture and spinal flexibility.

What is Diaphragmatic Breathing?

Diaphragmatic breathing means that, as you breathe, the diaphragm is able to move through its full range of motion. As you inhale, the diaphragm drops into a deep, powerful contraction, pulling in air. As you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes, doming up into rib cage. This dynamic improves your ability to move air in and out of your lungs for deeper respiration, more relaxed posture, and potential mobility benefits.

This doesn’t mean that the diaphragm is working alone. In fact, for diaphragmatic breathing to go well, a number of other muscles have to participate.

Muscles that Support the Diaphragm

The intercostal muscles lengthen on the inhale and contract on the exhale to allow the entire rib cage to expand and contract with the breath. This is one of the major improvements that happens when you improve diaphragmatic breathing
The “meat corset” muscles (the transversus abdominus or TA and internal/external obliques) contract on the exhale to support the body and drive air out of the lungs. These muscles stay engaged and lengthen eccentrically as you inhale (see below about belly breathing)
The pelvic floor works dynamically with the diaphragm to support the pelvis and keep the integrity of the mid-body throughout the breath cycle
The hamstrings are also important to the breathing process. If the hamstrings are working to anchor the pelvis, the act of inhaling and lifting the rib cage can pull the pelvis into an anterior pelvic tilt, shortening the hips and putting pressure on the lower back

The muscles that would preferably NOT participate in diaphragmatic breathing, unless you are exercising, are the muscles of the upper back, neck, and shoulders. If you are experiencing tension in those areas, look to see if your back arches, shoulders rise, or if your neck visibly contracts as you inhale. If so, you may want to work to improve diaphragmatic breathing.

Diaphragmatic Breathing is NOT Belly Breathing

This point may be somewhat controversial according to many of the breathing tutorials you’ll find on the web, but belly breathing does not strengthen the diaphragm and does not benefit your posture.

While there will always be some movement in the abdomen when we breathe, pushing the belly out to inhale disrupts the vital postural function of the TA and obliques, which should have a constant inwards pressure, especially if you are doing anything dynamic like walking, running, dancing, or lifting something heavy. A dependence on belly breathing can compromise your ability to get those core muscles working optimally, without doing much for your diaphragm.

Instead of pushing the belly out on the inhale, the TA and obliques should resist the outward pressure, working eccentrically as the diaphragm drops. They are not squeezing as much as they would on the exhale, but they are still doing their postural job. The expansion to accommodate incoming air happens primarily in the rib cage, where the lungs are located.

Exercises to Strengthen the Diaphragm

It is very difficult to improve diaphragmatic breathing without first having some sense of your diaphragm muscle. The video below shows a self-massage technique to get your fingers into this hard-to-find muscle and give it a gentle massage, in part to release the muscle and in part to know what it feels like to engage it.

Then we will go through a series of seated exercises to improve diaphragmatic breathing that mobilize the spine and rib cage while limiting movement in the neck and shoulders. These exercises may feel challenging at first, especially if you are used to either neck breathing or pushing out your belly to inhale. It may feel very hard to breathe. But with time and practice you may find that your respiration will feel more powerful and relaxed.

This earlier video on breathing techniques for back and neck pain has even more tools for feeling that core muscle relationship and how it enables our diaphragm to move through its full range.

Pro Tip: The Best Way to Improve Diaphragmatic Breathing

Inhale through your nose.

Because your have to work a little harder to pull air in through your nostrils rather than your mouth, nasal breathing biases your most efficient inhale muscle: the diaphragm.

Nasal breathing has many well-documented benefits, especially while exercising. One of those benefits is that it makes it easier to feel and properly use your diaphragm. This is why folks with blocked nasal passages are prone to underutilization of the diaphragm. If this is you, hope is not lost. Even a small amount of nasal breathing every day can make a difference in your muscle engagement.

So to maximize the efficiency of your exercises to improve diaphragmatic breathing, inhale through your nose!

Happy Bendings!

How Breathing Affects Posture and Spinal Flexibility

As long as we are alive, we are breathing! So it is very useful to understand how breathing affects both our posture and our spinal flexibility. Many different muscles participate in the breathing process, and breathing is one of the few physical functions that is both automatic and under our control. While there is no wrong way to breathe, taking control of our breath and learning to strengthen our central breathing muscles like the diaphragm is a great tool to improve many aspects of our physical and emotional state, including posture and spinal flexibility.

How We Breathe Affects our Posture

The spine is designed to be extremely mobile, able to move forwards, backwards, twist, and side bend. For more information on spinal mobility check out this blog post on spinal anatomy for back benders.

The ability of our spine to take advantage of this exquisite range of motion depends in part on our posture. If we habitually stand and move in ways that force our back muscles to become tight and over-worked, we will find ourselves with tension, even pain. The muscles in our back and neck can become resentful and stressed out. The way we breath can either help or hinder our back’s ability to relax and feel full mobility.

Breathing Can Relax the Spinal Muscles

One of the most important skills we need in order to relax our spinal muscles is the full exhale. When we exhale all the way our rib cage drops down away from our chin and our diaphragm relaxes, created a dome shape up inside our rib cage. This big, muscular dome, even relaxed, provides a lot of support for the rib cage (called the zone of apposition), so when we exhale fully our upper back and neck muscles get a little break, lengthen out, and the rib cage just floats on that diaphragm.

Surprisingly, many of us don’t do a great job of exhaling. As I explain in my blog post on core muscles and how they coordinate together, a full exhale and relaxation of the diaphragm requires a corresponding increase in participation from the “meat corset” muscles that wrap around your waist (the transversus abdominus, the internal obliques, and the external obliques) as well as the pelvic floor muscles.

If we have neglected to develop our relationship with this group of core muscles, it will be hard for the diaphragm to relax and therefore we will never get that corresponding relaxation in our upper back and neck muscles.

10 Minutes of Breathing to Improve Posture and Spinal Flexibility

I created a 10 minute series of exercises that guide your body through a coordinated breathing routine that facilitates these long, complete exhales while encouraging your waist muscles to participate while your neck and spinal muscles to relax. It is a series of four exercises in increasing levels of challenge, each one building on the last to develop the deep awareness of both diaphragmatic relaxation and core engagement, with a little spinal flexion thrown in since this is the first direction that we want to spine to go if we are working to increase spinal mobility.

All you need to try it out is a spot on the floor and a few pillows to get comfy. No previous fitness experience or flexibility is needed to do this. It is an exercise for any body. If, as the exercises progress, you find yourself feeling tension in your back or unable to find the meat corset muscles, just go back to the first exercise for a while.

This series is a good way to start to strengthen your core muscles if traditional ab strengtheners like crunches feel awkward and miserable, or cause your neck and back to over work. It is also an excellent warm up for a core workout like Pilates, or for anything involving spinal flexibility like contortion, pole, dance, or yoga.

Happy Bendings!

This Hip Flexor Can Contribute to Lower Back Pain: the Psoas

There is one hip flexor muscle that often contributes to lower back pain: the psoas.

The psoas muscle is hard to find and easy to annoy. It is not just a hip flexor, it is also a spinal muscle and the only muscle to bridge the upper and lower body. You can learn more about the location of the psoas and how it relates to the other muscles of the torso by checking out these posts on core anatomy and hip anatomy.

How the Psoas Hip Flexor Causes Lower Back Pain

Because of its attachment points all along the inside of the lumbar spine, when the psoas muscle isn’t properly supported, strengthened, and lengthened it can pull on the vertebrae of the lower back. If this goes on long enough it creates conditions that are conducive to spasms. When you hear someone say that their “back has gone out” (where did it go?) or if you have had that unpleasant sensation of excruciating lower back pain that causes you to lie on the floor and cry for two days, there is a good chance that your psoas was in rebellion.

Studies have also shown a correlation between weak, underused psoas muscles and degeneration of other spinal muscles.

Chronicly tight hip flexors, in particular the psoas, can contribute to long-term spinal pain and can even pull the vertebrae out of place. The psoas can even affect chronic issues liks spondylolisthesis and spinal stenosis.

Two major factors that can contribute to tight hip flexors and cause the psoas to pull on the lower back are sitting for long periods of time and poor posture. Both of these activities can make the psoas squashed, weak, and tight. You can learn more about posture and hip tightness here, and see a posture tutorial here.

How to Take Care of Your Psoas to Prevent Lower Back Pain

The good news is that there are things that you can do to take care of your hip flexors and psoas to prevent lower back pain and injury. While stretching can play a part in this regimen, sitting in a lunge alone will not usually be enough. Lunges can be a great tool, but you have had the experience of sitting in lunges for hours only to find your hip flexors tighten right up afterwards, you will know that stretching alone is not enough to change the way that your hips work.

Most often there needs to be a combination of elements including improving the cooperation of the core muscles to improve the support of the spine, strengthening for the hip extensors (hamstrings and glutes), and a nice, loving targeted routine to strengthen and mobilize the psoas muscle so that it feels free and empowered. I have a routine that I have used for years and has greatly helped my lower back pain, in tandem with all of the other tools mentioned here, in this post on how to have a strong, flexible psoas.

Even though the psoas hip flexor is a difficult muscle to work with because if its internal position and how many different ways it can move, it is worth the investment since it has a profound effect on lower back pain and your long term spinal health.

Happy Bendings!

Video for you visual learners…

Can Beginner Running Compliment Flexibility Training?

Everyone knows that running and flexibility exist in opposition to each other. Right?

Ask any flexibility coach about cardio cross-training and the vast majority will tell you to stay away from running. Ask any runner about flexibility training and most will groan and treat it as a boring and unpleasant but necessary evil to keep them from turning into one big, gristled tendon.

Convention will tell you that running makes you inflexible and flexibility training and being highly flexible or hypermobile makes you unsuitable for running.

But what if, by focusing on impeccable running technique, proper pre-conditioning, warm-ups, balance, and an almost exclusive application of active over passive flexibility exercises, these two disciplines could complement each other instead of oppose each other?

This is my experiment of one, as I test the capabilities of my own body in the lab of life.

Running with Proper Technique

Fortunately, with running technique I don’t have to invent the tools because someone else has already done it and written the book.

In the process of preparing for and recovering from foot surgery for osteoarthritis in my right foot I started running. I had been working with a client who was a trail runner and he had recommended that I read “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall. The running technique he describes in the book flipped my preconceptions about running being hard on the joints, positing that with the right technique and preparation running can strengthen and heal our bodies (and be insanely fun at the same time and I’m always down for fun).

My feet and ankles have always been a weak point. As a dancer I struggled with a perfect relevé, always wobbling like a faun. I’ve sprained both ankles more times than I can remember, over-stretched my feet and toes in pursuit of perfect lines, danced for years in high heels, and suffered bouts of tendonitis in my ankles. Now, with osteoarthritis limiting the flexion in my right big toe, it seemed so easy to follow the doctor’s advice and resign myself to a life of supportive shoes, cushy insoles, and a strict avoidance of impact training.

But everything I know about bodies in general, and my body in particular, told me that this medically recommended course of action would cause me nothing but misery. Because I’m hypermobile, constant strengthening and stability work is essential to keep me out of pain. If I’m not working out, everything falls apart very quickly. If I stop challenging my feet and ankles I’ll soon be walking around on a couple of melted marshmallows. What will that do to my knees, hips, back, and psyche? Nothing good.

So McDougall’s book spoke to me. He had also defied countless medical opinions to become an ultramarathoner and running devotee. His book chronicles his training with coach Eric Orton who rebuilt his running technique based on the timeless, tried and true form used by all the world’s best runners like the Tarahumara people of Mexico’s Copper Canyons. The way we ran before our obsession with over-engineered sneakers robbed our feet of their agency and power—what is now called minimalist running because you don’t need much more than your own body to do it.

Learning Beginner Running When Flexible

I started running about one year prior to my scheduled surgery date. I bought myself some minimalist running shoes (the Xero HFS) and hopped on the treadmill a few days a week. I quickly found that the only kind of running that didn’t make my knees and ankles scream at me was sprinting. A steady jog hurt, but sprinting felt great. I couldn’t do it for very long, so my running sessions were all done as interval training, alternating between uphill walks, 1-2 minute sprints, and recovery walks. These training sessions, as well as the extensive foot and ankle strengthening I did every morning, sent me into surgery with the strongest feet I had had since ballet training and certainly aided in my fast recovery.

A few weeks ago, three months post surgery, I started running again as part of my rehab. My cardio was utter crap after three months of inactivity, but as usual I found that a slow jog was painful so I was gasping through 30-60 second sprints with 4 minute recovery walks in between.

It was then that I had the good fortune to find myself on a Zoom call with Chris McDougall and Eric Orton themselves! It was exciting to have the opportunity to chat about fitness in general and beginner running in particular, and share my story.

I described how running had been part of my pre- and re-hab from the osteotomy surgery but that I was really only comfortable with sprinting, and Eric asked me about my cadence.

Cadence? What is cadence?

Eric explained that extensive observation of effective running technique has shown that everyone, regardless of leg length or the speed they are running, has optimal form when their feet hit the ground at 180 beats per minute.

If you aren’t a musician or dancer, I’ll tell you that 180 bpm is a pretty fast clip. Think of The Ramones’ Judy is a Punk or, Eric and Chris’ favorite, the B52s’ Rock Lobster. Eric explained that even if you are chugging along at a stately pace of 4.5 mph you want to keep that quick cadence. At 180 bpm your feet are boinging back up off the ground like the spring-loaded shock absorbers they are designed to be, and there is no time to sink into your joints. Most of your time is spent in the air where gravity can’t hurt you.

At the earliest available opportunity I was back on the treadmill, ready to try out this new approach. I loaded up the B52s in my headphones, momentarily transported back to my efforts to create a mosh pit at the 7th grade dance, and started trotting.

The effects were just as Chris and Eric describe in their new running technique book Born to Run 2, immediately effective and delightful. From 1 minute run/4 minutes walk I was instantly able to do an effortless 2 minutes run/3 minutes walk. A few days later 2.5/2.5. With no joint pain at all. I had been relying on sprinting to protect my joints because, at 7.5mph I had no choice but to spring back up off my feet.

Most people without squishy joints can get away with jogging at a lower bpm without pain, at least for a while, until something starts to feel worn or overworked and then that 70% injury rate for runners kicks in. For better or for worse I don’t have the ability to run slow and heavy at all. Hypermobile folks don’t have any of that desirable stiffness in our connective tissue that many runners rely on to protect their joints and help their muscles work more efficiently. Thumping along I was relying solely on muscles to hold me together, and with the slower cadence my feet were spending long enough on the ground with every stride that the muscles couldn’t hold on and I was sinking down into every joint. Pain appeared almost immediately.

After 30 minutes of high cadence running intervals, never going faster than 5mph, I had no joint pain. The muscles in my feet and calves were singing, but it was a song of new challenge and strength-building, not the lament of damaged connective tissue. To my surprise I woke up the next morning ready to do it again and felt even better the second day. My challenge was to not get so excited that I over-trained, and remember that I’m still in rehab and I need to take it slow.

After two weeks I felt brave enough to try running around the Silverlake Reservoir, away from the safety of the treadmill. Running on uneven surfaces makes me exceedingly nervous. Every pebble and sidewalk crack is a chance for my foot to land funny and my ankle to stage a repeat performance of it’s spectacular 90 degree lateral collapse, which has landed me on my back countless times since I was a kid. But I took it slow, trotted to the sound of the Ramones in my head, and trusted the strength I was building.

The idea of a real, up and down, rocky, trail run still feels impossible in my body. But I know what it’s like to achieve things I once felt were impossible. I didn’t think that I could ever sit on my own head either, but I learned to do that, a little at a time.

Tightness vs. Stiffness for Running and Flexibility Training

In my flexibility coaching I often talk about cultivating stiffness without tightness. Stiffness comes from stability in the joints that results from both healthy connective tissue and neurological control of the full range of motion. Flexibility without stiffness, often found in hypermobile, over-stretched people, is dangerous and debilitating. Tightness is an absence of flexibility. It means that a muscle is in a locked state, unable to either fully contract, fully relax, or both. Tightness has a variety of root causes, but most often it comes from stressed-out muscles that don’t trust each other and lock up to prevent you from moving into a position that your nervous system has deemed unsafe. Tight muscles are no longer working together as a team.

What I have learned from Chris and Eric is that running with proper preparation and form can be a vehicle to cultivate stiffness, even in people like me for whom stiffness is not an innate trait. If running is making you tight it’s because something is going on to foment mistrust and poor cooperation in the muscles and joints. Your form is off or you aren’t prepared.

With this new understanding, I am deeply curious and even optimistic that I could be both a runner and flexible, and that these two skills could actually compliment each other. Goals like running a marathon and being able to do a comfortable standing split and waterfall backbend seem less like pipe dreams and more like a compelling puzzle challenge. I just have to figure out the right pieces and put them in place.

This is my experiment for the next year or two. To take these two historical enemies and cultivate a romance between them, using the theater of my rather worn-in 48-year-old body as a setting. Let’s see what happens!

What is your “Core Muscle” Group and How Does it Work?

What is your core muscle group and how does it work? Practically every fitness program known to humanity talks at some point about “core muscles” and how to strengthen them. But what are your core muscles? Meet the team of muscles that works together to create mobility and stability throughout your body.

A lot of programs focus on the rectus abdominus muscles (known as the six-pack) but the six-pack is really just a supporting player.

The core muscles aren’t just on the front of your body. They make up a shape like a soup can with a top, sides, and bottom. The core muscles are constantly in dynamic interaction to provide both support and movement to your torso and internal organs and control how you breath, use the bathroom, have sex, digest food, and much more. They need to be trained together so that they can coordinate for both strength and flexibility.

Core Muscle group is like a soup can in the middle of the body

What is Your “Core Muscle” Group?

The Diaphragm

The diaphragm is the top of the soup can, a big dome of muscle at the bottom of the rib cage. It attaches to our spine, rib cage, and the muscles all around our midsection, with holes in it where the aorta, vena cava, and esophagus pass through on their way to the lower body.

The primary job of the diaphragm is breathing. When it contracts, the dome drops down pulling air into the lungs. When it relaxes it lifts back up into its original dome shape as the lungs empty out. Having the ability to fully relax and contract the diaphragm is very important for taking full, deep breaths. This is called diaphragmatic breathing, not because it only uses the diaphragm (other muscles also play important roles) but because it makes full use of the diaphragm.

The diaphragm also works with the rest of the core muscle team to stabilize the upper body. When other core muscles aren’t working well the diaphragm ends up needing to work overtime as a stabilizer, making it hard to relax. This can have a big effect on important stuff like your breathing patterns and neck and back flexibility.

The Transversus Abdominus

While the six-pack muscle is the showboater of the core muscle group, the transversus abdominus is the real power behind the throne. This is the deepest of the three muscles I like to call the “meat corset” because they wrap around our waist and, when they contract, they squeeze in to stabilize us from all sides. The meat corset makes up the sides of the soup can.

The TA attaches in back near your spine and wraps all the way around your waist where it comes together at a thin line of connective tissue in the middle of your belly. A happy TA works together with the other meat corset muscles as a primary stabilizer for the spine and entire upper body.

The Internal and External Obliques

The obliques are the second and third layer of the famous meat corset. They wrap around your waist over the TA at slight angles, providing even more stability and adding a dynamic side-bending and twisting ability that gives our spine it’s famous mobility.

The meat corset muscles work in constant coordination with the diaphragm so that when the diaphragm relaxes and you exhale the meat corset ramps up to take over most of the job of holding you up. If the meat corset is sleepy and uncoordinated then the diaphragm doesn’t get to relax and you can end up with breathing issues, back and neck pain, poor posture, stiff spine, and a long list of additional issues.

Check out the work of the Postural Restoration Institute if you want to do a deep dive here.

The Pelvic Floor

The pelvic floor muscles are a basket of interwoven muscle fibers that sits at the base of your pelvis. They are the bottom of the soup can.

The two main muscles are the levator ani and the coccygeus, that support your internal organs and have little holes in them to control your poop and pee, and the opening of the vaginal canal if you are AFAB (assigned female at birth).

The pelvic floor muscles are part of the intricate choreography of the soup can. When the choreography is off the pelvic floor can become sleepy and under-working, or stressed out and over-working, which can have unpleasant repercussions for digestion, pooping and peeing, and sex.

