How To Keep Your Flexibility Gains In 2024?!

To some extent, we’ve all hit a range of motion PR (personal record). Even if you’re super stiff, hate stretching and have already labelled yourself in your own head as, ‘just not made to be flexible’.

It might have been as simple as getting your fingertips a few inches below your kneecaps for the first time ever, after suffering through a few minutes of ‘relaxed’ stretching…..

Or as advanced as sitting in a fully flat side and/or front split for the first time in your life!

Whatever the case, my entire fortune bets you have had the same frustrating realisation that the next day, and the next few days (weeks even), you can’t get all that close to said position?

Told you my money’s safe.

But why is this reality – and an annoying reality at that? And more to the point, how can we alter this reality and rewrite the turn of events in our favour?

I’ve touched on this subject almost as many times as I’ve experimented with it over the years. Especially because I’m NOT a naturally flexible guy by any means; I’m the guy who can display good range while warm and fairly recovered, but often needs a lot of force and a few sets to get me there, yet if I’m not all that warmed up and have been training hard, you can forget any ideas of me looking remotely mobile at first glance!

Point being, it’s annoyed and puzzled me more than almost anyone.

What’s the best way to work on your flexibility to encourage it to stay with you with the easiest amount of effort there onwards?

Was the biggest question on my lips ever since I started seriously working on my flexibility as a tight adult male.

Whereas prior to that it was: What’s the fastest/best method to get the front splits, pancake, side splits etc?

This is an inevitable paradigm shift, or at least it should be. Just like the world of strength or skill training, doing the posture, hold, weight or reps only once at your absolute peak on a freakishly good day, doesn’t count as ‘having the move’.

Flexibility is no different.

I used to think the Instagram photo completed the game. I’ve done it and the pics prove it but the pictures don’t save you when you need to show people in person, or you want the peace of mind that having the positions more easily available will do for you, and instead you’re frustrated at how hard it is and how tight you feel, yet again.

For true success and ownership, you need to be able to keep and repeat the position. No different to a being able to handstand on cue or do a muscle up whenever, not just on a out-of-this-world day.

So, how do we do it?

Approach 1 – Develop A Flexibility Reservoir

Develop your maximum flexibility past your current end point, basically. The simplest example of this is having the goal of touching your toes with gully locked knees. To some this is a massive milestone and when they realise it they take their foot off the gas and stop training for/trying to improve the position.

But let’s also say this person has only ever touched their toes that one time, fully warm, nicely pre stretched, with the mind fully engaged on the task, can we really expect them to be able to do it the next morning or even the next dozen mornings?

No. Simply put, the body doesn’t recognise the position as normal/commonplace. It sees it as a maximum end range position only ever achieved once.

But what would happen if you kept working in this range, aiming to not just get the fingertips to the floor barely, but the first knuckle line and eventually the palms?

You would find the original fingertip victory to be much more accessible to you, simply because your maximum range is considerably beyond this point.

This can be applied to so many mobility goals…..

• Want to squat below parallel? Work on an ass-to-grass squat
• Want a straight handstand with open shoulders? Work on your bridge/back-bending.
• Want a head down pancake? Work towards and to, a chest down or stomach down pancake.

And so on….

In short, keep working on the position after the breakthrough and set the bar higher. This will make the original bar become much more of the norm.

Approach 2 – Visit The Movement Pattern Often

No different to a juggler having to juggle to stay sharp. Or a tennis player practicing to stay competitive. Or even maintaining sexual activity to be able to keep having the option to enjoy sexual activity, you will lose what you don’t use.

I’d say this is even more true for flexibility than the examples given above! Sure, there are some ranges that you may be naturally gifted in or have favourable proportions for (short legged making squats easier for example), but as a general rule you’ll only have ranges available to you that you use often.

And I’ve found over the years that there’s an obvious inverse relationship between how often you need to visit the movement pattern, and how long/if you’ve ever had it before at all.

Person A is a stereotypical gymnast girl. She’s 5 feet tall and had effortless splits from a young age. However when she got to adolescent years she stopped gymnastics and became much more academic. As a result she stopped stretching and doing things like splits, bridges etc and sat down more (studying) which continued into her 20’s.

Person B is a 28 year old male who did next to no official sports as a kid or even as teen. He had next to no interest in PE as the teachers were always lazy and just told everyone to kick a ball about. He was an overweight teen and this continued into his early twenties. When finally he had enough and knew he needed to make a change.

In the gymnast girl’s case she finds old friends who haven’t ever stopped gymnastics practice, despite being much older. They’re still as flexible, if not more so, than they used to be. Whereas our gymnast girl has lost her splits and feeling of looseness. But she dedicates herself to getting it back and uses the old stretches she used to do as a kid, and with some repeated effort she gets her splits back.

Our 28 year old male on the other hand under goes a journey of multiple (well over 5) years that entails getting leaner, stronger but also wanting to get more mobile – and even push that mobility to limits he never thought possible (yep, front splits! Why not?!).

He gets there after an arduous slog but finds it a real tough ask to keep this new position, whereas the gymnast girl has hers back as once per week she does adult gymnastics.

Is this a surprise really?

It shouldn’t be. She’s had them previous and had them for a while; therefore keeping them going forward will be easier, in the same vain as getting them back was also easier.

Whereas our tight late twenties male will have to work much much harder to sustain his and keep it longer term, as the position is still very alien to his body & nervous system.

He may very well need to visit variations of the posture daily for quite some time (albeit at lower intensities) to encourage and teach his body that it’s normal nowadays – more on this concept in a future post!

But the bottom line and harsh reality is: it’s unreasonable and bordering on ridiculous to expect an easy time keeping range of motion if it’s not used regularly, or very regularly (daily) if you’re naturally tight and was/have been for long periods of time (years).

