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One of the hardest things about CrossFit, on top of a complete drainage of energy & the risk of injury, is being able to be flexible enough.
How many times when you’re doing a ring muscle up or a snatch or some other complex CrossFit movement, that you think to yourself, how much easier this would be if you were just a little bit more flexible?
If you’re like me, far too many times!
In fact the other day, I was trying to do a kipping pull-up and I honestly don’t know how these guys do it.
These guys have so much flexibility, they can willingly make themselves look like a fish out of water.
But nevertheless, you want to get more flexible.
And I’m going to show you how to do that.
The Rule of 4
To really master flexibility in CrossFit, it’s important to pay attention to these 4 areas.
-Mobilize
-Lengthen
-Stabilize
-Strengthen
These sound good on paper but chances are you have no clue what I just said.
So let’s elaborate on all of these.
1. Mobilize
See, a lot of people think mobility is synonymous with flexibility but it’s just one of its core components. A major one, albeit but still vastly different.
That’s because mobility has a lot to do with positioning & alignment.
Basically, that means your posture sucks and you need to fix it!
It’s so important to nail this part down to a T because if your muscles don’t sit at neutral lengths, they pull your skeleton into weird positions.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know what happens next.
If your body is in weird positions all the time, uh-oh!--there’s going to be some injury!
And more injuries means what?
It means it will bring all the progress you’ve made in your fitness goals to a grinding halt.
All those years of hard work out the window.
How now brown cow, can we fix all of this?
Well, that’s where mobility training comes in and it’s primary goal is to restore lost ranges of motion.
Where, by doing so, it can help your muscles to come back to those neutral lengths we just talked about.
Some of the ways you can practice good mobility is by making sure you hit full depth in your squats, and one way you can do that is through some hip flexor training and using a PVC pipe to open up the shoulder
2. Lengthen
When we talk about lengthening the muscles, we’re usually focusing on one thing and that’s proprioception. What is proprioception?
Well that’s what happens when we become aware of our movement & spatial orientation, generated by stimuli within our body.
These proprioceptors send signals to the brain, which then in turn relays it to our muscles, to determine both our position & our actions.
The stretch receptor is one good example of this.
It’s the one that tells the brain how much when we should stop stretching because we reached our limit and when we go further.
A great exercise to help with this is the block lunges.
“The block is placed under the thigh just above the knee so that the block is situated under the tendon, sort of tricking the golgi tendon organs into allowing the quadriceps to lengthen more than it usually might…”
And the Golgi tendon is where muscle fibers of skeletal muscle meet the tendons.
Pretty wicked stuff eh?
3.Stabilize
Stabilization is extremely important to your training as a whole because that’s what allows you to balance better and build a stronger core.
And it’s directly correlated to how well you progress in your training.
Take for example, dumbbell squats vs barbell squats.
As research has shown, with a dumbbell squat, you’re more likely to be off balance and thus, you end up with a greater risk of injury.
Not only that but your workouts won’t be as effective and you’re less likely to reach your goals.
That’s why stabilization is key.
4. Strengthen
And the last best way to build better flexibility in your training is by strengthening your core.
There is an art to the science though.
For any kind of core work, especially to build core strength, you have to make sure of one thing and that is if your spine is in a neutral position.
That’s why primal movements are making such a big comeback in the fitness world because they emphasize keeping your spine neutral while moving. This could be seen through rolling or crawling, two fundamental primal movements.
Take crawling for an instance.
It’s important because it benefits from having the extra pressure of gravity acting on the muscles that help stabilize the spine.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, running or jogging, the spine moves in opposite directions antithetical to each other, so that’s why you feel more in pain after a run
Now we move on to the real bulk of this whole blog post right here.
How do we incorporate all those 4 factors into a simple, replicable “formula” that can be used over & over again.
Well let’s talk about…
Active Flexibility
Active flexibility can be best described as stretching with purpose.
That means you’re using a full combination of stretches and exercises to build that range of motion, and especially the strength and stability in that ROM.
For this to work, you have to make sure you’re engaging your antagonist muscles and extending it out.
This next step requires a neuro-biomechanical approach. Your brain, it loves tasks. And one of the ways to get around your brain’s impulses of fight-or-flight is by giving it simple tasks to do. This will allow you to move into deeper ranges to accomplish that task
Using weights is extremely beneficial to every aspect of your life, and yes even in stretching. You see, by using low-to-moderate weights, it helps us to build muscle & stability in those ranges. What’s the point of this? Neural confidence. Where you need to develop the link between body and brain that says you have the strength to move on.
Here are some great stretches to work on that active flexibility:
-Front Split https://youtu.be/L3OqYwdsUnU
-Straddle split https://youtu.be/WiIl8qsiTo4
-Middle split https://youtu.be/bgJeNfLahDQ
Take the front split for an example.
You can give your brain a task along the lines of hooking the foot and pressing that foot straight into the floor.
Or bringing the ball of your foot back to the starting position.
Try that out.
The most important thing to note among all of this is that active flexibility lives in the brain.
Flexibility, movement and muscle activation. It’s all there.
It’s important to note, that you’re not just training your body.
You’re training your mind.
You’re giving your brain little tasks and as it builds that task, you’re also building neural maps.
To accomplish any training or fitness goal whatsoever, you have to somehow convince the brain that the goal is safe enough to focus on and you’re going to be ok in the end.
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