Maximize Split Flexibility For Better Routines: Drills, Stretching, & Science Summary

Today on the podcast , I wanted to include just a bit of a hip flexibility and kind of leaps jumps , all of that together , a little webinar that I did last year for the Hero Lab , because right now a lot of people , as we get closer to season , are kind of asking for those last little tips to help improve some of their scores , some of their meat performance

, some of their aesthetics . So this is really something that I think I've spent a lot of time working on and researching with . You know what is the science of flexibility ? How do we improve hip flexibility , split flexibility safely , but in a way that actually shows up in routines , things like that .

It's one thing to have a split on the floor , it's another thing to actually have it show up in some sort of routine , whether it's , you know , men's pommel horse or parallel bars for stradaps , things like that .

So I wanted to include this for everyone to kind of have a nice little helping hand as we go into the season itself All the visuals , things like that , are inside the Hero Lab , which is linked down below , if you would all like to check that out and sign up . Hope you all enjoy this webinar .

Alrighty , hello everybody , and welcome back to another month of the Hero Lab webinars . I'm really excited for this one . I think we're going to talk about something that everybody kind of has questions about . Everybody struggles with myself included , sometimes with the athletes that I work with and we're really going to be talking all about hip flexibility .

So we're going to talk about everything that you could possibly need and the information both practically in terms of what drills and exercises I think are really really valuable , but also the scientific kind of support behind those , and trying to find the blend here of you know what is going to make things you know move the needle and what's going to really get

kids' hips more mobile , but also what's going to be the most effective and safe method at the same time .

And so I think there's probably not a single person reading this or watching this webinar or doing this that hasn't made some mistakes with hip flexibility training and has had to kind of learn the hard way aches with hip flexibility training and has had to kind of learn the hard way .

And you know I'll be the number one person to put myself in front of the guilty line of , you know , doing things that are just kind of passed down to me and not really understanding why I'm doing them , and just kind of pushing kids in splits , kind of thinking that's how we're going to get them more mobile .

And you know , I unfortunately have to just admit that my lack of education as a young coach has definitely hurt some athletes , not intentionally , but over time , not using the best methods has caused some injuries .

I'll review some of the case studies that I've worked with that have been really , really helpful to help me learn more and to make me open my mind .

A champion where I work I see so many athletes for hip injuries it's crazy A gymnast , ballet dancers also but just so many gymnasts that have problems with hips anywhere from the recreational , just general level all the way up to the elite internationals who have hamstring issues or have hip flexor strains or have labral tears in their hips .

So the goal of this webinar is really to give you guys all of my experiences from meeting and talking to a lot of people , but also combine the ideas of many , many hardworking researchers around the world who are maybe hip surgeons or , you know , physical therapists or are strength conditioning coaches , to kind of give you guys the best tools to use Right .

So let's just start with . The most kind of obvious thing is that you know I get where everyone's coming from , and this is something I ask myself every single day when I'm working with athletes about , like , how do I help you get more mobile ? How do I get you splits ? How do I get you a stall there ?

How do I get you , you know , pommel horse swings , or how do I get you in bars on high bar ? You know , but but not hurt you . You know , how am I ? How can I help you get better without really causing you to have sore hips or to have , you know , long-term problems with your , with your hips in terms of injuries ?

Especially as a younger coach , I was like man , how do I help you ? But what I found is that just so much information on the internet . It's insane when it comes down to hip mobility and hip flexibility . If you Google hip mobility , you'll get thousands and thousands of hits right .

So if you have all that information from the internet , but also maybe camps and clinics and groups online and things like that .

There's probably a lot of really good information in there , but sifting through it and trying to find what works for you and your athletes and and , honestly , why it's important to do these drills and what's the science and the reasoning behind them , that is like information overload to the max .

And if you take that and you combine that with you know , honestly , just athletes who weren't making progress the way that I wanted them to or the way that they wanted to , uh that's just really really frustrating . Uh , it makes you feel in practice like geez , why is this not working ? Like what's going on here , and it makes you feel really overwhelmed .

You know , I used to feel really overwhelmed that coaches , other coaches or parents or you know the athletes were asking me what to do and I was giving them exercises and it wasn't working . And then it kind of made me feel like , oh man , why isn't this working ? Like I felt really bad about the fact that they still had bad splits and they still had issues .

So I felt really stuck , you know , and that's kind of what led me five years ago to kind of go down the warpath of just being a massive nerd and reading a lot and trying to talk with people and just tinker and try new things and see what works .

You know combining my experiences that I learned from my coaches , but also you know what the new research said in the medical world and the strength conditioning literature and some of the hip surgery research . So that's kind of where we're going here . All right , and let's just be honest , saying that you know me trying to do things .

A few years ago I , you know , had all these drills and I had all these ideas and I was like , oh , this is going to go great . I know exactly what's going to happen . They're going to , you know , do these for a couple of days and then boom everyone . And reality is that it doesn't work that way .

You know it's not always a perfect method where you learn some drills , try it and it goes smoothly . I think everybody probably listening to this or reading this can understand that it's not as much simplicity as you think and it's the kids following along and understanding and being consistent and all that kind of stuff kind of doesn't really work .

So kind of keep that in the back of your mind , that like it's okay , like there's going to be a lot of tinkering that goes into this kind of process here , and then , even more so than that , is that me trying to do those programs after I learned was . You know , I felt really good about it .

I was like , oh , we're going to use these drills , these equipment . It's going to like absolutely a nightmare to try to get people on the right drills and set up and I don't have enough time and there's no space . There's classes in the way , like all this other stuff .

So , you know , take all these principles that we teach you and , uh , you know , apply them and how you feel they're fit and what you think is best for your gym . Don't think I tried to do is not only give you exercises that I feel are really , really valuable , but also give you a step-by-step kind of process about how you approach .

You know , okay , I see an athlete who doesn't have a good split . What's the first thing that goes through my mind ? Okay , what's what's the second thing I do after I do the first thing ? And kind of giving you an algorithm .

It's called to be like okay , this , then this , then this , then this , and then you can plug in all the drills that you like , things that fit your equipment , things that fit your time , the amount of staff that you have , and the cool thing is that if you learn the system , you can then add in new drills as you find them or you can tweak things based on

the athlete . You're not stuck in this rigid box of doing three or four drills every single day or just stretching for 20 minutes and over splits every single day .