The Erector Spinae

The erector spinae are a bunch of small muscles that stick out all along your spine like little pine tree branches, connecting the vertebrae together. They are the solid seam in the side of the soup can that provides extra stability and helps to keep your body upright but mobile. If the rest of the soup can gets sleepy and squishy the erector spinae can end up very over-worked and tight. Unpleasant outcomes include tight back muscles, back spasms, and even displacement of the vertebrae.

The Rectus Abdominus

Here we have arrived at the six-pack, all the way down at the bottom of the list. The rectus abdominus attaches to the bottom front of the rib cage and the top front of the pelvis. It’s sole job is to forward flex the spine (like in a sit-up) but it isn’t really awesome at stabilization. It’s a bit of a one-trick pony: very good at an important job but not good at anything else.

When the soup can is squashy the rec abs can end up over-working. You can tell if you have too much rec ab in your life if, when you try to do a sit-up, your abs push out instead of in. This ultimately robs you of a lot of your strength and stability.

Honorable mention goes to the Iliopsoas

Even though it isn’t technically part of the soup can, you can’t talk about core muscles without mentioning the iliopsoas. This is a loving union of two muscles, the iliacus and the psoas, that attach to the spine at the same place as the diaphragm and swoop down inside your body, through the pelvic floor, to attach to your upper inner thigh. I have a lot of content on the iliopsoas and how to fall in love with yours, so I wont get into too much detail here.

Key Takeaway about the Core Muscle Group and How it Works

The most important thing to remember about the core muscle group and how it works, is that these muscles all work together and what affects one of them, affects all of them.

The core muscles are always moving because you are always breathing and breath is the first and most accessible way to start to feel how they work and interact. Coming soon is a series of workouts and tutorials on how to coordinate and strengthen your core muscle group so that they work together as one happy team!

Happy Bendings!
Kristina

How to Have a Strong Flexible Psoas for Healthy Hips

A strong flexible psoas muscle is fundamental to a healthy back and mobile, balanced hips. The psoas attaches all along the lumbar spine in the lower back then swoops down under your internal organs to attach to the top inside of the femur. It is the only muscle connecting the upper and lower body, and it has multiple jobs including spinal support and movement, hip stabilization, and internal rotation and flexion of the thigh.

The Iliopsoas

Despite its extremely important role in our mobility (the psoas plays a part in anything we do from the waist down) it is often neglected. Part of this is because the psoas runs deep under other muscles and guts, so it’s hard to touch it or have a strong awareness of what it’s up to. It’s also because sitting too much, as most of us do, makes the psoas squashed, weak, and tight.

The Consequences of a Tight, Weak Psoas

Many people have issues strengthening and stretching their psoas and experience some kind of sub-optimal consequences. If you experience back spasms (“throwing your back out”), snapping hip syndrome, SI joint pain, sciatica, or myriad other issues, it’s good to take a close look at your psaos health.

My own psoas was very unhealthy during my years as a dancer and contortionist. It was chronically tight, which I found extremely frustrating. I over-stretched it and it spasmed on a regular basis. It wasn’t until I learned how to feel my psoas, which took some concerted work over a period of months, and strengthened it, that I was able to finally get it to relax and my hip flexibility and back health improved.

How to Have a Strong Flexible Psoas

The routine in this video is basically the format that I used to create a strong flexible psoas. I progressed slowly. It took me many months to be able to move through the exercises that I show in half an hour. In the beginning I kept offloading the work to the other hip flexors (see this post on hip flexor anatomy if you want to know who they are).

So you may want to just start with the first exercise, the foot slide on an elevated surface, and stick with that until you have a sensation of where the psoas is and how to use it, then progress slowly at the pace that works best for you.

This is not the most glamorous, social media-worthy work but it has changed my life to have a better relationship with my psoas, and I hope it changes yours too.

Viva el psoas! Hail the psoas! Psoas forever!

How “Fixing Your Posture” Could be Causing Your Back Pain and What to Do About It

Earlier this year I made a post called 4 Tips to Get More Flexible Without Stretching, and the #1 item on the list was to improve your posture. This post offers a deeper dive into posture, how some “fixes” can actually create back pain, and a checklist with alternatives.

We all know that hunching over like a buzzard is not good for us. The “tech neck”, rounded back, forward-thrusted head, and drooping shoulders characteristic of our modern lifestyle is obviously problematic. But how do you fix it? What should you do instead?

The most common “fix” that I see is to thrust the chest forward, lift the chin, and pull the shoulders “down and back” like a proud peacock. While this posture may work for peacocks, it isn’t so great for human anatomy and can actually cause more chronic pain, especially in the mid and upper back.

This tutorial is a little step-by-step bottom-up checklist for getting your bones stacked up and your muscles gently but firmly engaged for relaxed, healthy, mobile posture.

It is important to note that “perfect” posture is not a requirement for health or the same for all bodies. There is tremendous variety in the way our bodies are formed so this might not be what is optimal for you. This is just a set of guidelines you can use to check in with your body if you are having back pain or if you notice that your posture is feeling weird.

Posture Checklist to Align Your Spine

1. Notice How your Posture is Now

The textbooks have some guidelines for correct posture that I take as a loose jumping-off point, understanding that all bodies are different. Look for the landmarks of your ear, your shoulder bone, bone on the outside of your hip (the greater trochantur of the femur), the middle of the knee, and the ankle bone and get them all lined up one on top of the other.

Noticing where you deviate from this vertical line can help you identify some postural corrections that might help with chronic pain or tightness.

2. Check Your Pelvic Bones

All of us have different sizes and shapes for our hips, butt and bellies that make our posture look different, and that is part of what keeps the world interesting! Instead, I like to assess pelvic position using the bones, since those tend to be more (but by no means completely) consistent.

The two hip bones in the front (the anterior superior illiac spine or ASIS for those who care) and the pubic bone make a downwards-facing triangle in the front of the hips. With some variation for anatomy, you want to make these boney landmarks flat and symmetrical with each other so that the pelvis isn’t tilted side-to-side or front-to-back.

This generally involves a gentle engagement of the muscles of the pelvic floor and the illiopsoas. I have a number of workouts on pelvic stability if this feels mysterious and inaccessible for you and you can see how this looks in the video below at 2:00 minutes.

3. Engage Your Meat Corset

The meat corset is my fond nickname for a triple-layered band of muscles that wraps around your waist like a corset made of you. The transverse abdominus, internal obliques, and external obliques are a vital set of postural muscles, and like all postural muscles they are ideally awake and responsive almost all the time.

You can feel your meat corset by putting your hands on your waist and coughing or laughing. For postural work these muscles only need to be awake and lightly engaged. The “suck in your gut” cue that I loathe does not encourage sustainable posture, and endless crunches aren’t going to help either. I find that breathwork can be a good entrée to building that healthy meat corset structure.

Again, check out some of my workouts for some meat corset strengthening ideas and see the visual at 2:50 in the video below.

3. Open The Shoulders Without Squishing the Shoulder Blades

Forward rounded shoulders are the scourge of modernity, with so many of us sitting hunched over keyboards, phones, steering wheels, gaming consoles, textbooks, food preparation, sewing machines, antique scrolls, you name it. As previously stated, the common “fix” of thrusting the chest forward, squeezing the shoulder blades together, and lifting the chin is suboptimal. It strains and compresses the muscles of the upper back in a way they will not enjoy long-term and can create ongoing back pain if you try to maintain it.

Those gimmicky postural aides that encourage squeezing your shoulder blades together are just going to create a host of new issues for you.

The trick with shoulder blades is actually to pull them apart, while externally rotating the shoulder socket. This will get your upper back engaged sustainably while opening up the front of the chest and shoulder, and stacking that shoulder joint over your hip.

For an exercise to help you find this tricky position, please check out the video embedded below. For this specific tutorial skip to 4:00.

4. Stack that Ear

The head and neck come last, stacking them comfortably over the nice foundation you just built along the rest of your spine.

Many of us have a forward thrust to our head, so that the ear habitually sits in front of the shoulder instead of over it (see previous list of reasons). This position makes the neck muscles have to work much, much harder to hold up that heavy coconut of a head.

My favorite quick exercise to start to bring that head back in line is to interlace the finger into a basket cupping the back of the head, elbows wide, and gently press the head and hands together, feeling the inspiration of the muscles in both the upper back and the front of the neck. The chin should not be lifted or dropped, but remain parallel to the floor.

For that tutorial, skip to 6:30 in the video below.

Now What? Why is Good Posture so Awkward?

The first time I ran through this checklist and tried to align my posture correctly I got mad. How the hell was I supposed to walk around like this? It felt foreign, difficult, and uncomfortable.

The good news is that perfect posture is not a requirement for a rich, full, happy life or even for pain-free mobility. Like so many other things in life it is pretty much always a work in progress, something you chip away at, check in on, and use as a tool when you need it. If your current posture doesn’t cause you problems and is working for you, you may not need to change it. If you start to have pain, then running this checklist may provide relief.

When I was really dedicated to improving my posture to address my hypermobile back and a lower back pain I set an alarm on my phone to go off every hour on the hour to remind me to run through the check list. After a while I didn’t need the checklist, my body just started to remember to do it.

My posture now definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t have back pain any more and I still run through the check list if I’m on my feet for a long time or feel like I need it. It’s change the way that I walk and run, and vastly improved my forward bending which was always pretty crappy.

I hope this checklist is useful for you too!

Happy Bendings,
Kristina

Tight Hip Flexors? Try These Lunge Variations for Better Results

The humble lunge is a staple of flexibility training designed to target the front of the hips. With lunges, small details in alignment and positioning can make a huge difference in outcome, and we can use that to our advantage.

Understanding how lunge alignment emphasizes different muscles in the hips can help you target the muscles that really need the stretch.

Get to Know the 6 Primary Hip Flexors

First, let’s define our terms. There are multiple hip flexors, but six of them do most of the work and are our primary focus when we talk about stretching. These are the psoas, iliacus, pectineus, tensor fasciae latae, sartorius, and rectus femoris. To learn more about each of these muscles, where they live and what they do, please check out this blog post on hip flexor anatomy.

Once you know where your muscles are and how they work it’s much easier to delve into the mysterious habits of your own hips.

Find Your Square Lunge

Before tinkering with our lunge position, let’s start by finding a lovely, square lunge. The hips are square when both hip bones and the pubic bone are on the same plane, so the hips are not twisting, one hip bone is not higher than the other, and the pubic bone is not behind the hip bones. Your back leg should be coming straight back behind you, and your front leg straight out in front.

You can read more about square hips and why they are important in this blog post on square splits. And this workout video has some great basic lunges so you can get the hang of it.

I’m compelled to remind you (and myself) that doing square lunges means that you will not go as deep into the stretch. They may feel awkward if you are used to letting the pelvis do its own thing. If you like to arch your back or if your hips aren’t used to supporting this position, a square lunge could feel more like a workout than a stretch. It’s ok. Keep doing it anyway, it will get easier over time. I promise it’s worth it.

This square lunge gives a pretty even stretch across the front of the pelvis, not targeting any specific hip flexor but not leaving anyone out. If you allow the pelvis to tilt or twist or the back to arch you will start to skip some of the hip flexors (usually the tightest ones that most need the stretch). For you naturally bendy people this is especially important to keep your pelvis healthy. After years of extravagant over-stretching, this is now my pelvic theme song: Hip to Be Square…

Emphasize the Satorius and Rectus Femoris

The satorius and rectus femoris are the two muscles that cross both the hip joint and the knee joint. That makes it very easy to emphasize them in your lunge: just bend your knee. You can either do this in the traditional couch stretch, with your shin up against the wall, or by just reaching back and grabbing your foot and bringing it in towards your butt.

I don’t teach this lunge variation in my beginner/intermediate videos because it can be so hard on the knees, but there is a more gentle version of this stretch in the Happy Hips workout.

However you do it, please put some nice padding under your knee and stop if you feel any knee pain. And of course, keep those hips square.

Emphasize the Tensor Fasciae Latae

The TFL attaches to the outside front of the hip, so in order to emphasize that muscle you will want to externally rotate your back leg. The tricky thing here is to rotate the thigh bone but keep the hip bones square. For most of us, that means that the amount of external rotation will be quite small, so if you look back and the back leg has barely moved off center, don’t worry.

The front leg can externally rotate a little bit too, if that helps with the balance.

The TFL can be targeted a little more by shifting the pelvis slightly off center in the direction of the back leg, and leaning away from the hip. That means if my left leg is back and I am stretching my left hip, I will slide my pelvis slightly to the left and lean slightly to the right. No twisting in the hips though, both hip bones pointed straight ahead like headlights on a foggy night.

For you visual learners please check out the video at the end of this post!

Emphasize the Psoas and Iliacus (Iliopsoas)

These deep hip flexors are often both tight and weak because most of us sit too much, and these muscles hate sitting. When they work well, they are our most powerful hip flexors and stabilizers, but when they are tight they can lead to a very cranky pelvis, back spasms, and tight hips.

This lunge is one of my favorites because the iliopsoas difficult to target but terribly important. If this lunge variation feels challenging… yay! You’ve found something that could be very useful for improving your hip health.

To emphasize the psoas you will internally rotate your back leg. The front leg still comes directly forward and the hips stay square. Just like with the TFL lunge, the hips slide out to the side in the directly of the back leg, and the body leans opposite. Again, check out the video below for a visual.

Keep in mind that if your iliopsoas muscles are very tight, it might be challenging to get them to stretch. If you don’t feel a stretch, don’t be discouraged. Keep playing with the position, building the strength in the supporting muscles, and working into the lunge over time. When I first started it, this lunge felt like a lot of work with no payoff but it’s made a massive difference in my hip functionality over time.

The Sets and Reps for Lunges

A lunge is a mixture between a passive static and an active stretch. I do a million different variations to get the results I want in a particular session.

Lunges with the knee on the floor tend to be more passive, and unless you have knee issues I recommend these if you are just starting out with square lunges and lunge variations. An emphasis on static passive stretching and isometric contraction of the supporting muscles can be a very effective way to start to shift hip alignment.

I recommend doing all 3 lunges, 3 sets of 30 seconds each (9 lunges total on each side). Over time you can vary the number of sets of each lunge variety according to what your body needs most. For example I only do 2 sets of quad/sartorius stretching but 4 sets of iliopsoas stretching because that’s where I am most tight.

Feel the support from the butt muscles and torso muscles, building strength and control. Alignment is more important than depth. You can build depth over time but it is very hard to fix alignment once you are deep.

Happy hips come from consistent investigations into pelvic alignment and imbalances. The better you know your hips, the better you can tailor your training to your body’s needs.

Happy Bendings everyone!

What is a “hip flexor”?

The term “hip flexor” is often used as if it describes one muscle, when in fact there are multiple muscles that do the job of hip flexion (bringing the knee towards the chest). Tightness in the front of the hips is a massively common complaint, and it’s much easier to address if you know which of your hip flexors are tight.

Like GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle…

This blog and video are a quick introduction to the 6 primary hip flexors, where they are, how they work, and how they affect your hip mobility. I’m not going to hide my un-secret agenda to promote better awareness of the iliopsoas (the deep hip flexors)!

The most important thing is to gain greater understanding of how your hips work so that you can work with them in a way that is optimal for your body.

So here are the main players in the hip flexor game:

The IlioPsoas (Psoas and Iliacus)

The Iliopsoas

Let’s start with the big dogs… the Illiopsoas is a combo of the psoas and the iliacus. These are both hip flexors that attach to your upper inner thigh right in the groin area. They are your biggest, most effective hip flexors but they have some challenges.

The iliacus attaches to the upper inside of the back of the pelvic bone. The psoas attaches all along the inside of the lumbar spine. These attachment points are higher up on the body than any of the other hip flexors, giving these muscles better leverage to lift your leg, especially if you want it to go higher than your hip (hello dancers, aerialists, gymnasts, yogis and contortionists). Both of these muscles are deep in the body, making it hard to find them with your hands or brain.

Fun fact: the psoas is the only muscle that bridges the upper and lower body.

The psoas is affects and is affected by posture. If you sit a lot, or if you have an exaggerated bend in your lower back (check out the Bendy Back Tight Hips post) then your psoas can be chronically compressed into a scrunchy, tight, weak state where it is no longer effective either as a postural muscle or as a hip flexor. The illiacus right along with it!

Check out my upcoming series on core muscles and the psoas for some exercises and info to start to transform that predicament, if that sounds familiar to you.

In the meantime, let’s meet some more hip flexor friends.

The Pectineus

This little guy attaches to the base of the pelvis and has a short journey down to the inside of the thigh bone. It is definitely an adductor (squeezes the legs together) as well as a hip flexor and you can see just by looking at it that it isn’t as big or as well-positioned as the iliopsoas for hip flexion. That wont stop it from trying to help out though, and if it gets over worked you can find yourself with some tight, grouchy inner thighs!

The Pectineus

The Tensor Fasciae Latae (TFL)

This outer hip muscle is so important it got its own TFL blog post. This muscle attaches to the front outside of the pelvis and runs down the outer front hip, attaching to the famous IT band. Often tightness in the IT band can be traced back to a tight, overworked TFL. And it is easy to overwork the TFL because it can do so many different things: hip internal rotation, hip abduction (lifting the leg out to the side), and hip flexion. Like many competent beings, it can get stuck picking up the slack for under-performing friends.

A tight, weak, sad TFL can show up as outer hip pain, lower back pain, sciatica, and even knee and ankle pain.

The Tensor Fasciae Latae

The Sartorius

The sartorius is one of the two hip flexors that crosses both the hip and the knee. This elegant, swooping muscle runs from the front outside of the pelvis down across the thigh to attach on the inside of the lower leg. That means it can help to straighten the knee, externally rotate the hip, and flex the hip. It is most effective at hip flexion when the leg is turned out, as in a ballet passé. In fact, this muscle is usually super strong on ballet dancers! It just isn’t as effective if you are trying to lift your leg straight out in front of you.

The Sartorius

The Rectus Femoris

So many dancers, circus performers, and other athletes I have worked with over the years are very familiar with the rectus femoris. This is the biggest of your quadriceps muscles, crossing both the knee and the hip, right up the front of the leg. You can feel the big tendon in the front of the hip, just inside the hip bone, where this muscle attaches to the pelvis. Many people experience that tendon as being tight, tender, and possibly even inflamed due to overworking in the rectus femoris.

This muscle is the primary go-to for people who have difficulty accessing the illiopsoas, which can make the rectus femoris super cranky and tight. It can also create hypertrophy in that muscle so it gets really big and bulky (at the studio we fondly refer to that as femoris enormous or quadrisaurus rex). This is frequently an indication that the iliopsoas needs some love and encouragement.

Because the rectus femoris is both a knee extensor and a hip flexor, and because it attaches much lower on the body, it will never be as good at hip flexion as the iliopsoas. But it tries its best, bless its heart.

My hope in writing this article is that you now have a better sense of what is going on in your hips in order to tailor your workouts and your stretches to the muscles that need them most. If you suffer from chronically tight, painful hips and stretching isn’t helping, it’s likely due to an imbalance between these muscles where someone on the team isn’t pulling their weight, and other team members are having to play overtime and are getting resentful.

For the second half of the battle, check out the hip and core workouts on YouTube or the f ull length workouts on Video Club for some exercises and stretches that I have found useful to deal with hip challenges in both my own body and with my clients. I particularly recommend the next blog post on lunge variations to target specific hip flexors.

Happy Bendings!

Step by Step Introduction to Back Bridge/Wheel Pose

Back Bridge, or Wheel Pose as it is called in yoga, is a beautiful foundational element of the back bender’s practice. There are so many benefits to this position in strengthening the entire back of the body while opening the hips, chest, and shoulders.

I also love Back Bridge because it requires your body to reconfigure itself and learn some new skills. So much of what you need to do to have a comfortable Back Bridge feels counter-intuitive.

We are so used to a forward-facing orientation with our body. We push with the front of our body and pull with the back of our body. In Back Bridge we have to push with the back of our body, which is where so many new back-benders get stuck. If you try to push up into Back Bridge with the front of your body, it will feel pretty much impossible.

Here are two preparatory exercises that you can do, before you are upside down and bent over backwards, so that your body has some idea of where to engage and how to behave in Back Bridge. These are both isometric holds, which are very useful for re-training your nervous system to create new patterns of muscular contractions. I recommend holding each of these for about 30-60 seconds for 3 sets if you are new to Back Bridge or feeling stuck, prior to pushing up into Back Bridge.