Approach 3 – Lower The Effort Required

This on the surface seems counter-intuitive to approach 1 but when we look deeper at what’s going on, we see it’s actually more similar than it seems.

Let me explain.

As a coach and trainee alike, progressive overload was hardwired into my brain as the mother of all mechanisms behind progress. Add reps, add sets, add weights, decrease rest times, heck do all 4!

And do them all wherever and whenever possible, as much as possible and for as long as possible. Basically, a workout that wasn’t progressed was a workout wasted….or so I thought.

It’s only been in the last 6-12 months or so that I’ve began to discover the power of another form of progressive overload that most people never knew about to begin with, let alone forgot…..

Doing the same thing better or with less effort.

In the strength training world this would be doing the same sets and reps with the same intensity (load), except aiming for it to feel easier, more efficient and the form to be on an upward curve.

All of what we’ve covered so far in approach 3 can be applied to flexibility training, too. Instead of obsessing about full front splits, how about aiming to build up a better and better back leg focused long lunge?

And with the long lunge, why not aim to make the 30-45 second holds feel easier to access and/or easier to feel in the right area?

A more classical analogy would be the standing forward fold – instead of trying to get your elbows to your toes on an elevated surface, why not strive for an easier palms to floor hold where you focus on lengthening more and more from the hip, instead of flexing the spine as much?

You can even start using how soon you access the position as a marker for this category. In our example above, can you place your palms on the floor within 10-20 seconds of folding down? Instead of it taking you 45-60 seconds on the first set/stretch to get a forced touchdown?

This is a perfect approach for anyone not too concerned with constant and never ending improvement in various planes. You’re not pushing harder and harder constantly which increases the injury risk significantly, instead your recovery will be better as your flexibility training will gradually tax you less and less.

Approach 4 – Strengthen The Zone(s)

Our last one is the holy grail of flexibility training nowadays. It’s the cat that’s been let out the bag; the big secret nobody told us years ago, that strength in end ranges is the reason person X can do position A, but person Y cannot.

Simply put, person X has more strength in the more extreme ranges when compared to person Y. Therefore person X’s nervous system not only recognises this extreme range in its ‘movement mindmap’, but also deems the range as safe and stable.

The same cannot be said about person Y.

From all the research I’ve seen and my own anecdotal experiences, strengthening the end ranges is probably the most time efficient method for retaining flexibility long term.

Time efficient meaning requiring the least maintenance long term. No different to various strength skills really. For me now, a muscle up of any kind can still be done to a high standard if I go as long3 weeks or more without doing a single rep!

This is because it’s so deeply engrained in my nervous systems map of moves, AND I’ve been at a very high standard in the movement in my time, it takes me very little to keep the movement at a high standard.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand, how does this apply to flexibility? What are some examples?

In short, having active control at, or close to, your end/maximum range in a given move/position. This could be someone sliding into a deep side split using their hands for assistance, but then being able to take the hands off completely and resist gravity, holding the split firmly at the same depth.

The trick to doing this is incorporating active work into your flexibility journey from the get-go. I used this to great effect in my front splits journey; so much so I couldn’t actually sit in a passive front split for quite some time. It always had to be an active front split entry.

But as a result, even when I’ve gone long periods without any active splits or long lunge training, after a few sets I’m still comfortably holding at decent depths. All because I’ve engrained the strength there deeply.

Obviously in order to for it stay completely accessible there’s a frequency of use that must be maintained but it’s really not all that much, and actually gets lower with time, as the position becomes more and more ‘normal’ to your nervous system.

As a generalisation I would say you would need to do 1 set or hold of a move either once every week or 2 weeks at the most, to keep it long term. Improving it would require a different approach of course.

The Flexibility Retention Cocktail (Putting It Together)

In essence you need to have a flexibility maximum (PB) above, or considerably above, the range you want accessible whenever, wherever. To do this you need to be doing flexibility work that takes you as far past the goal range as possible; the higher your all time range PR, the higher your resting accessible range will likely be.

Then you need to visit the position(s) often. It’s both naïve and ignorant to expect the body to keep a position it attained once, when the moon and stars were in perfect harmony. For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with a daily stretch routine – something I do everyday to visit all the basic ranges of motion for 30-60 seconds once only. And I’ve seen interesting results that I plan on sharing in an upcoming post! But the idea is simple: use it or lose it.

It’s also crucial to try to lessen the effort needed to access a position. The easier a position is to attain, the more ‘normal’ it is to your body/nervous system. Throughout your journey you will find you can get deeper into ranges with less time and/or exertion. Sometimes rather than pushing range personal bests all the time, working the same range but making it easier and easier is just as good (if not better) a marker for progress.

Lastly, never forget the power of strengthening zones, particularly the end ranges. Once the end ranges are strong(er) the nervous system will let you go into them with no complaints, as your new strength essentially overcomes/shuts off the protective stretch reflex.

Some examples of this are:

• The ability to lift the leg(s) up against gravity as opposed to just stretching your hamstrings with gravity.
• The capacity to actively extend/lengthen your back leg in a deep lunge or split squat.
• The ability to arch and contract the spine against gravity in a floor backbend or a bridge, instead of relaxing with weight assistance into passive backbends/shoulder openers.

If your routine has each of these components factored in somewhere you can be sure your resting/’cold’ flexibility will be ever increasing.

But we also need to face facts: your warmed up flexibility will always be notably different to your stone cold flexibility. To expect otherwise is delusional.

With these tips in mind there’s no excuse for 2024 not to be the year you transform your body’s movement potential once and for all!

(More on my experiment with a daily stretch routine/movement practice real soon, too. Stay tuned.)