You know it gives you a little bit more , you know , kind of understanding of why you're doing it and then it allows you to kind of be in control and say , okay , I see this problem , let me try to make this as individualized to the athlete as possible .

Okay , and then let's take a big step back and think about you know , yes , it's good for gymnastics and injuries , but you know what's the really the biggest reason ? We need better flexibility , right ? So if you take somebody like this this is a medical screen for someone for hip flexor stiffness and for quad stiffness .

It's called the Thomas test and I'll talk about that later . But if you take somebody who has a really stiff hip flexor , like you can kind of see her leg is not in line and parallel with the table . That's kind of what we're looking at .

If you take somebody who has this limited hip stiffness and you add that on top of a lot of back handsprings , right , what unfortunately you can get is this right and I think , for someone who's maybe not a medical provider , what you can see over here in this line here you know well that is a L5 spondy fracture .

That's a stress fracture in the spine and people have called this like a stress fracture . They've called it a spondy fracture . You know just different medical terms to refer to what's going on here .

And essentially what's happened is that she's she's put so much pressure on this , this bone right here , this joint from backbending without using her hips and kind of putting it on her lower back is that she's caused that bone to get inflamed and then it became from a stress reaction , it became a full fracture and now what's happening is this eight millimeters you

can see is that her spine bone on top is actually sliding forward and that's putting a lot of pressure on some of the lower back structures . This is , unfortunately , a career-ending spondy fracture where the athlete was unable to get back to gymnastics . It was in so much pain I just couldn't do it . This is not taken from Google .

This is not taken from a medical journal that I found . This is one of my athletes that I coached five years ago . This was a level nine that we worked with . That was a senior . She really wanted to go to college and compete , but unfortunately this all caught up with her and it caused her to have a lower back fracture .

That was really hard for everyone involved . It was hard for me because at the time I was just at a grad school . I was her physical therapist who was trying to help her . I was also her coach who was trying to make her programs and get her better .

Her parents were really struggling with the amount of pain she was in rightfully so and all of the coaches felt really overwhelmed and it was just devastating to watch her go through that at the end of her senior year and she ultimately decided to not do gymnastics . She transferred schools and didn't pursue her college gymnastics career .

That was really hard for all of us involved .

So I really hope people can feel the gravity of that decision that I not decision , but the decisions that I was making in practice and PT that were leading to , unfortunately , not the best results and I wrote a blog post about this called the Worst Day in my Coaching Career and that was when she called me and told me she had this stress fracture .

So you know , this is why we need to think about flexibility . It's like , yes , it's important to have beautiful back handsprings and leaps and jumps , but in terms of health and a quality of life , this is flexibility in hip and shoulder . Another lecture we talked about is one of the most important things to think about .

With lower back injuries and many other injuries as well , we get the actual injury , but then , on top of that , look at all these things that always come along with one of these big time back injuries or hip injuries . Now they're at risk for another injury . Myself , as a coach , super , super anxious .

I definitely felt helpless when I couldn't help her . She missed a ton of time in practice , she had huge mental blocks on skills , she wasn't making progress , obviously because she was in a lot of pain , she wasn't training and then , you know , she was unable to compete .

But even if we have an athlete who doesn't have a severe back injury like this , they're just always struggling with limited hip flexibility . Right , they're not going to do it well meets , and then , rightfully so , like I said , her parents were , you know , really , really worried about what was going to happen to her back long term , and so is she .

That's kind of where we're moving here , and the upside to this is that now , uh , thankfully , because you're here and you're dedicated to learning more , you're going to be able to help these athletes . You're not going to let them slip through the cracks .

Um , so this is you , but this is like a step-by-step algorithm that I kind of have created in the last five years from all the people I've been lucky to learn from and all the things that I've been lucky to read that are available to me .

So if you take this kind of step-by-step process and you add that on top of a ton of patients , that's going to be the number one thing is just really understanding that these things take weeks , not hours Communicating with the athlete , the parents , other coaches , medical providers , really having an open mind to learn new information about how to best help the

athlete , trying to combine those thoughts into a team plan where we can all work together . Maybe a medical provider helps out with some of the soft tissue work and some of the specific exercises and pain management . Maybe the coach is the one modifying their technique .

Maybe the parent is the one who's supporting them in terms of helping them have the resources and get to the medical appointments or get to the gym or whatever . It is right , like everyone's kind of helping along with the athlete taking care of themselves . You got a lot more patients on top of that , right ?

Well , that's going to increase the possibility of a better hip flexor stiffness , right . And now we're going to have more hip mobility , which is fantastic , right , it's probably going to lead to better leaps , better jumps . That's awesome . That's good performance . We want that . So now we have maybe , you know , less injury .

We have more , uh , you know , actual gymnastics , specific progress and , honestly , the reason that I'm still coaching , the reason that many of us are still coaching , is for this , right . That's really why we're doing all this .

This is why we take so much time , and I think that the happy emotions , the values gymnastics teaches , the amazing things that people can learn from the sport and what it sets people up to do later in life is honestly the biggest reason that many of us are still involved in gymnastics . And this is not a you know , I'm not a personal UCLA bandwagon .

I enjoy all of NCAA gymnastics , but they just happened to win last year , so I put them up . But you know that celebration , that excitement , that being proud of your team , that you know being part of something bigger than yourself . You know that's really what's going on .

So take it from that big kind of meta level all the way back down to , okay , if I can fix your hip flexibility and help you and maybe make you not be as sore and make you perform better , you can be a part of something really , really big .

Whether that's just your local community it doesn't involve any competitive gymnastics at all or whether that involves high-level NCAA or international competition . As we give you more tools here , realize that this process of flexibility in general is just so not what you think it's going to be , and it was for me . I spent so much time studying and learning .

I was like I got this , this is going to be great . And then I was like , okay , I'm going to go . I got this plan and then boom , I'm going to win . These kids are going to get better , they're going to have good flexibility , it's going right . It was like up and down , up and down , up and down .