For the visual learners, please check out the video at the end of this post.

Lower Back Bend Isometric Hold

This hold will look very familiar to most of you. It is a simple shoulder bridge, focused on the muscle groups that you will need in Back Bridge. Both knees are bent, hip width apart with feet parallel, and the heels are close to the butt (exact distance will vary but find something comfortable for you).

They key components of this hold are:

Start by pulling your heels and butt towards each other to fire the muscles in the backs of your legs
Extend your hip flexors by using the lower glutes to lift just the tailbone up off the floor, keeping the rest of the back flat
Make sure that the hip flexors stay in the lengthened position as you lift higher off he floor (for more info on why it’s important to lengthen the hip flexors to protect your lower back see this blog post on back pain in backbends)
For bonus points extend the arms up overhead and press them gently down into the floor while keeping the chest opened

Hold for 30-60 seconds, repeat 2-3 times

Upper Back Bend Isometric Hold

The upper body hold is often less familiar to the body, which makes it especially important. This hold does require a certain amount of wrist flexion, so if your wrists are tight I definitely recommend a good wrist warm-up and the addition of yoga blocks under your hands to help mitigate the pressure on your wrists (see the video at the end for a visual, the blocks come in at 4:03).

The key components of this hold are:

Place your palms flat on the floor or on the yoga blocks just above your shoulders, spread out your fingers to engage your wrist muscles, and make sure your fingers are pointing towards your shoulders not out to the sides
Forearms are parallel to each other, not opening out to the side like little wings, while the elbows reach back past the ends to upwardly rotate the shoulders and decrease pressure on the wrists
Keep your head and hips resting on the floor while just your upper back lifts, opening the chest towards the ceiling
The dream is to feel the engagement in your upper back, not your neck, chest, or shoulders. If you are not feeling your back muscles, keep your upper back on the floor and just work on pressing your hands down until you get acquainted with those back muscles

Hold for 30-60 seconds, repeat 2-3 times

Pushing Up Into Back Bridge

After doing these isometrics, you are ready to attempt pushing up into your Back Bridge! The push up happens in three stages.

First, start your lower body isometric hold.
Second, start your upper body isometric hold but this time continue to push up until your head starts to lift, pausing with the top of the head gently resting on the floor (make sure that most of your weight is in your hands, not pushing down into your delicate neck vertebrae).
Align your arms so that your forearms are parallel and re-engage those same back muscles you felt in your isometrics, then use them to push your arms straight.

Ideally, this should feel like a lot of work on the back side of your body while the front side of your body gets to open up. If it doesn’t feel that way, it’s ok! Keep working on your isometrics and the muscles will start to learn their new jobs.

Check out the video below for a visual guide to walk through the exercises, and happy Back Bendings!

4 Things You Can Do to Address Back Pain in Back Bends

Back bends can be a glorious part of your body’s movement practice. A healthy backbend feels great, benefits your spine, opens the front of your body, and can fill you with feelings of well-being. Plus it looks pretty.

Back bends can also cause back pain. The spine is a complex apparatus requiring care and understanding, and back bending puts a lot of pressure on the muscles, ligaments, discs, and joints. Proper preparation and technique in back bends can help you get the most out of your backbend without damage or pain.

Firstly, get to know your spine (you can get a nice overview in my Spinal Anatomy blog post) and what your spine likes to do. Everyone’s spine behaves differently, but most people feel their back bend in their lumbar spine.

If you take a photo or video of your back bend from the side, look at where you are bending and where you are sticky. Take special note if you have one spot that is doing the majority of the bending. In contortion we call this a folding back. Folding backs are particularly prone to wear in that one spot, requiring folders to focus extra hard on strength and technique.

With great flexibility comes great responsibility!

It is important to note that back bending should NOT be painful! A small amount of muscle soreness the next day from an intense back bending session is acceptable, but ongoing feelings of bruising, sharp pain, pain in the spine itself, feelings of being unable to bend forward after training, are all warning signs of over-bending. It is vital to take care of your back and address this pain, don’t push through it. Injuries from over-bending can be quite unpleasant.

For all you back benders out there, these four things are my guideposts for taking care of my spine while continuing to indulge my passion for backbends:

1. Warm up for Strength and Stability

Back bends require a thorough warm-up. My ideal back-bending warm-up includes:

A full body movement session to elevate body temperature
Waking up the core muscles especially the illiopsoas, transverse abdominus, obliques, and pelvic floor
Hip extension stretches and movements like lunges, back kicks, quad stretches that lengthen the front of the hips and energize the butt muscles
A thorough opening of the chest and shoulders that opens the pecs and diaphragm, prepares the shoulders for weight bearing in extension, and warms up the neck muscles
Movements that take the spine through all of its different ranges of motion including forward bending, twisting, and side bending before initiating the back bending
Starting the back bending with primarily active work (ie sliding into cobra, kneeling back extension, supermans, and other exercises where you lift into the back bend against gravity)

If you want to see some of my spine warm-ups please check out the FaB Video Club Membership or the free, shorter versions on my YouTube channel.

2. Extend the Hip Flexors before Back Bending

If you have a naturally bendy lower back, odds are that you also have tight hip flexors (see my blog post on Bendy Back/Tight Hips for more info). But regardless of your anatomy, consciously lengthening your hip flexors prior to and during your backbend works to protect the lumbar spine.

When the hip flexors are shortened the spine has a much longer journey to get to the same depth of backbend than it would when the hip flexors are lengthened. This places extra pressure on the lumbar spine, asking it to make a sharper, tighter bend.

If you’re having difficulty visualizing the difference please check out the video below to see the difference in action

Lengthening the hip flexors also inspires the butt muscles and pelvic floor to act as a strong base for the spine and it helps you use your illiopsoas muscles to support the lumbar spine.

Drawing of backbend with short hip flexors

Shortened hip flexors create more stress on the lower back in backbends

Extended Hip flexors enable more length in the lower back

3. Slow and Controlled Movement

I advocate for a warm-up that includes active backbends because as soon as we back bend from a vertical position it is terribly easy to just let gravity take your body down and lose control of the movement. This is never a good idea in a backbend.

In an ideal world, you should be in perfect control of your back bend at every stage of bending. This means you can go very slowly with no areas where you couldn’t stop, hang out, take a breath, reverse direction, and feel stable.

It is much harder to move slowly into a back bend than to move quickly but it will help you build the strength to keep you safe and make your backbends graceful. Train with patience, friends!

4. Move Your Spine in All Directions, Not Just Backwards

There are some coaches who advocate for avoiding during a back bending session.

Personally, I strongly advocate for incorporating strong twists and sidebends and even some gentle forward bending into your back bending sessions to give your back a break from all that compression. The muscles that we need for backbending are the same that we use in side, twist, and forward bending and the other movement can help to keep them dynamic and engaged.

Plus, I feel that if we are so deep in our back bending session that other movement becomes inaccessible we might be going too hard. I’ve seen too many back injuries over the years because of over-training and while it may feel like pushing hard will get you where you want to go a little faster, injuries really cramp your style and can take a long time to heal.

I particularly advocate for ending your session with these movements, especially forward bending, to decompress the spinal muscles and make space between the vertebrae.

I believe that back bends are not just fun and pretty, they are a range of motion that is natural to the human body and can promote our overall health and mobility. The difficulty is that they are not part of the movement repertoire that we learn in most fitness classes and back bending instruction is limited. They also challenge our nervous system and feel scary.

As a result many people experience back bends and painful and inaccessible. I’m hoping that with more information and a solid, patient practice you can find joy and pleasure in your spine’s natural extension.

Happy Bendings!

Got a Bendy Back and Tight Hip Flexors? Try this Short Workout

Five years ago I wrote a blog post titled The Curse of the Bendy Lower Back that laid out many of the difficulties facing people with a naturally bendy lumbar spine. One of the most unpleasant consequences is shortened, weak, painful hip flexor muscles.

This phenomenon has been well documented. In 1979 Dr Vladimir Janda coined the term “Lower Crossed Syndrome” to describe the postural condition where the back arches and the pelvis tilts forward. This results from and further contributes to tight muscles in the lower back and the front of the hips, and lengthened muscles in the abdominals and glutes/hamstrings.

At the root of the problem is inefficiency. Our bodies are designed to move from a stacked spine where the S-curve rests directly on top of a vertical pelvis and very little muscle is required to hold us up. When our spine is not neatly stacked the muscles and connective tissue have to work much harder to hold us up, resulting in angry, resentful, tight muscles.

In the case of the bendy lower back, the spine pulls the pelvis into a forward tilt (and sometimes the pelvis pulls the spine). This makes the back muscles have to work very hard to hold up our upper bodies, and compresses our illiopsoas, the largest and deepest set of hip flexor muscles. It also aligns us in a way that makes it our quadriceps muscles over work and makes it harder to use our abdominal muscles and glutes. Left unchecked over time this creates chronic postural problems, tightness, and pain.

I’ve had a pretty severe case of Lower Crossed Syndrome for most of my life. I do exercises every day to counter its effects and it has decreased my back and hip pain and increased my hip mobility. I’ve also seen these exercises help other people with the same issues, so if you’re in the same boat, perhaps they will prove useful for you too!

The video below contains specific exercises that I find useful, but here are some guiding principals that can help you design your own workouts and adapt your current workouts to make sure that you aren’t reinforcing your imbalances.

1. Know Your Dominant Muscles and Try to De-emphasize Them

For many folks with bendy back issue, the quadriceps muscles are bossy as hell. When designing your exercises, find ways to reduce input from the quads in favor of the illiopsoas, glutes, hamstrings, and core muscles. Basically, anyone but the quads. It may mean going lighter with your effort in order to find those quieter, shyer muscles.

2. Just Because a Muscles is Tight Doesn’t Mean it’s Strong

The back and hip flexors do not want to lengthen. They may feel tight as a bridge cable, but that doesn’t mean those muscles are good at contracting either. Often those muscles are just stuck at one length, not getting shorter or longer. When that happens, I recommend working on contracting the muscles first, before trying to stretch them. It is easier to make a muscle contract than relax, and once you get them to contract they gain some confidence and are more amenable to relaxing and stretching.

3. Just Because a Muscle is Long Doesn’t Mean it’s Weak

Those glutes and abs may be stuck in a long position, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t strong in a long position. When I was doing backbends all day my abs were very strong, they just didn’t want to get shorter. The key to making sustainable change was to get away from the crunches that I was used to and find exercises that forced me to use my abs when they were in a shortened position, with my spine in forward flexion. This resulted in lots of shaking, and some sustainable improvement in my bendy back issue. Putting a squishy ball or pillow under the hips for ab work is a great way to start.

4. Changing Posture is a Daily Practice

Posture doesn’t change overnight. It’s likely you’ve had this posture imbalance for much of your life so doing exercises once in a while isn’t going to make a noticeable difference. Changing posture and maintaining that change means doing exercises to address the imbalance almost every day, possibly for the rest of your life. But hey, at least you’ll always have something to do.

For my fellow hyperlordotic (bendy lower back) friends, I hope that some of these tips and exercises are useful for you. I know many of you may be dealing with back and hip pain, and all I can say is that there is hope for relief with consistent dedication to this small, undramatic, exercises.

Happy Bendings!

Spinal Anatomy for Back Benders

Back bending is one of the most challenging areas of the flexibility arts. The spine is an extremely complex structure consisting of bones, cartilage, connective tissue, and tons of nerves. You are essentially bending your brain’s tail.

Back bending is also special because most of the flexibility gains come from shortening the muscles of your back. Most flexibility training focuses on lengthening muscles. That is why back bending feels so different than other types of stretching and why it requires a specialized, primarily active (strength-based) approach. For ideas on strength-based spinal mobility check out the Video Club series.

Back bending is intense! Moving those bones and nerves around can create all sorts of unexpected responses. Dizzyness, euphoria, nausea, headaches, intense emotion, muscle spasms, and exhaustion are all common responses to back bends. My coach used to say that one hour of backbending taxes the nervous system like eight hours of normal exercises.

And of course back bending can be dangerous. Overtraining risks the possibility of fractured vertebrae, herniated discs, pinched nerves, and chronic pain.

Lest I sound like a total downer, I still love to teach and practice back bending. I just have strong feelings about the need for education and safety around the pursuit of the back bend. So let’s start with understanding the basics of how the spine is constructed.

The Three Segments of the Spine

The spine is made up of 24 boney chunks (vertebrae) that are hollow in the middle to allow the spinal cord to pass through. In between each vertebrae is a squishy disc to allow for movement and protection, and there are tough cords of ligaments that keep everything held together. To nerd out more deeply on the anatomy of the spine check out this good introductory article from the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Vertebrae change shape as they go up the spine. Based on that shape the spine can be divided into three different sections. Each section has a different kind of movement function.

Lumbar Spine

The lumbar spine starts at the sacrum, a flat shield-shaped bone that attaches to the pelvis. The five lumbar vertebrae (some people have six) are the largest of the three sections and naturally curve into a back bend shape. Some people have a lot of natural curve, some people have less.

The primary muscles supporting the lumbar spine are the illiopsoas, transverse abdominus, obliques, and the pelvic floor muscles. The muscles in the back that need to shorten for backbends are the multifidi, quadratus laborum, and the large muscles on either side of the spine that connect the spine and the ribs.

The shape of the lumbar vertebrae makes them more mobile going forwards and backwards although they also allow for twisting and side bending. Your lower back is part of the support system for your entire upper body, so it is important to keep it strong and mobile even if backbends aren’t your passion.

If back bends are your passion, beware over-using your lumbar spine. Because it has a natural back bend curve it’s easy to dump into your lower back, especially if you have a lot of natural curve and/or tight hips and upper back.

Thoracic Spine

The thoracic spine is the longest section of the spine, starting in the mid back and extending up to the base of the neck. The shape of the vertebrae differs considerably from the lumbar spine allowing for less mobility. The thoracic vertebrae are also the anchors for the ribcage, further limiting movement potential.

The muscles that support the thoracic spine in backbends are primarily upper back muscles including the lower and mid trapezius, the serratus anterior, and the rhomboids. The diaphragm is also involved in upper back bending and a tight diaphragm can limit upper back mobility.

The thoracic spine has a natural forward bend that is often exaggerated by modern posture. This is why learning how to find a backbend in the thoracic area is valuable even if you aren’t a back bender. And if you are a back bender it is extremely important to develop the muscles that reverse the natural curve of the thoracic spine to avoid over-using the lower back and neck.

The thoracic spine is very good at twisting, so one entry point it to work on twisting motions.

Cervical Spine

The cervical spine is in the neck, providing the bridge between the skull and torso. There are seven cervical vertebrae designed for maximal movement in all

directions: forward, back, tilting, and twisting. This is necessary for us to have the mobility we need but it does mean that back benders (and everyone else) need to take very good care of our necks.

Like the lumbar spine, the cervical spine also has a natural backbend shape. That makes the neck another vulnerable place for back benders. I often teach backbending without including the neck at all until some amount of thoracic bend is present to lessen the pressure on the cervical vertebrae. Strengthening the neck muscles is also essential, especially for those planning to practice chest stands (locust pose) or shoulder stands.

It is important to strengthen all of the neck muscles evenly because it is so mobile. Don’t just work the back bending range, work forward, tilt and twist with resistance. That head weighs about 11 lbs. It’s heavy!

Know Your Bend

Understanding the sections of the spine and how they work will aid you in improving the beauty and ease of your backbend and making sure that your back stays healthy and pain-free.

Pro Tip:
Take some photos of your backbend. Notice where you are bending: which areas of your spine are doing the work? If you notice that you are only bending in a few spots and other areas of the spine are not bending at all, or eve bending forwards, this is a good indication that you should focus your training on evening out that bend before going deeper into your flexibility.

Please watch the video below for you visual learners, and check out our video workouts and workshops for ideas on how to safely approach back bending.

Happy Bendings!

Can My Body Be Strong and Flexible at the Same Time? Yes!

One of the most common misconceptions about training is that you cannot train to be strong and flexible at the same time. This isn’t true. Just watch any luminaries of circus, gymnastics, or yoga and they will demonstrate a gorgeous combination of strength and flexibility, which is necessary in any of those disciplines.

Two woman back to back in standing fron splits

The standing front split is an example of a common pose in contortion and yoga that requires strength and flexibility.

The training method that makes this combination possible is active stretching.

Active stretching means using your own muscles to move your body into your end range of motion. It feels more like a strength-building exercise than a traditional stretch sensation.

To learn more, check out “What’s the Difference Between Active and Passive Stretching?”.

In a passive stretch, gravity or some other outside force causes the joint to move into a stretch, so no effort is needed. This is very good for lengthening muscle, and done repeatedly over time (recommended to do at least three stretch sessions a week for best results) muscles will accommodate greater and greater ranges.

However the issue with passive stretching alone is that it doesn’t teach your body how to support that new range of motion. An over-emphasis on passive stretching often means that the body is able to achieve positions where no muscles are able to work to support the joint. This can lead to a situation where you achieve flexibility at the cost of your strength.

Of course, the converse is also possible. Muscles build only and exactly how you use them, so if you are lifting weights and doing strength-training exercises in a small range, over time your body will start to be limited to that range and either wont move beyond that range, or will feel unstable and prone to injury when it does. The more strength you build in a limited range, the harder it will be to move outside of this range, thus sacrificing flexibility for strength.

Active flexibility strengthens a muscle through its full range of motion, with a particular emphasis on its shortest position. Muscles can only do two things: shorten or relax. They cannot actively lengthen themselves. That means that the most vulnerable position for a muscle is when it is at its shortest length, helpless.

When we stretch passively, an outside force squishes muscles into shortened positions, and the muscle becomes powerless and possibly very resentful. In an active stretch we only move the joint as far as that muscle is able to contract on its own. Over time, with repetition, the muscles becomes more competent at shortening and the range increases.

Flexibility earned by active methods will almost always be less than passive flexibility. However, active flexibility will be more comfortable, safer, more sustainable over time, stronger, and require less warm up. Active stretching builds strength, awareness, and control of the joint and is a powerful tool to prevent injury, degenerative disease, and chronic pain.

Being strong and flexible isn’t just important for contortionists and gymnasts. It is a component of healthy movement for all of us, keeping our bodies responsive, supple, and able to enjoy the world. The good news is that this type of stretching is available to all bodies at any age or fitness level. It is safe, effective, and can be done with minimal fuss, equipment, and warm-up.

Active stretching can take many forms and levels of challenge and can be applied to any skeletal muscle or joint in the body. It is one of the primary components of our work here at Fit & Bendy. For a super gentle full-body workout using a large number of active stretches, check out this free workout. Other full-length workouts are available through our Video Club or you can get live instruction through our courses and classes.

Happy Bendings!

What’s the Difference Between Active and Passive Flexibility?

There are two different ways that we can measure our flexibility in any joint: active flexibility and passive flexibility. It is important to know the difference between them and how to use them to achieve your flexibility goals.

Active Flexibility

Active flexibility is the amount that we can use our own muscles to move into an end range position.

The active range is how far you can move into a stretch using your own muscles

So if I want to lengthen my hamstrings and the back of my leg, my active flexibility would be the amount that I could use my hip flexors to bring my leg closer to my body without touching it.

Active flexibility is the measurement of the shortened muscles’ ability to contract when it gets very short, which can be very challenging at first. Often active stretching doesn’t feel like a traditional stretch, it feels more like a strength exercise. Most of us aren’t used to strengthening our joints at our end range.

Active flexibility is essential for building strength and flexibility together, and keeping our joints stable. It’s important for addressing alignment, and correcting muscle imbalances that could be causing chronic tightness. It is also valuable for preventing injuries and making sure that our flexibility is helpful and useful for our chosen activities.

Passive Flexibility

Passive flexibility is the amount that we can move into an end range with help from an external force, whether it’s pulling with a strap, pushing from a coach, or gravity pressing us to the floor as it does in a split.

Passive flexibility, using help to stretch, will almost always be greater than active flexibility.

To find my passive flexibility in my hamstrings/back of the leg, I would pull gently on my leg with my hands or a yoga strap, or have a knowledgeable coach push the leg into a deeper stretch.

Passive flexibility means that the resting length of your muscles and connective tissues is longer, and that your nervous system is comfortable with a larger range of motion. Passive stretching will increase those two factors and facilitate a feeling of relaxation and decreased pain.

Finding the Balance

It is very important to find the proper balance between active and passive stretching for your body and your goals. Passive stretching is often over-emphasized because it is better-known. Too much passive stretching can create unstable joints, less useful flexibility, and possibly injury, especially in hypermobile people.

If you are experiencing joint pain, difficulty with strength movements, or you are struggling to make any progress in your flexibility quest you may not be doing enough active stretching.

If there is a very big difference between your active and passive flexibility in any particular joint, incorporate more active exercises to decrease that difference. You will always have more passive flexibility than active flexibility, but it is our goal to minimize the difference in order to ensure the health of our joints and prevent injury. FaB courses and Video on Demand service offer a variety of workouts combining the many approaches to stretching for optimal results.

Important Factoids about Active vs Passive Flexibility

1. Don’t let the name fool you, passive flexibility isn’t all about relaxation. When you are in a passive stretch you still need to engage your supporting muscles to hold your form. It is extremely rare that you want to be completely relaxed in a stretch as this can compromise your joint alignment and you may miss the tightest muscles that really need the stretch.

2. When it comes to passive stretching, more pressure does not mean more progress. Unless you are extremely muscled you don’t want to be pushing super hard on your stretches. Light to medium pressure is sufficient in almost all cases and more pressure can just cause tears and strains.

3. One of the reasons that active flexibility is so important is that the limiting factor in our flexibility isn’t always the muscle that’s stretching. Sometimes it’s the muscle that’s shortening. So that tightness in bringing your leg to your chest may be the result of hip flexors that don’t want to get shorter! If that is the case, contracting those muscles in an active stretch can be immensely helpful.

4. Active and passive stretching don’t have to be done separately, they can be combined. Play with alternating between the two, adding an active component to a passive stretch, and using movement in your stretches. For lots of ideas on how to do that check out our classes and video library.

Read more about the benefits of different varieties of stretching in this blog post, and check out the video below for all you visual learners who want to see these concepts in action.

Happy Bendings!

Kristina

How to Get More Flexible: 4 Basic Tips for All Levels

When I tell humans out in the world what I do I’m often asked—usually after a glum confession to being “the tightest person in the world”—what a person needs to do to get more flexible. It’s funny, because people don’t usually ask that about how to get stronger, or how to get faster, or better at a sport.

But flexibility is still cloaked in mystery. The old school approach to flexibility, suffering in a stretch until you get sick of it and give up, is understandably unpopular and lots of people don’t know what to do instead.

So here are four tips that can help to improve your flexibility without stretching. If you add some stretching on top of that (our classes and videos can give you some idea how to approach it in an effective, safe way) then that’s gravy. But these four tips alone can increase your range of motion and reduce pain and tightness.

1. Improve your Posture

Our posture has a huge effect on muscle functionality, tightness, and flexibility. Most of us only spend a small percentage of our day training, and for the rest of it we are mostly sitting and standing. So the way that we sit and stand is inevitably influential on our training.

Optimal posture stacks the body with the major joints in a straight, vertical line. This takes advantage of the bones balancing on one another to minimize the amount of work that our muscles have to do to hold us up. When we deviate from that vertical line with a forward thrusted head, an over-arched back, or forward rounded shoulders, muscles are called into play to offset that weight shift. After a while, the muscles get resentful and will become tight and cranky.

Learning how to stack your major joints as best as you can—ear over shoulder over hip socket over knee over ankle—will reduce tightness and thereby improve flexibility.

2. Move!

Our bodies are designed to move. Modern lifestyle has created immense conveniences that enable us to be sedentary and supported most of the time. This convenience takes a toll on our bodies by reducing the amount that we use our full capabilities.

It is extremely beneficial to move through your body’s full range of motion every day. This isn’t some big deal deep stretch session, it’s a gentle exploration of the ways that your body moves comfortably. Circle through every joint in your body, allowing them to move to their end range. I find that this is particularly effective when you first wake up to counter the stiffness of sleeping.

If you go for long enough without using a range of motion, you start to lose it, and losing range is a major cause of long-term pain and that general creakiness we associate with age. Check out my Full Body Stretch: Mild and Mellow for a super gentle full body ROM routine.

3. Targeted Strengthening

The myth is that strength and flexibility are opposing forces and you have to give up one to get the other. In fact, weakness can be a root cause of tightness. Many chronically tight muscles are not tight because they are too strong, they are tight because they are weak. Or they are tight because other muscles around them are weak so they are overworked and resentful (see the previous section on posture).

Figuring out which muscles on your body are sleepy, unenthusiastic, and just generally under performing and gently strengthening them through their full range of motion can make dramatic changes in your flexibility. Our video workouts and classes at Fit & Bendy include targeted strengthening for parts of the body that are commonly underperforming on a lot of our clients. This strength training enhances our active and passive stretching.

4. Water!

Every structure in our body is coated in a thin layer of fascia. This fascia also creates our tendons and ligaments, and separates one muscle from another. In a healthy, hydrated body there is a nice slimy layer of goo coating the sheets and cords of fascia, allowing the muscles and tendons and ligaments to slide along each other for ease of movement.

When we are dehydrated, this goo dries up and turns into more of a paste. The fascia doesn’t slide very well, and it can get completely stuck together. If you leave it stuck for too long it becomes increasingly difficult to unstick it. There are various techniques for unsticking fascia including ball rolling, myofascial release massage, and Structural Integration. But the best thing you can do is stay juicy by drinking lots of water. The minimum is 8 glasses per day, but you should consider more if flexibility is a goal.

Plus there are so many additional benefits to being hydrated. It’s an all-around win!

These four steps are useful for anyone concerned with flexibility and improved body mechanics, whether you are training like a maniac, brand new, or anything in between. Take the time, using these tips and as a jumping off point, to get to know your body and the root causes of tightness. Everyone is different, so if you understand your own body well, you can find the methods that will give you the best results.

Happy Bendings!

Stretch your Shoulders without Pain or Pinching

It is possible to stretch your shoulders without pain, pinching, or compromising the strength and integrity of the shoulder joint. This range of motions is necessary for a whole host of activities that require you to bring your arms overhead including weight lifting, handstands, aerial arts, yoga, and contortion… and just getting a plate off a high shelf!

Pinching or pain in the shoulder joint is often caused by sub-optimal shoulder alignment. When the bones aren’t in the right place you can create compression in the shoulder socket which can, over time, lead to injuries like impingement and tears.

Plus you wont make good progress on building your mobility and strength.

Coordinate Your Shoulder Movements

Remember that with all shoulder movement we are managing two different areas of mobility: the glenohumeral joint and the scapula. For more about shoulder anatomy please check out last month’s blog post, 3 Things You Should Know about Shoulder Anatomy to Address Shoulder Pain. Understanding shoulder mechanics is essential to mastering shoulder positioning for optimal movement.

The glenohumeral joint and the scapula each have an important job to do. And just like a choreographed duet between two dancers, if either one of them isn’t in the right place the whole thing falls apart.

I’ve broken the process of finding the correct position into three steps—and for you visual learners there is also a video below.

Step 1: External rotation of the Glenohumeral Joint

External Rotation of the Shoulder

Internal Rotation of the Shoulder

The glenohumeral joint, where the arm bone meets the shoulder socket, should be externally rotated when stretching. External rotation creates spaciousness in the shoulder socket and puts the arm in a more supported position.

It is much easier to achieve this position if you start with rotation before you’re in the stretch.

There are some overhead movements that call for internal rotation like the clean and jerk, but you never want to do anything at your end range of motion in internal rotation. This can lead to the dreaded pinching feeling.

If you’re having a hard time finding your external rotators, check out How to Find and Strengthen Your Rotator Cuff.

Step 2: Pull the Scapulae Apart

Illustration of Pulling the Scapulae Apart

Pull the scapulae apart creating space in the upper back.

The scapulae are capable of tremendous mobility since nothing is holding them onto your rib cage except muscles. Restriction in scapular movement comes from neglecting upper back mobility, and poor posture can make it worse. However time spent on scapular mobility has big pay-offs. In this case you want to pull your scapulae straight out to the side, away from your spine. It is easiest to do this with your arms in a T position. Don’t forget to keep that external rotation!

Note: If this is a new range for you, you may feel a deep, nervy stretch down your biceps, elbows, forearms or fingers. If this is you, GO SLOW. Don’t push into that stretch, just gradually work on it little by little over time and don’t stay in the stretch for more than a few seconds. Nerves are easily pissed off and hard to calm down. Don’t upset them!

Step 3: Upwardly Rotate the Scapulae Keeping Them Wide

Drawing showing the upward rotation of the shoulder blades

The scapulae move apart and rotate up in order to move the arms overhead for stretching.

The last step is to bring the arms overhead. This phase of the movement is highly dependent on the scapulae rotating out and up; imagine the upward rotation of a bird’s wing joint as it gets ready to fly. If the scapulae do not rotate upward sufficiently, pointing the shoulder socket towards the sky, then the shoulder muscles will have difficulty functioning properly and the glenohumeral joint will be overworked, resulting in the previously mentioned pain and pinching.

It is vitally important when upwardly rotating the scapulae to maintain steps 1 and 2 so that you don’t lose your external rotation or the width between the scapulae. Once you have all of these pieces in place, you’re ready to rock your shoulder stretch.

When you have all of the bones aligned properly, you should feel the stretch through the back of the arm, the armpit, and possibly down the side of the body. There may also be stretching through the chest (see Tight Shoulders? Try Stretching Your Pecs!). But keep in mind there is a lot of variety in anatomy and different people will experience this stretch in different places.

If you are feeling pinching, stabbing, blocking pain in the shoulder socket itself, keep working on improving your ability to do the three steps above before going deeper into the stretch. If the pain persists, I recommend seeing a doctor or PT as there may be an injury in the shoulder that needs to be addressed before stretching.

For ideas on how to create more stable, mobile shoulders and address your root causes, please check out our catalogue of shoulder mobility videos at Video Club.

Happy Bendings!

Tight Shoulders? Try Stretching your Pecs!

Tight shoulders restrict athletic performance and our daily activities. A key aspect of upper body health is to have full shoulder flexion, meaning you’re easily able to lift your arms straight up over your without arching your back. If you are interested in contortion, handstands, or advanced yoga poses you will want even more range, building the ablility to move your arms behind your ears with strength and good form.

There are a number of different structural and muscular factors that can restrict mobility here including the ability of the scapulae to rotate upward and correctly position the shoulder socket (see my blog post on shoulder anatomy for more info about this), instability in the rotator cuff muscles leading to tightness (see the rotator cuff post for more info), and tight lats, among others.

But today we are going to talk about a reasonably common cause of decreased mobility with a relatively easy short-term fix (yay): stretching the pectoral muscles.

What is the Pectoralis Major?

The pectoralis major muscles connect the front of the upper arm bone (humerus) to the bones of the front of the rib cage and the clavicle. It is one of only two bones that connect the arm to the torso rather than the scapula, and it’s a big, powerful muscle capable of lifting a lot of weight. This is the muscle that leads the way for weighted movements like push-ups and bench presses.

The pec major is a pretty common muscle to be highly active and over-worked. Lots of people train push-up style exercises without doing a corresponding amount to work the back of the body. Exercises like benching heavy or continuous sun salutations bias these muscles. If your form is off and your back muscles aren’t active, or your shoulders are forward rotated because of poor posture, those pec muscles can get very stressed out and tight.

Cute skeleton girl with a glowing pectoralis major muscle

Pectoralis Major can contribute to tight shoulders

How Does the Pectoralis Major Effect Shoulder Flexibility?

Since the whole job of the pec muscle is to pull the arm in towards the body, it makes sense that they could get in the way of that overhead shoulder flexibility. Tight pecs will pull the arm bone in and down, creating a concave chest, hunched shoulders, and forward rounded scapulae. Then when you try to stretch your arms overhead they may feel very heavy, blocked, or pinchy, and it will be hard to straighten your elbows and find external rotation.

For folks with chronically tight pecs, a relatively quick stretch of the pectorals can immediately confer a satisfying increase in range of motion of the shoulders. For my favorite pec stretch (I call it the clock stretch) check out the video below. All you need is a wall to do it, and it targets all the different fibers of the pectorals and even gets a little bit into the pec minor which runs underneath the pec major and is a big contributor to hunchy shoulders.

This is a Short-Term Fix!

Pro tip: the gains provided by the clock stretch can potentially feel miraculous, but they do not address the root causes of your tight pectoralis muscles!

If you find that the clock stretch provides a noticeable improvement in your shoulder flexibility I highly recommend that you take a look at your posture and training regimen in order to figure out why they are tight.

Passive stretches like the clock stretch are great quick fixes. They can feel good and provide windows of opportunity to try out greater ranges in our joints, but they don’t change our bodies’ fundamental configuration. Sleuthing down the root causes of tightness will give you a more sustainable change and ease of movement in the ranges you desire.

For ideas on how to create more stable, mobile shoulders and address your root causes, please check out our catalogue of shoulder mobility videos at Video Club.

How to Find and Strengthen Your Rotator Cuff Muscles

When I received my MRI back from the doctor’s office it just said “rotator cuff tear”. What a tease!

There are four rotator cuff muscles in the shoulder and each of them does a different, vitally important role. Even medical professionals tend to lump them together into one poorly-defined category. But the better you know each one and can strengthen them with precision, the easier it will be to keep your shoulders happy and healthy.

The rotator cuff muscles are responsible for the rotational qualities of your arm bone in your shoulder socket. They are also vital to the stabilization of the arm bone since the shoulder socket is very shallow and the bone has the potential to slip out of place without muscular support. This means that the balance of each individual muscle is necessary to keep the arm bone centered in the joint.

So let’s meet the team!

Subscapularis

The subscapularis is responsible for internal rotation and stabilizes the arm bone from slipping forward in the shoulder joint. This is a very important job since the most common shoulder dislocation is in a forward direction. The subscap attaches to the front of the arm bone and runs along the underneath side of the shoulder blade to attach along its inside edge. This means it’s very difficult to poke at your subscapularis since it’s mostly an internal muscle.

The Subscapularis Muscle

Supraspinatus

The supraspinatus is responsible for rotating the arm bone up in the socket and protects against the arm popping sideways out of the socket. It attaches to a boney ridge on the top of the shoulder blade and runs through a little hole in between the shoulder socket and the arm bone to fasten to the outside of the arm bone. This journey through the little hole between two bones makes the supraspinatus especially prone to sadness because improper shoulder mechanics can crush the tendon and over time lead to tearing. Since it’s right underneath the powerful deltoid it is easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention.

The Supraspinatus Muscle

Infraspinatus

The infraspinatus is responsible for external rotation and stabilizes the arm bone from slipping backwards out of the shoulder socket. It attaches to the outside edge of the shoulder blade and runs along the top of the shoulder blade to fasten to the back of the arm bone. Since modern posture biases internal rotation of the shoulder, most of us could use a little more external rotation love from the infraspinatus.

Teres Minor

The teres minor is the bff of the infraspinatus and they do everything together. The teres minor is a smaller muscle that sits just under the infraspinatus and reinforces the external rotation and stabilization role. For our purposes you can think of the teres minor as the Robin to the infraspinatus’ Batman.

Infraspinatus and Teres Minor Muscles

Compared to the big, beefy deltoids, biceps, and triceps, the rotator cuff muscles are relatively small. If you only do shoulder strengthening with heavier weights it is very easy to go right to the bigger muscles since they are designed for the big, dramatic movements. To feel and strengthen the rotator cuff muscles it is better to use light weight, or even no weight at all, to make sure that the bigger muscles aren’t called into action.

The video below shows three unweighted, easy isometrics that you can use to experience each of your rotator cuff muscles and develop your relationship with them. Once that relationship is established you can add weight and movement to build their capacity. But you can’t strengthen a muscle that you can’t find or feel so this is a great start in getting to know your shoulders so you can all be friends!

Spend time getting to know your rotator cuff team. It’s a relationship you will value for the rest of your life.

3 Things You Should Know About Shoulder Anatomy to Address Shoulder Pain

When I first injured my right shoulder in 2010 I joined the ranks of circus performers, acrobats, dancers, and athletes with shoulder injuries. I was bummed out, but far from alone. It is one of the most common sites for pain and injury for anyone who engages in vigorous upper body activities from aerial arts to lifting groceries out of the trunk.

And it’s no wonder. Shoulders are a complicated piece of equipment and, even though most of us have them, they didn’t come with an instruction manual. When I started to learn more about how shoulders are constructed I was amazed, and immediately changed the way I was training, stretching, and thinking about shoulder movement.

So here are three things that I wish I had known before I injured my shoulder that have helped me in my rehab process and informed the way I address shoulder pain in my clients.

The Shoulder is Not 1 Joint… It’s 4 Joints!

1. The Sternoclavicular joint is the place where your clavicle meets your sternum, right below your throat. We aren’t going to worry to much about this one because there aren’t a ton of muscles that affect it, but it’s important to know that it exists!

Stylish skeleton showing the sternoclavicular joint

Where the clavical meets the sternum and is attached by some ligaments.

2. The Glenohumeral joint is what we traditionally think of as the shoulder joint, where the arm bone meets the shoulder socket. It is pretty mobile, controlled by the rotator cuff, deltoids, pectorals, and lats. However it is vital to know that the glenohumeral joint, if no other joints are moving, cannot lift your arm above about shoulder height and is pretty limited at bringing your arm behind your back.

Adorable skeleton showing the movement of the glenohumeral joint

The Glenohumeral joint where the Humerous meets the Scapula and Clavical in a ball and socket joint.

3. The Scapular joint is the most mobile part of your shoulder. There is nothing but muscle attaching your scapulae to your back. No bones, no connective tissue, just muscles. The scapulae is primarily controlled by the trapezius (upper, lower, and mid), the levator scapula, the serratus, and the rhomboids. These muscles coordinate in an intricate dance to move the scapulae all over your upper back to position the shoulder socket for optimal arm movement. It is this versatility that gives the shoulder its mobility but also makes it extra tricky to control and understand.*

Adorable skeleton drawing showing the scapulae moving around the back

The scapulae have no bones or ligaments attaching them to the back so they can move around all over the place!

4. The acromioclavicular joint is where the scapula and the clavical come together. Since we don’t have a lot of musclular control of this joint I’m not going to bog us down but it is important to mention that this is another area that can have pain and strains if you aren’t using proper shoulder mechanics.

Only 2 Muscles Attach your Arm to Your Torso, The Rest Attach to the Scapula

So here is this wild, wiggly scapula floating around on your upper back, and the kicker is that the stability of the shoulder is deeply dependent on the stability of this very mobile joint. Only two muscles go directly from the arm bone to the torso. They are big, important muscles though: the pectorals run from the arm bone to the sternum and the latissimus dorsi run from the arm bone all the way down to the base of the spine and the pelvis. These are great muscles for big movements like push-ups and pull-ups, but they aren’t stabilizer muscles.

All of the muscles that provide finer control of the shoulder (the rotator cuff muscles and the deltoids) attach to the scapulae. And that means that no matter how much you strengthen your rotator cuff or pump up those delts, if you don’t have control over your scapulae then you are anchoring those muscles to an unstable surface.

This is why any campaign to improve shoulder health and address shoulder pain must include the muscles of the upper back.

We Must Improve Our Strength, Control, and Mobility in our Upper Back

Almost everyone I work with, myself included, could improve the strength, control, and mobility of our upper back muscles. The scapulae are theoretically capable of amazing ranges of movement and can act as a gorgeous base for shoulder strength and mobility. But poor posture, lack of attention, and just not being aware of what is going on in the back side of our body has a cumulative affect of creating tight, weak, unenthusiastic scapular muscles.

When our scapulae don’t engage and move properly it has a profound effect on the ability of the shoulder to do its thing.

One common example of this is when the scapulae are stuck in an elevated forward rounded position (computer hunch). This means that when we lift our arms over our head to do a pull-up or put dishes away after dinner, our glenohumeral joint, which doesn’t work well one it’s own once the arms are above shoulder height, has to strain past its happy place because it’s not getting the help it needs from the scapular joint. Over time this can lead to the miserable condition known as shoulder impingement and even to tears in the supraspinatus tendon.

That is just one of many sad stories about what can happen with the scapulae aren’t strong and free to do their job.