Like I consider these flag posts as little , like mini markers of like oh , we're working . It's like it's something , something's making progress , like maybe this little flag here is like one leap that looks really really good after a few weeks of working on this , like , oh , that looked pretty good , right .

And then the next one up here is you know , maybe they do something , they hit a big routine they've never hit before , because you know it looks way smoother . They get a good score oh , that was awesome too . And then maybe they they finally get a good , uh , you know an in bar around with a nice stall there .

They have their split goes all the way down and one day you're like , hey , look at that , that's , that's getting pretty good .

You know , those are all those little tiny wins , so take it way more with that patient's collaboration mindset and the fact that you're going to have to talk about before we move on to the fun stuff is that you know this is just a straight up reality of gymnastics and honestly , one of the biggest reasons I started the Hero Lab in general is because we have

never had in gymnastics a higher rate of injuries and burnout . Right , it's just unbelievable how many kids are getting hip injuries , how many kids are getting back injuries and how many kids are just deciding that they don't want to do gymnastics anymore because they're worried about their health .

And if you stack that on top of a lot of athletes who are just not performing the way that they want , the way that their parents and coaches want right , they're not making progress in skills or levels , that kind of adds up to be quite an unfortunate situation in terms of what's going on right and on the PT side of things not coaching the athletes that I

work with . Just as a medical provider who treats a lot of gymnasts right , I've had 34 gymnasts who have had stress fractures in their back or some sort of overused tear in their

hip . In the last you know , season I would say I've had 20 people who lost their competitive year , just didn't compete at all . They either started and then got hurt in their hip or their back and then , or they couldn't finish . Later in the year I've had three who had massive hip surgery .

So like label repair , bone shaving , you know , tying ligaments back together , like crazy stuff that like not only is not even about gymnastics , it's about quality of life . And then I've had 12 people this year , you know , who have quit . So I've had athletes who had such bad back pain .

They couldn't uh , you know , compete and they're worried about their long-term health so they stopped training . Or , you know , hip injuries they couldn't get back from him , like hamstring growth plate fractures . That their parents were like this is just crazy . There's no way that we can keep them in gymnastics .

My , my daughter can't even like drive , you know , you know , can't drive in the car with me and she can't sit in school , like kind of transcends just the gymnastics performance stuff . So , you know , that's kind of a really scary stat . That's only for my local community in the northeast of Boston .

I work with some people consulting online , but it's a very small amount of people that I actually treat here around the area , so I haven't really included everybody that I've talked with via email that are struggling too , but this is just really really tough to listen to and to hear about . So this is kind of why this lecture is so important .

So if you really only remember one thing from the entire lecture which I hope you don't , but I hope that , uh , you know , this kind of step-by-step algorithm is really really uh , I guess all the five to 10 years that I've been doing of work and hip flexibility put into one slide which is I don't know slightly a little bit , uh , saddening .

I guess it was a little bit .

But all the research I've learned from all the people I've been lucky to learn from coaching , I'm really lucky that I work with some of the best medical providers in the world and I've been able to travel around the world and talk with these people and I kind of just absorb and soak up all the things they find really valuable and I combine it with what I

kind of think about and this is kind of the step-by-step process we'll talk about . We'll talk about , like , starting with the base and then working from screening to soft tissue care and strength and control and technique . And if you've , if you listened to or you've read the shoulder webinar , you're going to see a lot of similarities between this lecture already .

Right and I did that intentionally because it's the same system , right , whether you're talking about the upper body or the lower body , the same kind of step by step process is going to occur and you'll see a lot of differences in the exercises and some of the anatomy , but it really matters that you understand that this is kind of a good approach for most of

these things . It's not only about doing the best flexibility drill or the best active flex drill or having the best strength program . It's all of these things put together . It's really going to be where you win , okay , so , starting from your cultures , your values and your habits , when it comes down to hip flexibility , do no harm .

You should not be hurting someone's hips . You should not be causing someone to get worse with your flexibility program , and that's not a malicious intent thing . It's oftentimes just a lack of education or maybe just not understanding the hip anatomy really really well , and so I'll offer you guys the kind of best practices I find .

But that's the number one things If you find athletes are getting really sore hips and can't move forward , you have to stop and you have to say , okay , how can I learn more ? What do I need to do ? Who do I need to talk to ? How can I find someone who's going to give me some more information about this before we have more problems ?

Okay , all the research is pretty clear that consistency is more important than intensity . Right , finding a good screen and doing three or four things every single day that are based on really good science , and also the end goal of whatever gymnastic skill they need to improve upon .

Right , that's going to be way more important than kind of having one epic 20 to 30 minute over split session or , you know , weight stretching or things like that . Like that , that is just going to be a little bit too hardcore and it might overdose .

Somebody , instead of getting just consistent practice throughout the entire week and throughout maybe a couple months , go with somebody instead of getting just consistent practice throughout the entire week and throughout maybe a couple months . Trying to take the best of what the research says plus what the best expert coaching opinion says is really important .

Gymnastics is a weird sport that has really unique hip demands and I think that if you only follow the research and just blindly ignore what coaches think is valuable , you're probably going to miss the boat , because it won't be specific to our sport , and especially with hips , more so than shoulders , is that , uh , there's no two athletes , hips that are the same ,

and I think the worst thing that you can do and that I've done in the past , so I'm guilty as well , but is is go to a camp or look online for a drill or find something that looks really , really good and like , oh man , this would be awesome .

And you go to practice and you make all of your girls just do this stall bar drill or all these girls do this leap drill , right , and it's like a bell curve for the middle of the pack .

You know , maybe 60% of the athletes it's just going to , it's going to be okay , it's not going to be amazing , it's not going to be awful , right , but for 20% of those athletes it might do really really well . Remember that maybe 20% of those athletes it's going to hurt , right ?

So if you just blindly apply flexibility drills , understanding the anatomy and why you're doing it and how , maybe one athlete might have to change the drill or do a different drill because of that , you could really hurt somebody , and you could really not only hurt somebody . You can make some serious stalls . And how much progress you're going to make .

You can sit there spinning your wheels for weeks and weeks and weeks and not , excuse me , see progress , because it's just not specific to them , right ? If you try to , you know , use a screwdriver to bang a hammer nail and it's not going to go well . So you got to make sure you have the right tool for the right job , okay .