What I took away from learning all this was that I need to spend much, much more time thinking about my upper back and my scapulae. And that extra time has paid off in reduced shoulder pain, increased stability and mobility, and improved performance overall.

If you are curious about what has worked for me and for my clients, the shoulder series included in the Video Club Membership has a lot of the exercises I love to coordinate between the shoulder joints and build scapular awareness.

Happy Bendings!
Kristina

*OK, you anatomy experts know I left out the scapuloclavicular joint. This is where the scapula and clavicle come together but since it has very little movement I don’t want to muddy the waters with excess information. But if you have a burning desire to get deep into shoulder anatomy, this is the fourth joint.

Advanced Hip Flexibility: Swim Through Splits Tutorial

The swim through splits (not sure where this term originates, I may have made it up but I don’t think so), are a beautiful transitional movement requiring advanced hip flexibility, strength, and control. I love this transition which can quickly and dramatically take you from sitting on your rump to laying on your belly and, with a little more effort, back again.

Below please enjoy a tutorial that breaks this movement down into stages, demonstrating the swim through both with and without assistance from the arms.

I only recommend this tutorial to folks who already have an established practice of hip stretching and strengthening and are close to 180 degrees on both straddle and middle splits. I have seen this transition used as a training tool for folks who are still far off the ground in middle splits and I’ll be honest that it isn’t my favorite. I feel that it can put too much pressure on the hips and, without adequate control, its a bit risky for my taste.

If you are still working on getting those deep straddle and middle splits, check out our free splits workouts on YouTube or full-length workouts on the Fit & Bendy Video Club Membership.

For those of you ready to tackle swim throughs, my recommendation is to start with the straddle slides and the no-hands leaning forward to pancake. These two movements build strength in the external rotators (piriformis and friends), outside butt (gluteus medius and minimus), and upstairs butt/lower back (upper gluteus maximus and spinal extensors) that you will need to successfully execute the full movement.

The most common misadventure I see in learning this movement is to heave your hips up and over to transition into the middle split. If this is you, continue to build that active flexibility in your hips with side leg lifts in a tucked position. The goal here (which I admit I do not execute to perfection in this tutorial but am continuing to work towards) is to be able to do the entire movement without lifting the pelvis off the floor at all.

As always, enjoy the process and many happy bendings!

-Kristina

2 Exercises to Address Knee Pain in Middle Splits

Middle splits can be beastly. Often we push too far too fast, going past our body’s limits without the proper strength and control. Sometimes this means that we just hate middle splits, but it can also lead to pain and injury if we push too hard.

One of the most common places to feel pain from middle splits is in the knee joint.

There are a few common reasons why this position can have a profound effect on the knees:

1. A lot of folks do not have strong knees when they are completely straight, as they are in middle splits. Even if your knees are strong in a bent position, you may not have worked to strengthen them in full extension.

2. The muscles and fascia along the inside and outside of the knee joint (the sartorius and gracilis on the inside and the IT band attached to the gluteus maximus and tensor fascia latae on the outside) are also hip muscles. That means that hip position affects knee position and if something is pulling at the hip, and the hip is tight, that pulling can radiate down to the knee. If the knee is unstable, it is easily pulled out of alignment.

3. Knees are designed for movement the sagittal plane (forward and back, like when you kick a ball), and a very small amount of rotation, but not at all for side to side. Generally if you see a knee moving sideways, like a pendulum, you’re going to worry about it. The force on the knee joint during middle splits is a shearing force, along that sideways plane. Knees don’t like it and need extra reinforcement to withstand it.

To counteract these effects and protect the knees, one of my first go-to approaches is to practice engaging the knee stabilizing muscles in the quads and hips while finding full extension of the knee.

The two exercises shown in the video below both emphasize the work of the outer quad (the vastus lateralis) and the outside butt/hip muscles (gluteus maximus and TFL) that connect to the knee via the IT band.

I find this approach effective because middle splits put the the inner thigh muscles under a lot of tension, particularly in folks with tight hips. This pulls the knee inwards, bringing it out of alignment. Learning to use the outside butt stabilizes the knee and provides support for the hip, facilitating some ease and lengthening for the inner thighs.

These are great exercises for anyone with knee pain in normal life too. The side butt-to-knee connection is vital to maintaining lower limb stability and prevents the dreaded knee valgus (when the knee collapses in) on squats and lunges.

Some important things to keep in mind when trying out these exercises:

1. Start slow. It’s important to feel the muscles in your outside butt and quads doing the work. If they aren’t used to working like this they may fatigue very quickly and try to outsource their work to other muscles. Keep the work gentle enough, and short sets, to target the desired muscle groups.

2. Straighten your legs all the way when there is no weight on them. The knees are most vulnerable when they are fully extended, especially for us lucky noodles with hyperextended knees. You want to build strength in this position while they aren’t burdened with the extra job of holding you up.

3. If you have knee pain during these exercises, or if these exercises don’t help your knee pain, then it’s important not to keep doing them anyway. Take the time to continue to investigate, and seek out professional help if needed. There are many possible causes of knee pain and these exercises are not going to address all of them, alas.

Check out the video below for the exercises. A band or strap is useful but not necessary to get the most out of this mini-workout.

Be kind to your knees, friends. They are crabby little beasts and when they are out of sorts they can make your life less pleasant!

What is the Difference Between a Straddle Split and a Middle Split?

The straddle split and the middle split are similar, and there can be some confusion between the two. However the relationship with gravity makes these two splits feel very different, especially for newer benders. Knowing the difference is very important for ensuring proper form and developing the strength, flexibility, and control in your lower body.

The primary difference is in the position of the pelvic bones. Pay attention to the alignment of those bones and you will know whether you are in a straddle or a middle split.

The Straddle Split

In a straddle split, the pelvis is in “anatomical” position. This means it is aligned as if you were standing up, with the three bones in the front of the pelvis—the hip bones and the pubic bone (anterior superior iliac spine and pubis)—facing forwards.

The bones at the base of the pelvis are on the floor. These “sit bones” (ischium if you want to get formal about it) take the weight of your body so that you are not supporting yourself with your legs.

The legs move apart to the extent that they are able. If your straddle has the shape of a small slice of pizza or if your feet are so far apart that they are behind your hips, it’s still a straddle.

It is also still a straddle split if you are leaning forward. That means that if you start to lean forward and the only way that you can get your chest towards the floor is by allowing your sit bones to come up off the floor, you are losing your form. Wherever you move your torso, you want to have the strength and control to keep that pelvis in the same alignment. That separation between the pelvic position and the torso is part of the gift of training straddle splits.

The Middle Split

In a middle split the entire pelvis rotates 90 degrees forward.

Now those sit bones are not on the floor, they are facing back behind you. Your hip bones and pubic bone are now facing the floor. The body is usually aligned parallel to the floor, however you will see middle splits with a backbend that brings the body back to vertical. Either way, it’s still a middle split because of the pelvic position.

In this position the relationship with gravity means that your legs are now supporting your body weight unless you are flexible enough to get to a 180 degree split. This is why the middle split is so challenging for newer benders.

The inner thighs are receiving contradictory messages to “relax” and lengthen, and to hold you up. They may get confused and start to scream. This is why, for so many folks, middle splits are unpleasant and even emotionally draining. A careful ramp-up is necessary to avoid misery and potential injury.

Graded Training is Required

If middle splits are your goal, start by getting comfortable in your straddle splits. The work of learning how to control your hips in this position, anchor your legs while moving your torso, and develop the strength in your butt and inner thighs, will prepare your body to start training middle splits with more awareness and capacity for that stand-off with gravity.

For a visual on the difference between straddle and middle splits, please check out the video below. If you would like a graded set of workouts to get comfortable in your straddle and middle splits, our Video Club Membership includes a series of four workouts to get you there!

Jean-Claude Van Damme doing a box split between two trucks.

Pro Tip: There is a third type of split that looks similar called a Box Split. This type of split is common among martial artists and was made famous in the 80s by Jean-Claude Van Damme who famously used it to suspend himself between two walls or moving trucks. In the box split the sit bones face the floor, the hip bones face forward, and the inner thighs face the floor.

I do not do or teach this split, not because it isn’t awesome, but because it is inaccessible to a lot of people based on the structure of the pelvis. For many humans, particularly those whose pelvises are prepared for childbirth, the head of the femur is sits too deeply into the pelvic socket to achieve the box split and pushing into it can dislocate the hip. However, if you find a good coach and wish to train it safely, it is pretty bad ass!

Improve Middle/Straddle Splits and Hip Stability: How to Do a Highly Effective Clamshell Exercise

I’ve often said that if I were stuck on a desert island and I could only bring one exercise, the humble clamshell would be a strong contender. This exercise is gold for targeting one of the most important and under-utilized muscle groups in our lower body: the deep butt.

The deep butt are six little muscles that run horizontally under the gluteus maximus, connecting the head of the femur to the pelvis at various points and angles. These muscles (the obdurator internus and externus, the gemellus superior and inferior, the quadratus femoris, and the famous piriformis) are external rotators and are vital to stabilizing your pelvis for positions like middle splits and straddles, as well as for life.

But the gold in clamshells is very much in the details. It’s so easy to swish through a set of clams utilizing non-targeted muscle groups like the obliques, the hip flexors, opposite butt muscles, and even the spinal extensors. The gluteal muscles (gluteus maximus, minimus, and medius) are working but not the primary targets here. The first time I figured out how to get all those other helpers to pipe down and really focus on the deep butt muscles I was shocked to find a tiny range of motion and shaking like I was hefting an olympic barbell. But it was just my thigh bone. So exciting!

How to Set Up for Success

Even Out Your Hip Bones: If you have a difference in the diameter of your waist and hips, which most people do, when you lie on your side your top hip will tip up towards your rib cage making your hips uneven. Use your waist muscles to lengthen that top hip out towards your heels until the top hip bone is directly above the bottom hip bone. This will make it harder for your obliques and back muscles to “help out”.

Slight Lean Forward: Very slightly rotate your pelvis forward as if you were considering rolling forward onto your belly. Lengthen your top knee out just past your bottom knee. Feel like that top leg is lengthening out of the hip socket. You are going to maintain this lengthened feeling and forward tilt throughout the exercise to minimize the participation of the gluteus minimus and medius and hip flexors.

Stack the Insteps of your Feet: Make sure that the feet are stacked one directly on top of the other with the insteps lined up and pressed together. That slight press down with the top foot is going to encourage the external rotators to be more enthusiastic.

Tips for Optimal Execution

Nothing Moves but the Knee: Try putting your top hand on your top hip. Don’t let that hip bone move at all. The only movement is the lifting and lowering of the thigh bone.

Bottom Leg Stays Relaxed: It is so tempting to push that bottom leg down to lift the top leg up, and some amount is inevitable. But really try to keep it as relaxed as possible.

Keep it Small: Most of us don’t have a huge range in our external rotation. If you are doing a giant movement where your knee points towards the ceiling every time you are likely bringing pelvic and spinal rotation into it and no longer isolating those deep butt muscles. Keep it small, keep it honest.

Feel the Burn: For most people this is not an isolation we do every day. Those deep butt muscles should be singing! You probably wont need more than 10-20 reps to get to shaky, crampy, maximum. Feel free to do multiple sets but when you get too tired to isolate, take a break.

For you visual learners check out the YouTube video below!

Pro Tip: The standard way to do this exercise is with the hips at about a 45 degree angle and the feet lined up with the hips but that isn’t the only way to do it. You can emphasize different muscles but doing the same set up with the knees tucked up towards the chest or in full extension with the feet back behind me like you were hanging upside down from a trapeze. These exercises are great for improving hip stability at every angle.

How Long Should I Sit in My Split? How Long Should I Hold a Stretch? Learn About the Stretch Reflex

I wish I had a simple, straightforward answer to this question like: hold your split for exactly 45 seconds then take a 60 second break and hold it again. It would make this blog post nice and short, and everyone would go away knowing exactly what to do. Unfortunately I can’t give that advice because it would be wrong and even potentially damaging, depending on where your body is with flexibility training.

The only way to truly know how long to hold your splits, or any other stretch, is to learn to listen to your body and the feedback it gives you. The body has it’s language but we are often conditioned to ignore or override its voice with the conventional, and in my opinion terrible, adages: “mind over matter” and “no pain no gain”.

Let’s go over what happens in our muscles when we stretch:

-When we first enter a stretch, our nervous system senses that the muscle is lengthening and, at a certain point, says “that’s far enough”. It sends a signal that contracts the stretched muscle to prevent it from going past the safety limit your neurons have set. This is called the Stretch Reflex.

-Various methods can be employed to convince the nervous system that it’s safe to go a little deeper: you can contract the opposing muscle, wiggle a little, gently contract and release the stretched muscle, do some deep breathing and mentally (or out loud) tell that muscle that everything is going to be ok.

-Depending on your nervous system, your experience, your body, it is possible that at some point the neurons will feel reassured and allow the muscle to lengthen a bit more. This is that lovely feeling of “sinking” into a stretch, when you feel that split get a little closer to the floor. It is that “ahhhhh” moment we love.

-As you go deeper into the stretch, at some point the muscle will lengthen to the point that the neurons get alarmed again, and the Stretch Reflex will kick in again. We have now entered the Danger Zone.

I highly caution folks against pushing your body past this second Stretch Reflex, when you feel your muscles contract against the stretch a second time. This is where injuries are most likely to occur and, in my experience, when we start to lose control of our form and control. We are also training that Stretch Reflex to go away, thus creating conditions for hypermobility and decreased muscle function at our end range. Our muscles start to lose their springiness and reactivity.

My best practice advice: when you feel your muscles contract into their second round of Stretch Reflex, come out of the stretch. Take a short break, move, feel your muscles work, jiggle them around, and then try again for 2-3 repetitions.

You will find that over time the neurons are comfortable accommodating a larger and larger range of motion without fighting back, while still retaining their functionality. This gives us the optimal mix of strength and flexibility and control/body awareness that we need for healthy, yummy, beautiful movement.

So while I acknowledge that this isn’t the simplest answer to a common question, I maintain that it is the most honest and useful one that I can offer. And if all that comes out of this is that you get better at listening to your body and respecting what it has to say then I will feel my work here is done!

For some visuals, please check out this video below. You can learn more about what to do when you are stuck in your splits progress from my previous blog post and get splits workouts from our Video Club.

Happy Bendings!

-Kristina

How to Get A Flat Split When You’re Really Close? It’s Time to Start Training Over Splits!

There is a point in every splitter’s life when the booty nears the floor and that flat split seems so, so close. And then progress just seems to slow to geological time!

If this is your world right now, please don’t worry, you’re not alone. The problem is that the closer you get to the floor, the less help you get from gravity. With more and more of your legs already touching down, less of your body weight is in the air. Gravity is nature’s push into your flexibility, so without it progress becomes more elusive.

There are a few things that a person (a purely hypothetical person of course) might do at this point as they become increasingly frustrated and impatient:

1. Let the hips rotate into an open split, thereby getting that last little bit of length needed for touchdown but skipping the deep hip and hamstring stretch and good form that we want in our splits (see my last blog post on square splits for why this is important).

2. Bounce. I know we all feel tempted to bounce sometimes and use that ballistic stretching to bully our body into those last few inches but unless your body is used to that kind of intense, rapid stretching, it can be a recipe for injury.

3. Get a push. This is the least dangerous of all of these options provided your body is accustomed to being pushed into a stretch you are getting that push from someone who knows what they are doing. Pushing on a stretch is a skill, and just getting your mom or your bff to do it may be risky, especially if they are agro and prone to pushing too hard.

4. Giving up. Some folks end up deciding that their bodies just can’t go deeper and flat splits are not for them. In some cases there may be a structural reason why going deeper may not be possible but often it’s just that they need a new tactic.

If you choose the twist, bounce or push this could be an opportunity for injury as well, and lots of folks get pulled hamstrings or labral tears at this point in their flexibility adventures by choosing overly aggressive tactics for their body’s comfort level.

So what’s an aspiring splitter to do?

Oversplits!

Now oversplits may sound scary but in truth they are a much safer and healthier approach to getting flat splits than choosing any of the options above (with the exception of an experienced pusher) and you don’t need a coach to help.

By simply sliding into the front split with the front foot elevated on a yoga block or other low riser you bring the body back up off the ground, bringing gravity back into the game. Run through all your usual splits movements in the over split, using your arms to support your body as much as is needed, then revisit your regular old flat split and see if you haven’t gotten just a smidge closer to the ground.

Of course, it is vital to warm up thoroughly before trying out your oversplit. Warm up your hips and hamstrings as usual, do a regular split to really get juicy, then break out that over spilt. A round of flat split – over split – flat split is a solid flexibility routine and will be very likely to produce results.

How long should you sit in a split? Check out my next blog entry for my musings on listening to your body to determine the duration of stretches!

For some visuals, here is a video showing the entrance to oversplit using a block on sliders to help you control your depth and form.

Happy Bendings Earthlings!

What is a “Square Split” and Why Should I Care? How Your Position in Front Splits Can Affect your Back Flexibility

When I first started training contortion with Serchmaa Byamba at Circus Center in 2004 I had already been dancing for over 20 years and I thought I was pretty flexible. I had all my splits, nice and flat and comfy on the floor. Then Serchmaa showed me what a square split was and all of a sudden I felt like I was three feet away from the floor, working so hard I broke a sweat. It was very humbling!

Of course, I complained, and Serchmaa promised me that even though it was harder and it felt like a step “backwards” it was very important for me to train my splits in square if I was serious about advancing in contortion. And, of course, she was right.

First of all, what is a square split and how do you know if you are doing one?

A square split means that both of your hip bones are facing forwards and your pelvis is as close as you can get it to neutral, meaning that your back isn’t arched. I say “as close as you can get” because most of us will have some back arch in splits, but we want to minimize it as much as possible.

The square split requires strength, provides a deeper stretch, and is an essential training tool for advanced flexibility or even just for those who want to have happy, healthy, strong, flexible hips and legs.

What are the benefits of a square split?

A square split is healthier for your hips and offers a more well-balanced and active stretch.

When we allow the pelvis to rotate in a split our body takes the path of least resistance and we end up over-stretching the muscles in the hips that tend to be more flexible, and skipping the ones that tend to be tighter. That is why we tiny dancer Kristina was able to get so much deeper and feel so much more relaxed in her open split!

This isn’t a problem if you only do it some of the time, but if you never stretch in square then the difference between the tight parts of the hips and the loose parts of the hips becomes greater and this can lead to instability and even injury.

Plus, the muscles that we build when we hold our hips in square are excellent for keeping us healthy and for the strength and control we will need if we get into more advanced movements like standing splits.

A square split prepares us for back bends.

A back bend is so much more than just a bending of the spine. It also involves the shoulders and the hips. When your hips are out of balance because you have been allowing them to rotate in your splits, they will want to rotate in your backbends too. Hip rotation in backbends can show up in a few different ways depending on your position.

Firstly, if your hips are locked in place, like in a kneeling backbend (camel pose) then the tightness in the hips will just restrict your flexibility and potentially put more stress on the lower back.

Second, if you are trying to bring your foot to your head while your hips rotate, your foot will not go to your head. It will wander off to the side, maybe hitting your ear if you’re lucky, most likely ending up somewhere off in space where you will have to fish around for it with your hand and haul it back into position, possibly torquing your knee or shoulder in the process. Not ideal!

Third, in a position like bridge (wheel pose) where both hips are stretching at the same time you will end up with what we like to call “frog legs”. No offense to frogs, it looks great on them. But, in a human backbend, frog legs put stress on the knees and feet, put pressure on the sacrum (low back), and can make balance and control difficult if you are working on transitioning from standing to bridge and back up again.

Yes, Serchmaa was right and even though you may be grumbling about it like I was, I promise that the extra work is worth it for your long term health and progress.

Pro Tip 1: It is vastly easier to square your splits and then slowly work on going deeper from that position than it is to go deep into your splits and try to push into square from there. Let gravity be your friend!

Pro Tip 2: Lunges and hamstring stretches are just like splits done one piece at a time. If you stretch your lunges and hamstring stretches in square it will help make your square splits happen much more easily.

For some visual aids please check out the video below, and if splits are on your bucket list we have a series of workouts and tutorials in our Video on Demand Membership.

Happy Bendings!