And then , lastly , it's kind of combines everything is just happily a mutt right . Don't be afraid to learn from PTs , ats , chiropractors , you know , coaches , sports scientists everybody has an opinion that's probably valid as long as it's based on really sound quality evidence or expert coaching experience .

So we always start with screening and I think in the shoulder lecture you might have seen that we do that kind of seated wall screen . Well , in gymnastics , I think the best way to do this is probably starting with just a split floor screen and we'll show these videos so you guys understand . But you want to make sure that it's kind of standardized right .

So drawing a line in the ground , putting them close to a wall , trying to make sure that it's consistently done at the same exact thing , what same exact thing .

What you do is you're going to have the athlete do a split and a line and they're going to use a measurement stick next to their own hip and kind of measure against the wall and see how far they are off the ground and that just helps give a little bit of a window of insight into where they're at and if they're going to make progress .

You'll see that split slide down over a few weeks . And there's other things that I really really needed to , and this lecture has a little bit more in-depth than some previous lectures I've given on this topic because I want people to really understand it . But there's a lot more specific tests that you can do .

I always recommend people do them with a medical provider . If you're a coach , do it with a medical provider . If you're a medical provider , there's even more really in-depth hip-specific screening and medical assessments that are really really good and I think that you guys should always collaborate together .

And again , if you're curious about some of these articles or what you want to learn from , always in my articles or my research presentations I try to put down these articles in the bottom . So , like one through 11 has all these kinds of hip surgery screens and hip anatomy screens that we'll talk about .

Okay , so it's up here on the right-hand corner , right Starting on the line . She obviously has a full split and that's not the common thing that we find .

I just used her because I wanted to have a really good example , but she would come up a little bit closer and be next to this tape line which has inches on the wall and she goes down and she puts the goniometer or this ruler thing that I'm holding and kind of measures off the ground .

If she's far so , she puts the measurement thing on her own thigh , right where her hip bone is , and that caused her to go out . And , like I said , there's this is a really good gymnastics general screen we do . But there's many other things that you can do that are specific to you know , more hip mobility , right . So we already talked about this .

This Thomas test , it's called , where they lay down and we're looking for the thigh to be parallel , which you can see here . It is that tells us her hip flexor is nice and flexible . And we also like to see can the knee bend to 90 degrees , right here ?

So if the hip is flat and the knee is bent , that kind of is telling you that you have really good hip flexor and quad stiffness or , sorry , that you have really good hip flexor and quad flexibility . So you can do that one , right . You can do a straight leg raise . You can do a band assisted straight leg raise .

You can do what's called a favor test you can do . You hold the hip and it drops it down . You want to be about one fist width away from the table here , right . But these are all medical , specific screens that are general , and even past this , there's there's things called the Craig test or x-rays .

There's soft tissue assessments , there's range of motion assessments . There's so many things that you can . You can do with a good medical assessment to narrow in on .

Okay , it's , it's not the hamstring , it's the , it's the quad here and it's the inner thigh right or like okay , maybe it's not the hip flexor stiffness , it's maybe an arched pelvis position , or maybe it's something going on with their ankles causing them to arch when they land .

There's a lot of different reasons why somebody can not have hip mobility and I think starting here for coaches or for general people is good , but always partner up with a medical provider who really understands hip anatomy so they can give you a much more specific plan

. Taking a little bit of a peek at the anatomy , which I think is really important , and taking a little bit of a peek at the anatomy , which I think is really important , and I don't want to go super in depth because it can be really , really wonky .

But you just think about layers , right , there's three layers to our , to our hip joint and our shoulder joint that are really important . So you have layer one , which is the bones . Right you have this , your your hip . Here . You have your pelvis cup , which is called your acetabulum right , and then you have the actual hip bone .

So you have pelvis , you have the acetabulum , which is kind of like a socket , and then you have a circular structure that sits inside of it with a long bone that's called your femur . So you have your femoral head , then you have your femur bone and if you look down at your own thigh you can look like your quad muscle .

Your thigh muscle is this femur here . And if you put your fingers kind of up and kind of feel the bony points around your hip , that's kind of the pelvis and that's deeper down there would be the acetabulum . So don't think about it more in depth than that , unless you're a PT and you want to learn a lot more in AT or Cairo .

But just thinking that this bony layer is something that really can't change . You know , you're just kind of born with it . Some people have , you know , shallow hip sockets . Some people have really deep hip sockets .

Some people have weird not weird , but just abnormal turns in their hips or their toes rotate more in or out , and if it's a structural thing in their bones you can't change that . It doesn't matter how much stretching you do or how much active flex you do , it's not going to change .

And so you have to really understand that if someone is not making progress in their flexibility , you have to rule out that it's a bony problem first , because if it is a bony problem and you're stretching like crazy , you're not going to make good progress and you're probably really gonna hurt somebody if you keep pushing . So layer one bones okay .

Layer two is kind of going to be the next thing , which is like your ligaments right . So these ligaments lay over this , this kind of joint , and they help secure it . You have a bunch in the front , you have a bunch underneath and you have a bunch in the back and you also have something down in your hip socket . It's called your labrum .

So essentially it's just like a deep suction seal of Fibroartilage that helps to kind of again secure the vacuum they call it in your hip joint . It's got to be a really , really tight seal to make sure it's got good stability . So this labrum just helps to deepen that seal and the ligaments around your hip joint kind of help hold it in firm in place .

Gymnasts tend to have really really loose ligaments , which is not going to be , you know , a problem . Sometimes it's really good for them because they can do gymnastics well .

But , that being said , if you have loose ligaments right , naturally , and you have someone who's maybe not the most support in their bony area , right , we really don't want to be putting pressure on these ligaments and this labrum here , because once you start getting into tugging on that , it can cause a lot of injuries , labral tears , some other issues related to

hip instability , and we want to really make sure that the stretching that we're doing and the soft tissue care that we're doing is specific to the third layer , which would be the muscles , right . So this is going to be everything that we kind of know about . We know about the hip flexor that passes in the front , the groin muscles on the inside .

Here the quad is on the front , the hamstring on the back . That's the third layer , right , we had bones and then we had ligaments in the labrum , which would be layer two they call it the passive layer and then we have layer three , which would be the muscles themselves .

So inner thigh , hip flexor , quad , things like that those muscles can become very stiff and overworked with . Think about gymnastics . You squeeze your legs together all day long , right . You keep your knees straight all day long . You use your hip flexors a ton right . So the muscles around your hip can become very overworked and stiff .

And if the muscles are stiff and the ligaments are a little bit loosey-goosey , right , that becomes the problem where someone who's not , you know , necessarily the most mobile has a lot of motion at their hip joint and that can start to cause irritation . So I don't want to go deeper than that , no pun intended , because of how complex the anatomy can be .

But if you're someone who's thinking about how do I help somebody , you want to focus on the muscles themselves and you want to take away stretches or take away things that are putting extra pressure on their ligaments , and we'll talk about that a little bit If you're trying to feel a little bit more nerdier .

So these are kind of the capsule and the ligament , kind of stuff of the hip that's really important to kind of understand from a medical point of view . So I'll breeze through this . But the front of the hip , you have your iliofemoral ligament that kind of goes from your pelvis to your hip .

Here , right , you have a what's called a lateral band or a medial band and they attach at different points . Again , if you're a coach and you know you don't want to get too overwhelmed , that's totally fine kicking motions and it kind of prevents the hip from sliding downwards .

And then , lastly , in the back you have the posterior capsular , what's called the ischiofemoral ligament . So this is more to prevent your hip from kind of sliding out in the back and it also helps you to give a lot of flexibility to bend your hip up towards your chest . Okay , these are all the muscles that kind of go through .

There's some nerves in here too and some bones . But kind of ignore the text and just kind of look at the density of muscles we have around our hip . Right we have hip flexors , we have an inner muscle called our sartorius quad , inner thigh right the back has hamstrings , calf glutes , like there's tons of stuff in here that gets overworked in gymn .

More motion to happen from with stretching and foam rolling and some good targeted specific strength work . That's going to kind of be where we get the most progress . Okay , so here's a split screen , kind of going back to it .

So here's the left leg right she just goes on the line and then the right leg and again , if she had limitation , I would have her take this little ruler and put it next to her , the line , and tell me how many inches off the ground she's limited , right . So straddle , middle and right pretty easy to do but not bad to set up . It's just tape .

We put on a block line and we just left the tape on there for a couple of weeks while people were doing screens . Okay , so what do we do if they're limited ?

So if they're limited , right , you want to focus on the hamstring , the inner thigh , the quad muscle first , and then you want to have that athlete do some active flexibility drills next that are appropriate for their level .

If it doesn't look that bad and this happens all the time with hip flexibilities that you'll see someone who has pretty decent splits and they don't really have any issues on the screen .

But they just don't jump and leap to their angle , their back leg doesn't get high enough , their stallers don't seem to be compressed enough , their pommel flares don't seem to be opened up , their dip cuts on p-bars don't seem to be really , really wide , and you know what that might be is that it actually might just be a strength and active flexibility technique

issue , right . So you can have someone who is really , really stiff and on the screen , on the floor , they're going to be limited , but then also limited on the equipment , right . That might be a mobility problem .

But you might also have athletes who are really , really mobile , right , and they're just not the strongest ever , or maybe that's really hard for them because they're growing right If they have really good passive flexibility in the ground but it doesn't show up on beam or on bars or on high bar , right .

What you want to do is just think , okay , we need to get you stronger , we need to get you a little bit more controlled with active flexibility , and we also need to really make sure that you're doing a ton of technique work to have that transfer over . So just kind of think about those two pathways in your mind , okay .

So the next thing we're going to do is really talk about soft tissue care , right , and we're going to talk about specific to the hip versus the shoulder in the last lecture , right . Especially with the hip and the femur , the more you grow and the more you train , the more overworked those muscles get , right .

If your bones are growing faster than your hip muscles can keep up with , that can be a really big issue in terms of having stiffness in your groin and your quad and in your hip flexor , but also it can cause you to really struggle a lot in gymnastics . Right , you're going to have to you know longer legs mean you got to .

You got to put more muscular force to lift them up . You're going to have to do a lot harder . You know , strength drills to support some of the ranges of motion that you need .

Right , if you're overworking those muscles because of how long your legs are and because you're growing , and then you put that on top of normal , squeeze my legs together , kick my toes , things like that , that's why those muscles get so stiff . And the way we want to kind of manage this is through regular soft tissue care every single day .

We want to make sure we're doing specific foam rolling and specific stretching drills that are targeting just those muscles in that third layer , not the first or the second layer that might put pressure on bones or ligaments . And so there's a lot of really good articles on like systematic reviews on you know stretching foam rolling . Why does it work ?

What do we think is happening ? And I'll highlight some of them , but I really want people to have access to all of these articles . If you want to learn more , I included some at the end as well . But if you're on the geekier side and you're trying to figure out , what's the support for me changing the way that I'm stretching right ?

Why am I going to do certain things now versus 10 years ago ? A lot of it has to do with the enormous amount of research that's come out on stretching , foam rolling and hip surgery and hip injuries and things like that . So keep that in mind if you want to find out more . Okay , so what are we doing for foam rolling ?

And again , this is based on some big studies that have looked at the effects of foam rolling . Why foam rolling works . Essentially , we think that it's getting the muscle to relax . It's probably just reducing what we call tone or some stiffness in that muscle in terms of blood flow and also increasing the water content , so hydration of the muscle .

And then it just kind of feels good when you do it with a lower intensity . Right ? Articles kind of suggest that we're definitely not breaking up scar tissue or doing any .

You know fascial distortion , which is definitely , definitely a thought that I had in my mind earlier in the day , sorry , earlier in the in my career , and what I what I really realized is that it kind of makes sense , right , if a foam roller was enough to break up the fascia and was to form scar tissue , then the forces would be so high in gymnastics that

you would absolutely explode when you landed right . And that's my friend Urson Rogioso brought that up with . You know the concept of these studies when they first came out . It's like man , that makes sense .

If a formal could , you know , break up fascia and distort , you know , fascial adhesions , then the 15 times body weight and ground reaction forces that a double back test , you would make you absolutely explode .