Stuck on Learning a Difficult Move or Pose? Here are 3 Strategies to Achieve Your Goal

Whenever learning a new physical discipline you’ll have the experience of trying out a new aspirational move and thinking… this seems utterly impossible.

One way to approach this new challenge is to keep trying the beast move over and over again, hoping that eventually it gets easier. This may work! But it is also miserably frustrating and has a high potential for burnout or injury.

As an alternative attack, try modifying your exercises to make them easier so that you can manage them and control them. A strategic approach with the right combination of achievable exercises, gradually increasing in difficulty over time, can win you that monster move without the misery, just a little smarts and patience.

How do you make your difficult move easier? Here are three strategies, just add creativity!

To make it easier to understand I’m going to use the example of the standing front split. I wanted to pick a move that I’m not good at and don’t practice very often and you can watch the video at the end to see what the struggle bus looks like!

1. Break it into pieces

Every pose, ever move is a combination of elements. What are those different elements and how can you practice them separately? Break your monster move down into 3-5 exercises that are challenging but doable and practice those.

Example: Standing front split could be broken down into standing on one leg with excellent balance, deep hamstring flexibility, and an opening of the standing leg hip (there are other ways to break it down this is just what worked for me).

Check out the video to see what exercises you could try out to work these components.

2. Change the Relationship with Gravity

Gravity, ever-present, can be either friend or foe. The most challenging moves work against gravity, so how can you change the position around to make gravity a little more helpful? This can allow you to work on form, alignment, strength, and depth with control in a position that feels more manageable and accessible.

Example: Part of what makes standing splits so hard is that gravity is pulling that leg down to the ground. Practicing the standing split while laying on your back enables you to check your hip position, build active flexibility, straighten out the standing leg, and stretch the hamstring with a floatier-feeling leg.

The video shows you what it looks like when you flip that standing split on its back.

3. Slow it Down

This is quite possibly the least fun part of this breakdown process, but it is extremely helpful in perfecting your transitions in and out of a position. Too often we focus on the end product, just long enough to snap a photo, but you don’t really have a pose until you can get in and out of it with grace and control.

Slowly moving in and out of the position, even if you are 10 miles away from your end goal position, builds strength, awareness, and control. It’s also good for flexing those patience and humility muscles, which are no one’s favorite muscles to train.

Example: Transition to standing split could be just lifting the leg up in front, holding it for a breath, and lowering it back down without buckling in the standing leg or losing your straight spine. Does it look good? No! Does it feel good? Heck no! Does it make you stronger and more balanced? Yes! Watch the video to see the humility.

Make Up Your Own!

What are your goals? What is your dream pose or move? Break it down, flip it up, slow it down, and—most importantly—give it time. Impatience invariably causes us to skip important steps in our training that will catch up to us eventually and we are in this for the long term, right?

Happy Bendings!
Kristina

How Not to Over-Train and Stick to Your Workout… Injury Free!

Why do we over-train?

This process may sound familiar to many of you:

Feel discontent with something about your body (size, shape, ability, performance, etc)
Set an ambitious workout schedule to quickly make the changes you want to see
Work out. Like a lot. Really hard. Endorphines churning and muscles burning. It’s happening.
I’m tired. Why does my knee hurt? What’s this clicking in my shoulder?
I need to take a few days off, this is too much.
Forget it. That goal wasn’t realistic anyway. My body just can’t do that thing I want it to do.
Stop working out.
Back to step one

Why do we do this to ourselves, often over and over again?

If we don’t have communication with our bodies we approach fitness as an exercise of willpower, of “mind over matter.” But in truth it is a relationship of mind and matter, working together.

Sure, having a conversation with your body may not be fun. Imagine being in the same room as someone for years and completely ignoring them every time they try to get your attention. When you finally turn to them and say “Hey, so what’s going on with you?” you might get an earful!

Your body might need to complain a little bit. It does that by aching, getting stiff, having weird shooting pains, and being very tired. The important thing is to start by just noticing it. We tend to skip this step and go right to fixing it, as fast as we can. But how can you fix something that you can’t feel?

So before you leap into your New Year’s resolutions about gym memberships and splits challenges and the like, take a moment to have a conversation with your body. Then keep that conversation going, before, during, and after your workouts. Over-training isn’t going to get you where you want to go any faster than not training at all.

A few tips to avoid over-training:

Start your workout with a solid warm-up in which you deeply feel and assess each part of your body that you will use for your workout. If something feels icky, spend extra time loving it up.
Don’t go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds! If you have been working out once or twice a week, go up to three or four. Not 10 or 12.
I’m serious, you have to sleep. That’s when you actually get in better shape. When you work out you stress your body, when you sleep you grow it.
Recognize that your emotional state has a huge effect on your workout. If you are in a negative emotional state that is not a good time to push yourself to the max.

And most of all… remind yourself as often as necessary that whatever it is you want to accomplish in your workouts, you aren’t able to do it alone. You are doing it with your body, not to your body. Your body must be a willing partner in this enterprise or it will fail. That may mean some compromise is necessary.

But you only get this one body. And you’re stuck with each other.

Sometimes Tight Muscles Need Strength Instead

Muscles are tight for a reason. They are not tight because they hate you and want you to fail, or because they want you to be in pain. Your body is your devoted partner in this life and everything it does, it does because it believes that it’s helping you.

So why do muscles get tight, since it is so clearly unpleasant and painful? Why do some muscles seem to be impervious to stretching? Even if they relax for a few blissful moments, not long after they are right back to feeling like steel cables.

Muscles get tight because they are nervous, fearful, or downright terrified. They believe that if they relax, something really bad will happen in your body or your life. They feel responsible for your integrity, guarding you against injury or death.

The thing is, the nervous system as it relates to our muscle reflexes is very old. Lizard brain old. It responds to any perceived stressor as a threat. Threaten that muscle often enough and its like a kid on a playground afraid of bullies, it’s always tense. It may not really trust you to make the best decisions, especially if you have done mean things to it in the past (over-training, injury, exhaustion, excessive stress, dehydration, accidents, you get the picture). So even though you are begging it, yelling at it, demanding that it relax, it’s not going to listen.

This is especially true when you are going into a deep passive stretch. Passive stretches are perceived by the body as scary positions, so if a muscle is already a little freaked out, stretching will just confirm its worst fears. You may be able to force it to relax for a little while by pushing it hard enough, but that tension and hyper-vigilance will come back with a vengeance once you let up.

So what’s to be done? How do we reassure these muscles that they are safe and loved and it’s ok to relax?

Strengthening.

We often think of strength and flexibility as being in opposition, but in fact they are utterly intertwined.

If a muscle is chronically scared, the best way to reassure it is to build its support system, and its capacity. Building its support system means strengthening the muscles around that muscle, the synergists (muscles that do similar things) and antagonists (muscles that are opposite). Building capacity means strengthening that tight muscle itself.

So often when I suggest this (especially to gym addicts), I hear people say, “but I’m already so strong.”

To which I reassuringly reply, “Yes, you are. And just because you are overall buff does not mean that you can’t have some muscles in your body that aren’t keeping up.”

Muscles build only and exactly the way that you use them. That means that as we train we default to certain muscles that are already strong and our body finds ways to compensate for muscles that are weaker. It all works out great for a while, then it starts to catch up to you because those sleepy muscles aren’t helping out enough.

In my years of working with bodies, when I have been investigating for the source of tightness, I have found some kind of weakness 100% of the time. I’m totally open to being proven wrong, but it hasn’t happened yet.

In terms of your daily practice, this means constantly searching for your weakest points. Usually we like to go right to where we are strong, because it feels good. But our bodies need balance, and balance comes when we dive into our discomfort and root around for the parts of our body that most need our attention.

Balancing ourselves out brings increased confidence and peace to our muscles—that feeling of cat-like grace, suppleness, strength and flexibility combined.

So next time you are feeling like you and your muscles are locked in mortal combat over a particular stretch, take a step back, thank your tight muscles for their loyal service to your well-being, and start investigating the cause of their stress. Who needs to be stronger and more capable so that they feel safe again? They will reward you with delicious flexibility.

Happy Bendings!

Kristina

WTFL???? What is the Tensor Fasciae Latae (TFL)

The Tensor Fasciae Latae, or TFL to its friends, is a small muscle in the outside front of the hips that works very, very hard. The TFL is a multi-tasker. It does hip flexion, hip abduction, internal rotation, and it even internally rotates the lower leg through its attachment to the IT band.

The TFL is an important hip flexor muscle

Moving the leg out to the side in parallel inspires the TFL to work in hip abduction with the gluteal muscles

The TFL is also one of the primary muscles working in internal rotation

Because the TFL has so many abilities, it is often overworked. It’s just so easy for other muscles to lay back and let the TFL take over. The TFL is also not one of those sexy muscles that we pay a lot of attention to when we go to work out, so it may not be strong enough to do everything we need it to do.

As a result it is not uncommon for the TFL to get sore and/or tight, contributing to problems in the lower back, hips, and knees. The TFL is also one of the common culprits in what is often interpreted to be a tight IT band. Because the IT band is fascia, and doesn’t stretch, it can’t be tight. For more on “tight” IT bands and my rant about the futility of foam rolling check out this blog post (link).

How do I Find my TFL?

Sitting on the floor with both knees bent and the feet more than hip width apart, let both knees fall to one side. If your hips are very tight you may want to sit on a block to start. Focus on the leg that is internally rotated (the back leg). Place your thumb on your hip bone then move it around to the outside of your hip about 2 inches, then down about 2 inches. Poke around for a lumpy muscle.

As you are poking, begin to sink your right hip back down towards the floor, rotating towards your back leg. You will be able to feel the TFL contracting and shortening under your thumb. If this is unpleasant, then you probably have a cranky TFL.

Poke around the front outside of your hip feeling for the TFL. You should feel it compress and shorten as you sit your butt down and rotate towards the back leg

How do I Release a Tight TFL?

When a muscle is very tight and angry, its usually because it is stressed out. It feels overworked and unappreciated. Sometimes when you start with rolling out or stretching a muscle like this it just gets more stressed out and, while there may be momentary relief, it will just get tighter again when you start to move.

Beginning with a very gentle TFL contraction will help the muscle feel more confident, loved, and appreciated. Here are three very kind TFL exercises to get you started.

Strengthening a Weak TFL

TFL Internal Rotation Exercise

Laying on your back, bend both knees with both feet more than hip width apart. The wider the feet the more difficult the exercise. Put your hands on your hip bones to remind you that the hips will not move at all. One leg at a time, gently internally rotate your femur, dropping the knee in towards the floor. Feel that little TFL gently contract at the end range of motion to push your knee down towards the floor. Remember, keep this gentle or you will start to feel other muscles (glutes, inner thighs, back) and you want just the TFL. Do 10-15 soft, sweet pulses in this position on each leg.

This exercise directly targets the TFL by internally rotating the legs.

TFL Flexion Exercise

Still lying on your back move both legs to parallel, just at hip width apart. Pick up both legs to table top (knee at a 90 degree angle), internally rotate the leg slightly keeping the knee still and moving the foot out, then begin to pulse the knee in towards your chest. It is very important not to let the pelvis move. You may notice that the pelvis wants to tuck under as you pulse. Don’t do it. You are in charge. Do 5-10 pulses on each side.

Combining slight internal rotation with hip flexion really gets that TFL fired up

TFL Abduction Exercise

Lay on your back with your legs together. Your abdominal muscles will be working a bit here to keep your body still so only your legs will be moving. Externally rotate both legs, turning the feet out but keeping the knees straight. Without bending the knees, start to slide the legs apart as far as you can go without twisting the hips or arching your back. You will feel your TFL work as a team with your side butt. Teamwork! Do 10-20 pulses apart in this position. Don’t arch your back, even though that feels very tempting.

External rotation biases the TFL when doing hip abduction (moving the legs away from the center of the body). Don’t worry if you don’t go as far as Natalie when you first start, she’s a pro.

How to Stretch your TFL

Its really easy to miss the TFL when you are stretching your hips. Its in a weird spot on the front outside of the hips and its often so tight and grumpy that your body would just rather skip it. Hopefully giving it a little strength will help it feel more relaxed, but the form on your lunge will still have to be impeccable to get into the right spot.

Start in an upright lunge, back knee down and hips perfectly square and slightly tucked under.
Slightly externally rotate the back leg. It doesn’t have to be much for most people to feel it. Just move that back foot across the body a few inches and that should be enough.
Make sure that when you rotate the back leg you don’t rotate the pelvis, those two hip bones are still in one line.
Gently push the hips forward and slightly out to the side, extending the hip of the back leg. If you don’t start to feel a stretch in that TFL keep checking on your form. Hips must be tucked, square, and the back leg externally rotated to get the right stretch.
Lift the arm up over your head and lean sideways away from the back leg, sticking your hip out to the side a little bit. That’s just a bonus bit of juicy goodness to get a little deeper into the stretch.
Be sure to do both sides and if one side feels tighter, do it again. It’s best to hold the stretch about 30 seconds or so but less if it is very painful. You can do some gentle, soft pulses into the stretch if the muscle needs some movement to help it relax. No momentum.

This delicious TFL stretch is a variation on the square lunge. Be sure to keep your hips square!

What Else Can I do to Relax my TFL?

As mentioned above, the TFL can become overworked because it is compensating for sleepy muscles in other places. Two of the most common muscle groups that could be slacking off are the illiopsoas, and the gluteal muscles.

Check your Psoas

The illiopsoas is also a hip flexor and an internal rotator so a sleepy psoas can heavily overburden that TFL. To test out your psoas strength do the hip flexion movement listed above but with the leg slightly turned out. This should move the work in the inner hip. If that feels difficult, work to strengthen that psoas.

Are the Gluteus Medius and Gluteus Minimus Working?

The gluteal muscles are right up next to the TFL and also attach to the IT band. If you have a sleepy butt then your TFL has to work very hard as a hip stabilizer, and that might make it resentful. To find your glutes do the leg sliding apart exercise mentioned above but with the legs internally rotated. See if you can find that side-butt work. If that feels week the more side butt strengthening should help support your pelvis without so much contribution from the TFL.

Doing the same leg slides into abduction with the legs internally rotated will bias the glute muscles. If this feels weaker than the TFL exercise you may need to strengthen your side butt!

Remember that our muscles are tight for a reason. They are tight because they are trying their best to hold our bodies together and do the work we ask of them. Treating them with kindness and figuring out how to support them is the best way to get them to relax and stop screaming at us so we can be stronger, more flexible, and have less pain.

Happy Bendings!

Kristina

Being Flexi-Curious

If you avoid stretching at all cost, you are not alone. Plenty of people avoid stretching for a variety of reasons, most commonly that they believe it has to be boring and painful, and doesn’t really do any good. There are some reasons for these myths about stretching that I covered in this past blog post. Below are some concrete steps that you can take to increase your flexibility safely that aren’t boring or painful.

1. Start with Movement

People often think they need to start their flexibility journey by sitting in an uncomfortable stretch and just waiting for it to suck less. Ugh! Instead try moving through every joint in your body and just feel what’s going on in there. Mostly we go about our lives without really feeling our bodies or noticing where we might be tight. Check out this “Circles” warm-up here that I like to do first thing every morning just to say hi to my body and shake off the cobwebs.

2. Look for Areas that Need Extra Care

Pretty much all of us have areas in our bodies that are cranky: hip sockets, lower back, neck, shoulders, ankles, elbows… so many possibilities. This could be from old injuries, too much time sitting, too much time standing, weird posture, stress, or just a mystery ache. Knowing where you might need to be more careful will help you prevent injury and have greater success.

3. Do a Little Every Day

Whenever we start something new the tendency is to get excited and go crazy. This isn’t a great approach to stretching. You will be so much happier if you do a short session of 15-30 minutes (depending on your needs and schedule) every day rather than going nuts and doing every splits video you find on YouTube so you can’t walk the next day! Have longer sessions a few days a week if you like, but with flexibility you will make the best progress if you do a little something every day.

4. Focus on the Areas You Need Most

If you are only doing short sessions you can’t stretch every muscle in you body, so pick some areas that are particularly in need of TLC for your daily routine. When you do your Circles you will probably be able to tell what needs this loving attention because it will be complaining the loudest. Hit everything else during your longer sessions,

5. Don’t Sit in a Stretch that Feels Like Hell

Pushing your body into a hell stretch and trying to hang while you feel like you want to puke and die is just not productive. You are teaching yourself to hate stretching and you are teaching your body to rebel against you. Instead, find that tight muscle and flirt with it. Go into the stretch and out of it a few times, holding it just for a few seconds. Go into and wiggle a little bit while you are there. Massage the tight muscles while you are stretching them. Try stretching the muscles around the tight muscle by moving back and forth a little bit. Muscles vastly prefer to be flirted with instead of attacked. They will relax more when they don’t anticipate pain.

6. Find a Good Coach

Really, I’m not saying this to plug my classes! Stretching is the most mysterious and least understood part of fitness and is often treated as the unpleasant add-on at the end of your “real” workout. There is a lot of misinformation out there on the interwebs about how to stretch safely and effectively. If you are concerned about whether or not you are doing it right nothing beats a good coach to help you construct your personalized routine!

Just remember, the best time to start stretching was years ago, the second best time is right now! Don’t let anything hold you back from finding that freedom and joy in your body that comes from mobility. You can do it!

Happy Bendings!

Back Bend Drill: “Down-Ups”

The most difficult part of the waterfall backbend is the last few inches before your hands hit the floor. That is also the most difficult part of the return to standing. If you can get your legs straight you have a fighting chance of making it back up to vertical!

This drill, we affectionately call “Down-Ups” is an intermediate exercise to help smooth out that transition. You *must* already be comfortable with waterfall backbends to try this! I can be intense on the lower back if you don’t have enough strength to support your spine in a deep hanging backbend.

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What Muscles Should I Use in Bridge/Wheel Backbend?

The body should be as relaxed as possible in any pose, particularly a flexibility pose. If your muscles are tense you can’t fully bend, plus you quickly expend your energy and get exhausted.

That said, obviously some muscles are working to hold you up and keep your joints supported. So which muscles should be working in your bridge pose, and which muscles should be relaxed?

The following info will vary a bit depending on your body proportions and how tight you are in your shoulders, hips, and back. But use this as a starting point adjusting as needed if something feels horrid.

Let’s work from the bottom up!

Foot Muscles

There should be a light engagement of the feet. The toes should spread out, pressing the entire sole of the foot flat on the floor. If your feet tend to turn out or roll to the edge of your foot, move your feet farther apart. It is better to start with a wide stance than to be closer together but with weird foot positioning.

Correct foot position

Incorrect foot position: froggy feet

Leg Muscles

The quads usually want to help in bridge. Unfortunately, they are more of a hindrance than help since engaging the quads will shorten your hips and drive more pressure into your lower back. Use the backs of your legs to help support the weight of your lower body, and the inner thighs to keep your legs and feet parallel.

Hip Muscles

The hip flexors, as an extension of the quads, tend to get overly helpful. Just like the quads, the hip flexors should be as relaxed as possible. This is especially important if you are leggy (see tips below if you have long legs compared to your torso length).

Butt Muscles

If you are new to bridges and just trying to get up there then go ahead, squeeze your butt muscles. They are big and strong and can be quite helpful in supporting your body weight.

However, as you get bendier and more comfortable in the pose you will want to make some subtle changes. Try to isolate the downstairs butt (the upper fibers of the hamstrings and the lower fibers of the gluteus maximus) and the outside butt (the stabilizer muscles including gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and the tensor fascia lata. The bulk of your gluteus maximus should be relaxed because over-contracting the glutes can push the stretch too deeply into the lower back.

Some helpful tips to find the correct gluteal muscles:

1. Think of digging your heels into the floor and slightly pulling them back towards your hands to inspire the back side line of your body to work harder. This will help you find your hamstrings and downstairs butt.

2. Try to tuck your pelvis. It feels a little weird to do this in bridge but if you practice it a lot in lunges (with square hips) it will get easier. You will start to feel your downstairs butt and pelvic floor engage and your hip flexors lengthen.

Bridge with the hips tucked lengthens the hip flexors and takes some pressure off the spine and shoulders for a more even, rounded backbend.

Bridge with the hips untucked shortens the hip flexors and puts all of the stretch into the spine and shoulders. This is an extreme version but even a little bit of untuck in the hips will increase the spine compression.

3. Tie a heavy resistance band around your thighs just above your knees. In your bridge, press your knees out into the band to inspire your outside butt to work. You will experience this as increased stability in the hips. Be sure to keep your feet and knees parallel as you do this.

4. Alternately, you can place a magic circle or squishy ball between your knees and squeeze it in your bridge. This will inspire your TFL and inner thighs to work.

Core Muscles

Once you get into a deep backbend your rectus abdominus (the muscles we need to get a six-pack) will be deeply stretched out. You will still use them if you are moving in or out of the bridge, but once you are there you want to relax them.

The pelvic floor works to support the lower back and tuck the pelvis. The transverse abdominus (we affectionately call it the meat corset since it runs all the way around your body like a corset) will be working to stabilize your body and keep your spine happy. And the obliques are an essential part of all backbending moves. They are not just for twisting and side bending, they are back benders as well!

Lower Back Muscles

If you have a really tight, unbendable lower back you can try gently squeezing your lower back muscles to help you get a little deeper. However if you are bendy, just let those muscles relax and compress.

Shoulder/Upper Body Muscles

Just like with the lower body, the front side of the body should be relatively relaxed. That means that the ribs are splayed open, the pectorals are chill, and the neck is relaxed.

In the upper back all the muscles around the shoulder blades are working to stabilize them, especially the serratus anterior that pulls the shoulder blades apart. Finding the correct shoulder blade position is a bit challenging because you don’t want to go to the extreme in any direction.

Some helpful tips to find the correct shoulder muscles:

1. Just like with your legs, make sure your hands are parallel to each other or slightly turned out and feel like you are slightly sliding the finger tips towards your feet to inspire the backs of the shoulders to work.

2. Relax your neck so that you are looking at the floor between your hands, not at the ceiling

3. Bring the shoulders all the way up to your ears, then relax them down just a little bit to find the optimal position

4. Turn your armpits to parallel rather than letting them look out to the side. You can test if your shoulders are externally rotating by bending your elbows a little. If they are parallel, you are all good. If they open out to the side then you know you are too internally rotated.

5. Squeeze a magic circle or yoga block between your elbows with the arms slightly bent to help you externally rotate your shoulders.

Pushing into something (like Kristina’s hands) with slightly bent elbows helps you bring the elbows to parallel. This position is much healthier because it externally rotates the shoulders.

6. Tie a band around your upper arms, just above the elbows, to help inspire the muscles in the outside of the shoulders.

7. Remember your goal is to have your shoulders stacked directly over your hands. The upper back muscles keep working to press your shoulders into an open position

Hand Muscles

Like the feet, the hands should be fully but gently engaged, fingers digging into the floor to help support the wrists.

Every time you push up into bridge, run through this checklist of muscles and see if you can find them, use them, and relax everyone else.

Correct position with the fingers facing slightly out and the shoulders externally rotated so that the armpits look in the same direction as your face.

Incorrect position with the fingers turned in and the shoulders internally rotated so that the armpits look out.

Bonus… a couple more Flexibility Hacks for your bridge

1. If you have very long legs compared to your torso, or if your shoulders are very tight, or if you have weak and cranky wrists, use yoga blocks under your shoulders. Place the blocks up against a wall to keep them from sliding and then cup the edges of the blocks with your hands. The blocks help to even out a disparity between arm/leg length while taking some pressure off the wrists and shoulders.

2. BREATHE! Seriously, this probably should be the first thing in the blog post but for all of you who have read through this whole thing, if there is only one bit you remember, it should be this. If you cannot breathe in any pose it isn’t going to feel good and it sure wont last long. Relax your chest and throat so that you can take big, healthy breaths that expand your rib cage and fill your muscles with oxygen. It is the single best thing you can do to improve your pose.

Stay safe, say nice things to your muscles, and many Happy Bendings!

Want Better Backbends and More Flexible Hips? Square Your Splits! Here’s How and Why…

When I first started training contortion, after years of dance, I thought I had some pretty badass splits. I was solidly on the floor, and oh so comfy. Then I learned the terrible truth, I was supposed to have my hip bones even with each other and not arch my back??? Oh the horror!

Once I was in a squared position, I was about ten miles from a flat split. I couldn’t even feel the stretch because I was just working so hard to keep my hips in the right position without twisting out. It sucked. In despair, I asked my coach Serchmaa why I had to square my splits anyway. Why couldn’t I just let them be open and feel good?

She told me to go ahead, but down the road I would regret it. And, as always, she was right.

Not squaring your splits may work well for performance purposes, but they are terrible for training. By not squaring my splits I opened myself up to major hip imbalances and some pretty ugly backbend problems. Then later on I had to go back to square one and suffer in those humbling square splits after all in order to make progress with my training.

Let me save you the extra time. Square your splits now, have more fun later.

What is a Square Split?

A square split means that your pelvis is in a neutral position while your legs extend directly forward, and directly backward. You know that your pelvis is in a neutral position when both of your hip bones (as well as your pubic bone) are on the same plane. If you put your hands on your hip bones, they should be even with each other.

In an open split the pelvic bones rotate towards the back leg.

In a square split both hip bones are even with each other facing directly forwards.

The simpler alternative is the open split. This split is prettier for performance purposes because the pelvis rotates towards the rear leg, which makes your legs look longer and gives the illusion of deeper flexibility. It is a cheat. Performance is built on cheats, but training is not.

What is the problem with Open Splits?

The problem with open splits is that, by letting your pelvis rotate, you end up stretching only some of your hip muscles while skipping what are, for most people, the tightest part of the hip complex.

When the hips rotate they move the front hip a little bit forward, taking the stress off of the outer part of the hamstrings and outer hip. For almost everyone, these outer muscles are much tighter than the others. At the same time the back leg moves a little bit backwards (and usually the back arches too) which takes the stretch off of the deep hip flexors like the illiopsoas and the adductors.

The result is that you are stretching the muscles that are already loose and skipping the muscles that are tight. That is why it feels so good and relaxing, but it is creating an ever-increasing imbalance in your hip muscles that can result in long-term hip tightness and even injury.

This is especially dangerous if you have a fairly flexible lower back and tight quads and hips (see The Curse of the Bendy Lower Back for more info on that challenge).

How Will This Affect my Training?

In addition to creating pesky and potentially injurious hip problems, training open splits will make for some challenges with backbends.

For the majority of people, one of the most frustrating limiting factors in increasing back flexibility is actually hip flexibility. Without flexible hips, deep backbending will always be limited and your chance of developing lower back pain is much higher. Also, if you have difficulty squaring your splits you will find that your backbends will be a bit froggy.

Have you every noticed in your bridges that your knees and feet need to be far apart and tend to turn out like frog’s legs? That comes from imbalanced hips and underdeveloped squaring muscles.

Imbalanced hips makes your feet and hips wide and externally rotated

More balanced hip flexibility enables you to do a comfortable bridge in parallel with your feet closer to each other. Araceli has worked on her hip flexibility to the point that she can comfortably do a bridge with her feet and knees touching, a more advanced position.

Have you ever tried to get your foot to your head and instead found it hovering somewhere past your opposite ear? Also imbalanced hips.

When you are not used to squaring your hips and you try to bring your foot towards your head the knee will go out to the side.

Here Priscilla is keeping her hips square so that her knee comes straight out of the hip and her foot is pointing directly at the back of her head. Her knee may not come up as high in this position yet, but she is in the right line.

If your hips turn out in splits, they are 100% guaranteed to turn out in backbends and it will prove to be an endless source of frustration as you attempt to progress in your training.

So what do I Do to Improve my Splits?

1. Stretch your Hamstrings in Square: When doing your hamstring stretches notice if your hip wants to rotate up and forward. Use your oblique muscles and your inner thighs to pull that hip back and down. You may notice that this creates a deeper stretch in the outside of the hamstrings, maybe even in the outer hips muscles. This is a good thing.

If Lynette lets her hips rotate in the hamstring stretch her legs turn out and she skips the tightest part of her hips and leg.

In this square position her body is farther from her leg but she is getting a more complete stretch with the hips even.

2. Stretch your Lunges in Square: Learning how to maintain your neutral pelvis is lunge is probably the most important step in squaring your split. The muscles you want to feel are your meat corset (the band of muscles that runs around your waist and helps you lift your body up straight), lower abs (tuck that pelvis), downstairs butt (the upper hamstrings and lower glutes that work to push the hip bone forward), and the inner thighs/hamstrings of the front leg that keep that front hip from pulling forward.

You can see that Ann-Marie has rotated her entire pelvis and back leg to avoid stretching those pesky deep hip flexors.

By keeping both hip bones in one line and tucking the pelvis you get a much deeper hip stretch even if it feels like a lot of work.

3. Develop those squaring muscles listed above so that they hold your body in place while you stretch. You should never fully relax in any of these stretches because then your body will just take the path of least resistance. In order for some muscles to stretch, others must be engaged. Those same squaring muscles are also form the foundation for a healthy backbend with no frog legs.

4. Don’t worry if you are suddenly ten miles from the floor in all your stretches. That is just part of the process. Don’t worry if you don’t feel the same satisfying stretch that you are used to. It will come. When you start stretching chronically tight muscles it may feel like a lot of work, or just unpleasant. You are correcting some old imbalances. Once that shifts, your stretches will feel better.

How Long will it Take to Get a Square Split?

People ask me this all the time and, alas, I have no way of telling you. It depends on how tight you were when you started, how well your body responds to stretching, how often you stretch, and how rigorous you are in maintaining your form while you stretch.

What I can say is this. Stretching regularly with good form yields results almost universally. Stretching with poor form will not eventually lead to good form. And of course, not stretching at all because you feel discouraged will probably not help you get flexible. Is there hope? Of course! See Can Anyone Get More Flexible? for more on this subject.

So get out there and find the joy in the process and square those splits! Yay Muscles!

Happy bendings,

Kristina

“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
― Naomi Wolf

Sometimes I get my body type shamed.

At the time of this writing I am just shy of 5’2”, 43 years old, and 138 lbs, which is on the upper side of what is considered a “normal” body type for my height. I have a lot of muscle—I can load up the leg press with 700 lbs and still get a good range of motion for 10 reps. I also have some fat. I eat pretty clean, but this is what my body does unless I am working out like a maniac, which my coaching doesn’t give me time for, and starving myself, which I refuse to do.

I am thick.

Despite the recent trend towards thickness in the media, the fitness world is still hyper-focused on skinny. I have been body shamed by producers and promoters who wont hire me, an agent who dropped me once I got a little older, casting directors, coaches, colleagues, and a marketing person who told me that she didn’t think I was representing my company well. I have even been body shamed by family members, who worry that I’m not going to be successful because I’m “overweight.”

I’m not overweight. I am healthy. This is how my body is built, and I love my body.

I love my body because, over the years, we have really gotten to know each other. We have worked hard together, through times of health and strength and through times of illness and injury. Through my training, we have learned to communicate. And after my younger years of punitive hardcore workouts that treated my body like a bad machine, I have learned that I must listen to her and respect her if we are going to get along for the rest of our time together.

A key part of loving my body means accepting that she is not built to be skinny. I let go of that random, externally imposed demand and we are able to achieve health, flexibility, and a sustainable performance.

Our minds have been conditioned to see health and fitness through a certain lens, that we are all striving for that thigh gap, those rock hard abs, the muscle striations and complete absence of cellulite. But for many of us that body type requires unhealthy choices.

In all my years as a performer I have seen countless women (and some men) battle shame and eating disorders brought on by unrealistic expectations for their bodies. For a wonderful article on body issues in the circus world check out Rachel Strickland’s blog post about auditioning for Cirque du Soleil when you’ve got a booty.

I’ve also had so many people tell me that they would love to learn flexibility but they are “too fat.”

So it is important for me, both for myself and for everyone else who is struggling with this pressure, to emphasize that Fit & Bendy is for all body types.

Flexibility Fitness will get you in kick-ass shape. It will increase your range of motion, give you healthy stable joints, increase your muscles’ ability to contract, help to balance your nervous system, and help you perform better in everything else you do from putting on your shoes in the morning to advanced circus skills. It may even make you lose weight, but that is not the goal and it is not necessary to get the benefits from the training.

Because health and size are not the same things. Eat well, work your body intelligently, drink water, sleep, love your body. That is health. That is a revolutionary act of self-care.

Fit & Bendy classes welcome all bodies. We welcome all sizes, all skin colors, all interpretations of gender and sexuality, all fashion styles, all faiths, all abilities.

What we don’t welcome is shaming of any kind.

Happy Bendings,

Kristina

Gratitude as a Training Tool: Praise over Punishment

Stretching is vulnerable. Stretching is exploring the boundaries of your own mind and body, standing at the edge of who you are now and peering into the wild lands beyond, playing along the borders of what feels safe and, gradually, expanding those borders.

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This process requires patience. If you run headlong into the wilderness you may well get hurt, sending you back to your fortress to recover.

But the truth is that sometimes we prefer to hurt ourselves; it is easier and faster. Sometimes we get angry at our bodies and want to lash out. The world around us is full of false messages accusing us of being the wrong size, shape, age, color, gender, or ability.

We are surrounded by self-destructive behavior and we are encouraged to do the same, laboring under the false belief that if growth comes with discomfort, more discomfort means more growth. This is not true, particularly with stretching. Often more discomfort just brings ouch!

Only you can know when more becomes too much. Only you can learn your body’s language. Maybe you don’t know now, but you can learn. Unlike the kamikaze approach to learning, the process requires vulnerability. It is vulnerable to be a beginner, to not know. And every time you stretch, you can think of yourself as a beginner all over again. Every day you have something new to learn.

Gratitude is a powerful tool in this approach to stretching.

If we get angry at our bodies for not doing what we wish they would do we greatly increase the chance that we will injure ourselves by creating tension (anger and frustration change your body chemistry and increase muscle tension) and making you not listen to your body’s cues. Gratitude can counter this anger and frustration and create the perfect atmosphere for you to do your work.

Find joy in your training sessions, even when they are difficult or frustrating. Because you get to try.

Every time I find myself feeling frustrated or impatient with my training or comparing myself to someone else, I come back to gratitude. I am grateful that I get to try.

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Exploring the Terrors of the BOO-Ty: The Butt Muscles

It is October, our favorite month because all month long we get to celebrate the strange, mysterious and even scary things we love. This year, October is dedicated to the deep dark power of the BOO-Ty!

Your booty has tremendous power. It is home to thirteen different muscles, including the gluteus maximus, which is the largest muscle in your body. Working together in harmony, your butt muscles are responsible for all the movements that we think of as “hip opening” including all three splits, hip extension (like needle scale), and even back bending.

Too often, we neglect our butt muscles or treat them like they are all one big lump, rather than understanding and developing each individual section of the booty. Think of it, as you sit still and read this, you are sitting on a powerhouse of flexibility!

So here is a brief guide to your booty muscles and their areas of specialty:

Handstand Unicorn Fit and Bendy Flexibility Booty Dog Woman — The Handstand Unicorn uses her Gluteus Maximus to lift up into this beautiful position!

The Gluteus Maximus (main butt): Undoubtedly the celebrity of the booty, the gluteus maximus is the biggest muscle in the body and responsible for hip extension. You engage maximus to bring your leg back behind you, stand up from bridge, press up into a contortion handstand, or stabilize your standing leg in a front leg scale.

The Gluteus Minimus and Medius (upstairs butt): These two glute sidekicks are the multitaskers of the booty. They do a wide range of jobs from moving your leg out to the side or back, rotating your pelvis, or internally and externally rotating your femur. They are so versatile that they can often be hard to target but boy oh boy is it important to love them. These two are important for every kind of split, side leg scales, and pelvic stabilization in back bending. These are the muscles you need to help you square your splits.

The Hamstrings (downstairs butt): While the hamstrings are not technically in your butt, they do attach right underneath your glutes and so we consider them part of the booty family. Engaging the upper fibers of the hamstrings is absolutely essential to hip extension and therefore backbending. If you have lower back pain with back bending, downstairs butt is your new best friend.

The Tensor Fascia Latae (outside butt): Despite a name that makes it sound like an expensive coffee drink, this muscle is terribly important. The TFL stabilizes and flexes the hip and internally rotates the femur, as well as helping with abduction. While it is not a prime mover in most flexibility positions, if it is weak and neglected it will get very tight and painful and can be a primary cause of multiple hip and knee problems. Strengthening your TFL will lead to happier, healthier hips in all positions.

The Deep Six (deep butt): These muscles are the covert operators of the butt. They lie deep inside the hip socket, underneath the gluteus maximus. Because we cannot see or touch them, we often forget that they exist, but these are the muscles that will make your middle and straddle splits splendid! They work to externally rotate the femur in the hips socket, which, for the majority of humans, is essential to get a deep middle split. They also act as stabilizers, similar to the rotator cuff in the shoulder. So if your Deep Six is offline it can contribute to a host of problems from snapping hip syndrome to piriformis syndrome (sciatic pain).

We realize that this dazzling variety of muscles may be a bit scary, which is why we are dedicating the whole month to doing exercises that work each section of the BOO-Ty.

Unleash the terrible power of the BOO-Ty and your hips and back will be BOO-tiful!*

* Apologies for our terrible sense of humor. This is what happens when you spend most of your life hanging around circus nerds.

The Waterfall Backbend: How to Lower to Bridge from Standing with Maximum Control and Grace

The gradual, controlled descent from standing to bridge is a foundation of the contortionist’s basic repertoire. It is more than just a transition, it is a means to build your strength, improve your spinal control, deepen your flexibility, and warm up your back quickly and effectively without pain or compression.

There are many approaches to the standing backbend, but our absolute favorite from a training perspective is the Waterfall Backbend (so named by our friend Jonathan Nosan over at Contorture). As a sequel to our post The Curse of the Bendy Back we wanted to let you know more about the Waterfall Backbend, why we love it, and how you can make it part of your bendy journey.

What is the Waterfall Backbend?

The Waterfall Backbend is a technique that bends the spine backwards one vertebrae at a time, like a slinky going down the stairs. It requires a great deal of core strength and control of the upper back muscles and can be a bit difficul

t to learn if you are used to a different technique. However your work will be rewarded since this technique vastly reduces the risk of the dreaded lower back ouch that all contortionists know too well. Its also a great training tool to help you get to know your back’s tender areas and ways you can improve your bend.

1. Starting Position: stand up straight and tall with the pelvis in neutral or even slightly tucked if you know you are a chronic lower back archer. Lower abs and downstairs butt are engaged, shoulders are down and back, spine is completely straight (no pelvic thrust), hands on the front of your hips like a gunslinger, weight is slightly forward into the balls of the feet.

2. Chicken Pose: Keeping the tuck in your pelvis, engage your upper back muscles to lift your chest up and forward as far as you can. Your rib cage should actually be sitting in front of your hips without sticking out your butt. Don’t lift your shoulders up or smoosh your shoulder blades together in back or Step 3 will be difficult.

3. Head Drop: Drop your head back completely, like a Pez Dispenser. Your neck should be fully relaxed and you should be able to breathe normally and shake your head “no” at the ceiling. If this is scary or difficult, start by finding this position while leaning forward with your hands on the table for support.

4. Roll Down: Keeping the lift in your chest and the tuck in your pelvis the entire time, slowly roll down one vertebrae at a time, as far as you can go without bending your knees at all. If you feel yourself collapse into your lower back you have gone too far for your current strength. Start small and slow and build from there. It can be very useful to video this process so that you can see if you are getting a nice smooth bend.

5. Arms Overhead: This is one of the most difficult parts for most people because as soon as your arms come up over your body you start to feel a whole lot heavier. Start by bringing your arms up just to your chest, then to your head, then over your head arms bent, then straighten the arms all the way. Use a spotter if you have one. Don’t collapse, your pelvis stays tucked and chest stays lifted the whole time.

6. Bend the Knees: Once your hands are reaching for the floor and you are as deep into the backbend as possible with the legs straight, start to bend your knees keeping your weight forward. If you are trying to use your quads to support your body weight here you will get a little ways down and then thump to the floor. The quads should be relaxed so that they can stretch, support your weight with your hamstrings and keep those hips tucked to maximize the stretch in your hip flexors.

7. Enjoy your bridge! You are down! Check to make sure that your hands are slightly turned out and that they are lined up evenly with your feet. If your back is lopsided you may notice that you land unevenly. Take that information and remember it for next time. Work on perfecting your control of the descent before starting to work on coming back up, which is harder since gravity will be working against you.