So what we think is now happening is that the muscles are just relaxing because of you know the way our nervous system is , just like , oh , that feels pretty good , like , oh , it's a good massage , like I can just chill and I can relax , and that reduces that tone of that muscle .

And the research also shows that going really , really hard on a foam roller is probably adverse to what we want . Again , we just talked about muscle relaxation .

If you're pushing on the foam roller so hard that you're squinting and sweating and it's like , oh , my God , this is terrible , right , your body , oh my god , this is terrible , right , your body's probably not going to respond to that well .

So what the research studies did is they had people form really different intensities , kind of low , zero to one at a 10 discomfort , a middle three to four , and then a higher end , eight to nine .

They found that people were in that kind of middle sweet spot , did just as well as the people who were rolling really , really light and actually did a little bit better than people that were rolling really , really hard . So the stretching comes from a couple big reviews , which is where they look at all these big research studies .

And what they found is that they did 26 studies and they did over a huge statistical analysis of like what , how many days per week , how , what , how long do you need to stretch and how much per muscle group should you stretch and what type of stretching should you do if you want to make a range of motion increases . And we'll highlight the study study .

But essentially they said that about five minutes of stretching per week , so about two sets of 30 seconds I've done every day , five days per week , or maybe a six day , not seven , didn't be seven , wasn't that much more effective .

But doing that every single day per muscle group seemed to be the most ideal to help increase range of motion when it was specific to the muscle groups . And then , from my point of view , this is not in the research , but I think the really important things are proper alignment and technique .

And then trying to do these things in a circuit , like we'll talk about doing screening and then soft tissue work and then control work and then kind of strength work in a row around in a circuit , is probably going to be better for you than just doing one epic stretching session long-term .

Okay . So here's an interesting example from an athlete I work with . She was a college gymnast who came home for the summer and she was having a lot of hip pain on her right side here and she was having a lot of lower back pain . And so when I had her do her splits like look at this , this is a pretty good split right .

She's a sophomore in college now and she has good left split . Her right split is almost all the way down , so clearly she has a stiffness in her hip flexor right . She's nowhere near flat to the ground , if not being a little bit more . And then this other test called a Faber test is called . It's just there to look at inner thigh flexibility .

And there's versions of this test where you see , okay , is it maybe more of the arch in your back ? And she wasn't that case , right ? Even with those other tests , she definitely had inner thigh soft tissue problems and her leg can't drop down . So she doesn't have hip flexor flexibility and doesn't have inner thigh flexibility , but still has a full split .

Like , well , what's going on here , right ?

Well , you can see here she's cranking on her back and doing arch to try to get lower and what she's probably doing is she's pulling on those first two layers of the hip , right , she's probably pulling on her bones and she's pulling on her ligaments a little bit and those are stretching out extra to make up for the limited hip flexor mobility here .

So this is probably why she's having so much pain in her hip and her ligaments and probably that deep , deep joint structures are probably getting really , really beat up because they're trying to get overstretched to make up for the stiffness .

And this was the product of her maybe not understanding about proper hip flexor stretching and quad stretching and thigh stretching we'll talk about but also not doing the holistic program that did active flex and control work , you know , and strength work and eccentrics , kind of combining everything together . She was just doing over splits .

She was just holding over split for two minutes and , you know , it just led to return , limited return on investment and probably over time , not splits caused her injury , but over time , with competing in a pretty brutal competitive season in college , she started to have back and hip pain . Okay , so takeaways here focus on the muscles , not the ligaments .

And again , consistency is more important than intensity . Don't go crazy with over split stretching . Use this step-by-step process and what the science suggests as the really kind of the best way to go about this . Okay , so here's some just examples here . So form rolling of the back of the hamstring .

Again , we're doing 10 passes , or about 30 seconds at a three to four out of 10 discomfort level . So we're going up and down in the back , going up and down on the inner thigh and once athletes know how to do this , it really only takes like five minutes . It's not as elaborate as you think and they just go 30 seconds on every muscle group .

So we have all the athletes . Come in right before practice and just knock this out in five , 10 minutes , or maybe we do this on a light recovery day . But there's some quad work there and I'm going to pause this here because this one's really , really important .

You see , what happened here is I don't want to knock on any choreography I think that you know extended lunge positions in that deep lunge position is really valuable for aesthetics and things like that . But if our goal is to stretch the hip flexor and the quad right , those muscles start at the pelvis and also the hip flexor starts up at the spine .

So the more I arch my back and the more I tip my pelvis forward , the more I'm slacking those muscles . I'm slacking my hip flexor and I'm slacking my quad because those muscles anatomically start from here and here .

So what I have to do in order to get a really specific muscular stretch to these areas and not have the ligaments be over irritated or have the back cheat a little bit , like we saw in that college gymnast , is I'm going to need to hollow myself in , flex my spine into a rounded position , really engage my glue on this side and I'm going to push down on my

front thigh to activate my core a little bit , and you'll see her do that in a quad and a hip flexor stretch .

And what that does is when you set yourself up in a proper alignment and then you really keep a focus on , okay , brace my core , squeeze my glute and then move forward , right , what you have is that really , really mobile athletes who maybe haven't been stretching the soft tissue , they've been cheating with their ligaments , their back they start to feel a huge

stretch in their thigh . And this athlete actually has full over splits on all three sides right , and all she feels a stretch with is right there . So she moves like an inch and she feels a huge hip flexor stretch . And same thing with this one she hollows and leans forward .

She just tilts her pelvis a little bit with her knee fully bent and in a hollow and squeezing her glute and pushing down . She moves maybe two inches forward and she feels a huge thigh stretch right here . That's what we're talking about with specific muscle-based bias .

And , yeah , we're going to stretch the ligaments a little bit and we'll stretch from the back a teeny bit , because you have to in gymnastics . But if our goal is to make muscles more mobile , this is probably a better approach than just that super aggressive lunge and the way we do it is both right .

When we warm up and when we do soft tissue work or we do flexibility circuits , we focus on just this aspect of a hollow . And then , when we do dance and choreography and beam stuff , we , you know , allow the kids to do a deeper lunge and arch and show off the aesthetics . You can see her in a quad here and we'll see an inner thigh .

It's the same version . She puts her foot all the way out to the side lines up , she hollows down as much as she can and then she rocks backwards so she feels an inner thigh stretch . And these are really , really good for leg lowers or for hamstrings .

So what we're doing here is we're having the athlete lay on the edge of a block , flexing her core and pushing down . She's holding her leg and she's allowing her leg to drop down as far as she can until she feels a stretch in the hamstring here . And the reason we like this is because it keeps the core engaged right .

But it also works specific to gymnastics in a larger range of motion , versus just holding a static stretch where maybe they arch their back or they or sorry , they round their back or they slump over , they don't get a good hamstring stretch , they just get more of a back rounding .

So this is probably a little bit more specific and also , you can use your leg muscles to help you out rather than just passively stretching . Okay , so , just some ideas to start with . Okay , so this is that big study I talked about . It came out in 2018 .

And essentially you can see here on the side I pulled this picture from it Is that it looked at 26 studies .

They looked at static stretching , active stretching , passive stretching , ballistic stretching and PNF stretching right , and what they found is that , honestly , all of them were okay , right , ballistic stretching seemed to be not great out of all of them , but PNF static .

So PNF active and passive were all really really high and static seemed to be the most effective with that 30 second bout . But the key here again , consistency over intensity , right , all these things kind of work . If they're based on an assessment , right , and they're based on proper movement patterns and proper technique , they're probably all going to work right .

So they found five minutes per week right . So that two times 30 seconds per day , five days per week , right , equals five minutes per week . That was the best parameters of static stretching and others to help increase range of motion , right . So with assessment first , then you've got to be consistent in what you do .

That's going to be so important If you know what muscles groups are limited from an assessment , medical provider or elsewhere . You consistently do stretching and soft tissue work every single day and then you kind of do it in a circuit that's going to be specific to gymnastics . That's going to probably lead to your best long-term progress .

And this study just happened to come out two or three months ago , so I put it in , reviewed it and kind of picked it apart , then reviewed it and kind of picked it apart and then looked into some really good stuff we can take away here .

But again , it's one fifth of the puzzle after screening and then , along with some of the other stuff we'll talk about in the lecture . But people always ask me about what type of stretching , how long , what should I do ? Why does it work ?

Again , we think that we're just relaxing those muscles and especially with static stretching or other stretching , what we're doing is probably teaching the athlete and the perception of their stretch to be more tolerable .

So we're maybe not increasing the length of those muscle fibers themselves , but we'll just teach those athletes to tolerate the stretch and relax into their stretch , and that's probably going to be probably excuse me the best way to go about this . Okay , so , moving on , after we do some screening and some stretching work , what's the next step in our progress ?

Right now , we're going to do some strength work . So there's two different areas of strength work that are really , really important . So one is going to be building off what we just talked about . So eccentrics , the , the lengthening contraction .

So picture if you kind of jump up to a pull-up and slowly lower down , that's an eccentric contraction where your body has to lengthen and contract at the same time . Right , sliders on the floor with your foot on a furniture slider and sliding out slowly forward is an eccentric contraction of your hamstring

, right . So eccentrics are actually something that is shown to increase muscle length in research , right ? So what happens is that you have that , either that relaxation from soft tissue care , or maybe you have some of that learning to tolerate the stretch .

When you stretch every single day and get a little bit pushed uh , you know , push yourself a little bit more each week , right ?

And then eccentrics do actually make the muscle fibers longer , and that's kind of cool to think about is that , uh , there's a way maybe to actually increase how much length an athlete has If you add a little bit of load in a controlled manner and focus on that slow lower and all all those studies that are down below are done in a lot of weightlifting and

some other things like that . But I think there's a really good theoretical transfer to gymnastics in terms of some of the things we see every day again with sliders or with some other contractions that we do in active flex drills . So that's going to be one that we'll talk about .

And two is that balance is super , super important in your strength program If you want to keep your flexibility right .

So doing a lot of strength work to your chest and to your lats from like rope climbs and pushups like that stuff's okay and I don't want to give off the notion that we shouldn't be doing that , but it has to be in proper balance and in proper volume compared to how much upper back strengthening we're doing , or maybe how much in the lower body we're doing a

lot of hip , flexor and quad and your thigh work . How much direct glute training are we doing in the back ? How much core training on the sides are we doing ? How much side hip training are we doing to work on other muscles that are smaller and maybe not as frequently trained ? So we have to make sure that we have both of those things together .

Is the eccentrics , the balance strength program , and also not feeding the fire , which just refers to slightly reducing the volume of , maybe , movements or exercises in a program that are contributing to the flexibility issue in the first place ?

Okay , so for eccentrics , what we're going to probably do is two to three sets of five repetitions with a five second lower , and this can go up to 10 repetitions for more necessary times . Right , but three things you can do is just split sliders right . You can do single leg deadlifts focusing on that slow lower contraction , and you can also do split squats .

You can do things that just focus on the back leg as well . Right , for the strength balance , the way that we approach this and what I program for a lot of gymnasts who come to Champion is giving them a home program of two to three sets of 10 to 12 repetitions on a bunch of different exercises for their hips , their glutes and their hamstrings .

It's not that they're not doing box jumps and sprints and sled pushes and other groin or inner thigh work things for beam , but uh , what they're trying to do is balance themselves out right . And the male athletes that come , it's almost the same thing . We add a little bit more for their shoulders . Obviously that's their bigger problem .

But you know , a lot of athletes struggle with stalders or jams or pommel flares or dip cuts or things like that , and we give them two times a week accessory work to their hips and to their core . That helps fill in some things . Maybe they're missing because they're so strong in their other muscles of their thigh .

So this applies equally for men's , for women's and for a lot of other disciplines in gymnastics that have , again , any type of straddle , any type of pike . I know there's a few athletes in trampoline who have to get into a very deep pike to do things like that and sometimes their hamstrings are limited .

Some single leg deadlifts or some split sliders might be a fantastic way to enhance their mobility , to get into a deeper tuck or to a more efficient flip . Okay , so balance work here .

So just doing some direct hip training , kind of laying on our back she's driving to the ceiling and squeezing her hip at the top those are really , really good ways to try to focus on that last little bit of end range hip motion .