What are the Advantages of the Waterfall Backbend?

The spine is an amazing but delicate piece of equipment and it should never be mistreated. The good news is that most people’s spinal columns are capable of impressive flexibility without causing damage or pain. But this is only possible if the spine is supported by adequate muscular engagement and isn’t smooshed. Smooshing your back can cause all sorts of unpleasantness (muscle spasms, herniated discs, fractured vertebrae) that you would rather avoid.

The muscles that should be engaged throughout are the lower traps, an even balance between the rhomboids and serratus, the rear deltoids and external rotators of the shoulder, the meat corset (obliques and transverse abdominus), the pelvic floor, and the hamstrings. These muscles can be strong and engaged and you can still wrap your spine into a tiny circle, no smooshing.

Because this backbend technique is so strength-intensive it is a great way to warm up your back. Start with tiny backbends, gradually going deeper as you get warmer, treating them like a sit-up but in extension. Add a few twists and sidebends and bam! You are hot and bendy!

Happy Bendings!

The Curse of the Bendy Lower Back

I like to say that with great flexibility comes great responsibility. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the bendy lower back.

I know that those of you reading this who do not have naturally flexible lower backs are grumbling that you would be happy to have this problem, but time and again I have seen how the bendy lower back poses difficulties for aspiring flexperts.

First, a little anatomy. The lumbar spine (the part of your back between your sacrum and the lowest attachment of the rib cage) naturally bends backwards on almost all people. Even on non-flexi people this area tends to be pretty darned mobile. The muscles of the lower back are small—it is actually designed to be supported and controlled by the abdominal muscles, the psoas, and the pelvic floor. On either side of the lumbar area are traditionally tight areas: the upper back and the hips.

People with naturally bendy lower backs often have difficulty controlling their spinal flexion. Some have hyperlordosis, a condition where the lumbar spine’s resting position has an exaggerated curve. These folks require extremely strong, finely attuned abdominal and psoas muscles to support their full range of motion. Without this additional strength a variety of postural issues can develop including:

Lower back pain
Difficulty bending forward or sideways
Unpleasantly tight hip flexors
Weak pelvic floor
Weak and tight psoas
Exaggerated forward bending of the upper back creating tightness (kyphosis)
Tight, inwardly rotated shoulders
Weak, under-utilized glutes and hamstrings

The consequences for training are unpleasant. Because the surrounding joints are tight, the lower back does all the work of creating the desired shapes. The spine is able to smoosh into poses without enough support and putting tremendous pressure on the delicate structures of the lower back. Training without addressing the imbalances will only exacerbate them.

This was me for so many years! It was only have developing chronic lower back pain and unbearably tight hips that I started to change the way I trained.

Brynn and Adrien work on using their full spinal flexibility in advanced class.

The only way out of this situation is to tame your lower back. Learn how to strengthen your abdominal and psoas muscles… a LOT! You will have to do twice as much abdominal conditioning as your friends who have less flexible backs. You will also have to strengthen your abs in your backbends. It isn’t enough to do 8 million crunches. Learn how to be strong in the positions that you want to hold for your contortion training.

Here are a few tips that help me every day to tame the lower back:

Learn the “Waterfall” approach to the standing backbend so that your abs are engaged from the very beginning of the movement.*
Find your psoas and love it up. Strengthen that muscle every day.
Do your lunges in a doorway with your spine pressed into the frame. Make sure that your lower back does not come away from the frame as you stretch your hips. If this feels really hard, it means that you need it.
Whenever strengthening your abs with leg raises make sure that the pubic bone stays above the hip bones in a deep tuck.
Strengthen your glutes, hamstrings, and upper back to start to bring your pelvis and spine back into alignment
Don’t push into your lower back when it hurts! It hurts for a reason, it needs more support from your muscles. Do your conditioning first, then go back to your contortion training.

There is hope for those suffering from the curse of the bendy lower back. With proper training, strengthening, and controlled stretching you can harness the power of your natural bendiness and use it to make bendy beauty without hurting yourself.

Happy Bendings!

*Stay tuned for a blog post on the Waterfall backbend!

How to Get More Flexible from an Injury

Injuries happen. Sometimes it is from some kind of trauma, sometimes from chronic overuse. Pretty much everyone eventually ends up with some kind of bodily complaint that restricts their training.

It sucks, but it is also an opportunity.

Think of an injury as your body’s way of communicating, in no uncertain terms, where you need to focus your attention. Often our bodies break in the areas where we are weak or imbalanced. If you have tight, hunched shoulders you may get a shoulder impingement. If you have weak abs you could get a back injury. If you have weak psoas muscles you could get an overuse injury in your hip flexors. If you over-train you will get exhaustion-related injuries.

This can even be true for some traumatic injuries. Your body is most likely to break along its pre-existing fault lines.

So try not to freak out about taking some time off from regular training. Take advantage of the opportunity to work on those pesky body parts that you are ignoring! Try find the root cause of your injury. Where are you weak or tight or imbalanced? What are those exercises that you know you should do but you hate so you always skip them?

And even with severe injuries there is always some part of your body that you can still train.

True story: Many years ago my dear friend, belly dancer and burlesque performer Princess Farhana, was in a terrible car accident. The accident damaged her spine and left her flat on her back for months, barely able to walk let alone dance. Doctors told her that she would never dance again and it was time to look for a new career. Rather than give up, she took that time to work on her belly rolls and undulations, spending hours figuring out how to isolate the muscles in her abdomen. Now she is famous for her ridiculously amazing rolls and flutters that travel not just up and down but side to side! Plus, strengthening her abdominal muscles was just what her back needed to begin to recover its full range of motion.

Remember, every setback is an opportunity for learning and growth. As Obi Wan Kenobi once said, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Nerdily yours, Kristina

Dare I Hope? Can Anyone Become More Flexible?

If I had a dime for every time someone told me they were the “least flexible person in the world” and “beyond hope” I would have a really big pile of dimes. Then often this same person, with a little encouragement, will find that they are actually more flexible than they imagined, they’ve just been stretching wrong… or likely not stretching at all!

The truth is that no one is beyond hope, even if they were the Least Flexible Person in the World according to the Guinness Book of World Records! Barring certain medical conditions and injuries anyone can get bendier. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how long it has been since you have stretched, or how tight your muscles. Improvement is possible!

Some of the most common obstacles to becoming more flexible are:

1. Over-emphasis on passive stretches. Sitting in a stretch and waiting for your muscles to finally lengthen is frequently unsatisfying. Some people find that the muscles don’t relax and you sit there feeling frustrated and in pain.

Solution: Try more active, resistance, and dynamic stretches. They are more fun, hurt less, and tend to yield results when static stretching has failed. For more about the different types of stretching see this blog post on stretching for adults.

2. Poor alignment: Finding exactly the right position for each stretch is super-duper important to get the best results. If you let your alignment get wonky your muscles will not get a good, even stretch.

Solution: Don’t worry so much about going deeper into every position; focus on alignment and eventually the depth will come. If you aren’t sure about the alignment, find a video, book, or a class to help you. Sometimes we all need a little help to learn new things!

3. Bad posture: Your mom was right, posture is important! Even if you stretch like a maniac you are still spending the vast majority of your time NOT stretching. If that not-stretching time is spent hunched, sunk in, slumped, hunkered, slouched, or curled, your body will just tighten right back up.

Solution: Sit up straight! Stand up straight! Not only will this help you balance out your muscles, avoid joint pain, and get more flexible, it will also make you look more confident and powerful. Winning.

4. Not stretching: Yes, I said it. Not stretching is the number one reason for not being flexible. Stretching “every once in a while” doesn’t cut the mustard. You need to stretch at least three times a week to see results or your body will forget the work you’ve done and tighten back up.

Solution: Find a way to incorporate stretching into your life. Maybe its fifteen minutes every morning when you get up, maybe its half an hour after your workout, maybe its three one hour sessions a week. Set it, and stick to it. Get an accountabilibuddy. Fall in love with stretching. Keep doing it; you will get more flexible.

If flexibility is important to you (and it should be if you have a body and you enjoy moving it) then you need to stretch. This is true for all ages, all body types, all abilities. Learning how to stretch properly will give you flexibility, and flexibility is freedom.

FaB Intro to Contortion Class — FaB Intro to Contortion class helps these badasses break through their bendy blockages

Got Middle Split Blues?

Do middle splits make you feel like you want to puke and die? You are not alone! So many people struggle with this very intense, emotional stretch. The problem comes from tight, stressed out inner thighs and hip flexors. They don’t understand why you would do such a scary stretch so they will fight you like crazy and scream bloody murder until you stop. When your muscles are fighting you like this, it makes you feel like your legs might pop off and you want to puke and die!

The only way to make middle splits better is to help those hip flexors/adductors feel safe so they stop screaming. Here are a few tips to help you on your quest:

1. Don’t force it! Nothing will make your muscles scream harder then having someone come and push on them or having you force them open when they are so scared. This will make them fight more and can result in a pulled muscle or damage to your connective tissue that will be difficult to heal.

2. Strengthen the other hip muscles. Whenever a muscle is having a hard time relaxing you can help it feel safer by developing the surrounding muscles. If your hip flexors/adductors are overworked, strengthen your hip extensors (glutes and hamstrings), abductors (outer hip), and external rotators (outer butt). This will reduce muscle imbalances in the hips for more relaxation and range of motion.

3. Strengthen your hip flexors and adductors. It may sound counter-intuitive but often strengthening a stressed-out muscle will help it feel more confident. A confident muscle has an easier time relaxing in a stretch.

4. Do all your other splits first. Working on your front splits and straddle will help to open up and engage your hips so that when you get to your middle splits you are more prepared.

5. Engage your external rotator muscles (outer butt) while you are in your splits: Most people have difficulty accessing their full middle splits with the legs in parallel because of the way that the bones of the hips are formed. Turning out the legs moves the head of the femur (leg bone) out of the way of the pelvic bones so that your leg can go deeper into the stretch without crunching or pinching. It has the added advantage of helping the inner thighs relax (see step 2). If you find yourself so deep into your middle split that you can’t figure out how to engage your external rotators, try not going so deep yet or try step 6.*

6. Work on one leg at a time. If the very notion of attempting a middle split makes you want to break into a cold sweat, try just stretching one leg at a time. Keep one knee bent in a frog stretch to help support your weight as you slide the other leg out. This can be a great way to work on finding your external rotation, checking your alignment, and calming your body before going for the full split. If this still feels like too much, lie on your back with your butt against the wall and let your legs fall open, working on your external rotation from here until you get more confident.

7. Breathe. Seriously, it is so much harder to stay calm and get your muscles to feel safe if you are holding your breath, gasping, moaning, or groaning. Breath is one thing you have control over so force your body to breathe slowly, in and out, to a nice slow count of five. This sends a message to your muscles that you are calm and everything is ok.

Above all, keep saying nice things to your muscles and know that they are not fighting you because they are mean or spiteful but just because they are scared. Your ability to be nice to them, stay calm, support them, and go slow and steady will help them work with you instead of against you!

*A great way to learn how to engage your external rotators it to sit in pike stretch and squeeze your heels together while pulling your big toes as far apart from each other as possible until you feel the work in the outside of your butt muscles. Then use those muscles to slowly slide your legs open to straddle, going as far as you can. Repeat until those outer butt muscles start to sing!

Tight Hips? Alternatives to Rolling out Your IT Band

A favorite activity of athletes is to roll out their aching muscles on a foam roller (the real masochists use the bumpy ones). Many of us like to roll along the outside of the thigh to “loosen” the tight, cranky Iliotibial Tract (known to its friends as the IT Band or ITB). This is an activity so painful that we have all assumed that it must be helpful!

The ITB is a thick band of fascia (the stuff that holds you together) that runs from the top of the pelvis all the way down the outside of the thigh to the top of the tibia, just past the knee. The ITB supports the hip and knee joints and provides anchor points for the muscles in your hips.

People like to roll out their ITB because feels like it would help to loosen up any tightness in the outer hip and leg, but a study from the University of Melbourne shows that this isn’t so. The ITB does not stretch, so you really can’t loosen it up. Moreover, the ITB cannot be separated from the other parts of the outer thigh because it is actually part of a larger fascial structure that covers the entire area. So you are tormenting yourself needlessly…

Instead, focus on stretching the muscles that control the ITB: the tensor fasciae latae and the gluteus maximus. These two muscles in your butt and outer hip can get very tight and pull on the ITB, making it feel tight. Here are some good stretches for the TFL and glutes from our Get Bent and Bendy Body videos:

1. Figure Four Stretch: Lie on your back and bring your knee in to your chest, then externally rotate your leg so that your foot moves in towards your chest as your knee moves away. You can use your hands to move your leg or bring your opposite knee in to support the ankle.

2. Pigeon: This is a slightly more intense version of the figure four stretch. The front leg should be as close to a right angle as possible. If you can’t get your butt to the floor in this position place a yoga block under your butt to reduce strain on the hip. Slowly lean forward over the front leg.

3. Cross body hamstrings stretch: Lying on your back, use your hands or a strap to pull your straight leg towards your face. Then, keeping your hips still, move your foot slightly across your body until it is over the opposite ear. You can move the leg around a little here working to find the tightest part of your hip. This should create a strong stretch in the outside of the hip!

4. Supine Twist: Lying on your back, pull your leg into your chest and then let it fall across your body towards the floor keeping the opposite shoulder on the floor. Then start to bring the leg dedper into flexion, as if you were going to stick your toes into your ear. You may feel the pull of the stretch all the way down the outside of the top leg as well as in the hip.

Please note that this does not mean that you shouldn’t roll out other areas, especially the glutes and hips. Rolling out muscles and joints can be very helpful in relieving tension in other parts of your body, but you never have to subject yourself to IT Band rolling again!

Ask Fit & Bendy 11: Backbend Flexibility Q&A

We just finished up another action-packed Q&A on back flexibility for the Worldwide Splitters’ Network January Backbend Challenge. This one is jam packed with juicy tidbits on alignment, control, and how to backbend safely in various common poses.

You will learn to abandon, modify, or correct stretches that aren’t right for your body and find a deep joy in the stretches that are, even when they “hurt.”

Listening to your body ensures that you are doing stretches that are good for you and helps you to enjoy your flexibility training instead of just suffering through it!

One of the primary objections to a regular stretching practice is that stretching hurts. While there is no magic to prevent all challenging sensations from occurring during your stretches, it is important to distinguish between different kinds of “pain” by listening to the subtle distinctions between different sensations during your workout.

Your body is your best teacher for what works, and what doesn’t. You will learn to abandon, modify, or correct stretches that aren’t right for your body and find a deep joy in the stretches that are, even when they “hurt.”

A few tips to help you on your journey:

• The body will resist an increased range of motion at first:
Any time you ask your muscles to extend beyond their usual length they will get nervous and resist because they are afraid of getting hurt. This creates that tight, sometimes anxious sensation of the body fighting itself and the muscle screaming at you to STOP NOW. You don’t need to stop completely, but it is important to be sympathetic to the muscle’s fear and continue to encourage it gently, slowly, consistently, so that it learns to be brave. This will reduce the duration and intensity of your discomfort in the stretch.

• Be careful of pain that radiates, burns, or prickles:
That electrical pain usually involves the compression or stretching of a nerve and is a sign that you should not go deeper. It is possible to work through this but not until those nerve pains go away. In the meantime, hang out at the edge of the pain and do some gentle movements (wiggle your fingers, flex or point your foot, anything to get the nerves unglued) to slowly loosen the sticking point.

• Pain should not last after you come out of a stretch:
Even if you feel some intense sensations while you are stretching, the sensation should abate after you stop stretching and move your limbs around. If you still have pain in your joint afterwards, especially a sharp or nervy pain, that is a sign that there could be an injury or the beginning of an injury and something needs to be modified or investigated. It is fine, however, to have normal muscle soreness the next day or two after stretching, as you would with any workout.

• Pain inside the joint should be avoided:
We want to be focused on stretching the muscles, not the connective tissue inside the joints. If you are experiencing pain deep inside the joint (knee, shoulder, hip, sacrum, etc) then something is probably not working correctly. Consider addressing alignment or modifying the stretch.

• More pain doesn’t mean more progress:
Pushing harder into a painful stretch does not mean that you will get better faster. With flexibility training benefits come from consistency (training regularly) rather than intensity (pushing hard). Pushing too hard too fast into pain will cause the muscle to contract and potentially create tears in the muscle or connective tissue.

• Combine active and passive stretches:
Weak muscles and joints with limited active flexibility hurt more and take longer to warm up. Strength, when developed through your full range of motion, can actually work to improve your stretching experience.

Learning to minimize the negative types of pain leaves you free to find joy in the glorious sensation of a really good stretch, as the muscle releases, tension decreases, and you realize more of your body’s full potential!

Happy Bending!

Casual Fridays: Musings on Warming Up

What is a warm-up? It is an essential part of your workout, so don’t skip it! Your warm-up should serve the following fuctions:

Move through your joints. Move through the full range of motion of every joint in your body paying particular attention to the joints that you use for your activity (if you are a dancer or aerialist that means all of them). This is not stretching, it is just moving and breaking up the stiffness that accumulates when we sleep or sit around.
Get the body warm, of course. That means cardio. As we’ve discussed previously, your muscles are happiest stretching at 1-2 degrees above your normal body temperature. Cardio can be any kind of activity that elevates your heart rate and gets you sweating a little. I like burpees because in two minutes I’m huffing and my heart is going fast, but it can be anything that works for you.
Set your intentions. Envision your workout. Take a few deep breaths before you go into your full training session and picture the things that you want to accomplish, the more detailed the better. Make some goals for yourself, feel your body, and leave everything else behind. Get into the moment. (Tip: a fitness journal is beneficial in this regard.)

Take 10-15 minutes to do these three things and your workout will be far more productive; and you’ll be less prone to injury, distraction, and aimlessness.

P.S., A simple tube of warm, cozy material to retain the body heat you’ve generated can extend the amount of time you’re able to spend on bending. Shamless plug: we sell the cozy tube you seek. Fun fact for extra warmth: made by my Mom. 🙂

On Active Flexibility

Active flexibility is the range of motion that you can achieve by using your muscles to put your joint there (i.e., if you use your shoulder muscles to pull your arm back behind your ear as far as you can). You’ve probably heard us mention active flexibility before—we kind of won’t shut up about it.

It is normal to have greater passive flexibility than active flexibility, but the greater the gap between these two ranges of motion, the more unstable your joint (passive flexibility is the range of motion you can achieve by having some external force move your joint while your muscles are relaxed—i.e., using a wall or a friend to push your arm behind your ears). When you can push your shoulder or your hip far past where the muscles can actually work, you are putting your joint in a position where it has no muscular support. In this position it is easy to damage the connective tissue (tendons and ligaments).

It is normal to have greater passive flexibility than active flexibility, but the greater the gap between these two ranges of motion, the more unstable your joint.

So, while it is important to train passive flexibility if you want to increase your range of motion, never neglect your active flexibility! Always set it as a goal to keep the two as close together as possible. Not only will this help to keep you injury-free, it will also make it easier to warm up, and give you better tricks!

You can try many repetitions of actively moving your limb, gradually trying to go farther each time. It is important to do this without momentum, as momentum in this context can greatly increase the chance of injury.
There are many ways to work on active flexibility depending on which part of the body and what your goals are (you would train differently to be able to kick high than to be able to hold your leg up high without moving). One method is resistance stretching where you passively stretch your body and then work on engaging your muscles in that position by squeezing into whatever is pushing on you. Start that slowly, not squeezing with your full force, and holding for only about 5 seconds each squeeze.
Active back flexibility can be increased by lifting your body into backbends (supermans) and doing standing to backbend and back up with weights (this should be done very carefully at first, the goal is to increase abdominal strength since those are the muscles that support the spine as it bends). There are more, but that is a good start.

From Bendy Body— An active flexibility superman that focuses on upper back and hip extension while working to hold the lower back in a relatively neutral position. This is very difficult since the lower back is typically what wants to bend first.

Both Get Bent! and Bendy Body, of course, employ active flexibility techniques to safely increase your strength in range of motion. 🙂 Find out the difference between the two workouts in the video below:

Happy Bendings!