And the next one you'll see is a single , is a double leg kettlebell deadlift , so just working on the posterior chain , driving the hips back right . And you do have to have a little bit of a learning curve here .

It probably took all of our athletes a good , probably two months to really understand proper hip hinging mechanics and how do I keep my core tight to prevent my back from getting sore and how do I drive myself down to the floor right Without arching too too much .

And this can be taught from a good strength conditioning professional , from a medical provider who understands this , and probably , honestly , a couple weeks . Like you can start low , you can load it up and we'll have a couple more webinars that are specific to teaching these movements .

But this is one of the best hamstring exercises that you can possibly do and especially transfers over very well to the landing mechanics . Okay , so it's drinking the hamstrings here . Here you'll see some side core work which we've shown in some other lectures up and down , trying to work the side of the hips . Okay , clam shells as well .

You know , these are just kind of things we add in a few times a week because they're typically overlooked . But those muscles , specifically the hip rotators , the glutes on the side right that , the hamstring and the direct glute training itself , those are the muscles you need to get those last end ranges of split flexibility , staller , inbar .

Those muscles rotate your hip and kind of put your hip in the right position to do fast , rapid movements that you see in gymnastics all the time , whether it's bars or jumps or leaps , or again , dip cuts for men's or pipe compression , things like that .

Those muscles have to work just as hard to help balance out the stiffness of maybe some other muscles that we've worked on all the time . These are some of the eccentrics here . So you can see she's slow lowering down for a five second count , right . And what you can do here is there's two options .

You'll see she goes back up by accident , right , but she can either put her foot on the floor and stand back up or she can just kind of take her foot around from the block and just kind of do only the down part , if that makes sense , right . So if you're on a really low block you can just put your hands down and not use weights .

But probably the best method is going to be slowly lowering down , taking your foot off the block and then standing up with two legs , and she doesn't do it in a split squat but she does do it in a deadlift and you'll see it there .

So , again , slow lower , trying to go eccentric contraction for the back leg and then a slow lower of a hamstring and you see there she puts her foot down and she stands back up .

Because , again , this is for a flexibility goal , right , we're trying to just focus on the flexibility of the hamstring or the flexibility of the quad and the hip flexor , where she was really , really hollow , and just stretching out this muscle . Here In a strength program we might be doing like full deadlifts or something like that .

This muscle here In a strength program we might be doing like full deadlifts or something like that . But this is just specifically working on flexibility and this would be in a flexibility circuit we'll show . So these are kind of more commonly known of sliders right , like front foot up , slowly slide up right and you can see the hands are up on the mat .

For a very important reason . Number one is safety right . These things are very demanding and very taxing on hips and it can be very , very hard to do them well . So I tell the girls square yourself up , be very , very belly , button forward , tight core , tight glutes , slowly lower down and use your hands to push back up right .

The second reason is almost in line with that alignment thing is I only want them to go as low as they can , with proper positioning , right . If they get all the advance of flaring their hip out , turning their hips , skewing back leg , but that's not going to be specific to the muscles that we want to target .

It's going to probably be a little bit more low back and it might be starting to stretch out some of the hip ligaments that are not designed for that . At least this is the goal we're trying to work on . So trying to do some sliders to the front and you'll also see this done to the side . You'll see these .

They do a couple on each side , usually five , and this is kind of the outside direction . So she slowly slides down sideways into a straddle split and then she uses her hands to help pull her back up right , just focusing on that slow lower contraction . Okay , and again these . Why are we doing these ?

These are what's shown in research to actually help with some of the flexibility and the length of the muscle . Okay , so don't feed the fire is something I always talk about with people , just because it's an error that I made as a younger coach that was huge , limiting it to like long-term flexibility gains .

Or if you have somebody who has really stiff hip flexors and really stiff quads , right , maybe the problem is that they're doing so many leg lifts and so many L-holds and so many L-rope climbs that it's causing them to not make progress in their splits and their flexibility right .

So it's not that we don't want to do them , it's that maybe for that athlete we can modify that and we can do a different exercise to complement half of their work so they can still get their core strong and still get their arm strong right , but in a different way .

So one of the reasons we like to do this , or one of the ways we like to do this , is just reverse slider crawls right . You , you can see in this position her hips are open or flat , she's squeezing her glutes , but she's still working on core and she's still working on getting her shoulders strong .

This might be a better exercise for those athletes with really , really stiff shoulders over just doing more leg lifts and more rope climbs . Maybe you can knock the volume down of these and supplement as soon as their shoulders get more mobile . In a couple of weeks you can add these back in and focus on a nice slow lower .

The other way we see this is in rope climbs A lot of kids doing L-hold rope climbs , doing leg lifts they may also have again . I know you're trying to work core and legs . It's really important for bars , but if you get so stiff in your hip flexors that you can't open your hips for a full split or for a sprint , that's going to be a big problem .

So what you might be able to do is still work on your upper body with horizontal rows , but again , this is , the hips are flat , the hips are open , right . We're not going to contribute to hip flexor or quad stiffness . This is kind of like that addition by subtraction concept .

For a few weeks you can still do plenty of exercises to get strong , but you're not going to contribute to the issue . And then maybe over three or four weeks you can add back in some of these exercises that are more , you know , kind of the staple gymnastics exercises we need . Okay . So moving on the third step now . So , sorry , four steps .

We have screening , we've done some soft tissue work , we've done strength work and now we're going to finally move on to control , and this is kind of active flexibility .

It's what a lot of people understand are really really good and really really important drills and you'll see a ton of drills in here that I like but things I've gotten from people that I think are really really valuable .

And the reason we're doing this is because just doing passive flexibility on the floor is not going to automatically get you a big split , a big , uh , you know , split , jump on the beam , uh , an in bar stall or the ability to step in for a toe shoot or do a jam or things like that .

So just because you have it on the floor we talked about it doesn't automatically mean you're going to have it on the actual equipment , right . So strength by itself is not going to help you get there .

You need something to close that gap between the strength part of just being on the floor or maybe having individual muscle strength , that actually a gymnastic specific pattern . The way that I really like to do this is through active flexibility drills , right , but also just through basics and this is something that Nick Ruddick talks about a lot .

It's just , you know , you can never go wrong teaching proper basics right , giving them perfect basics and shapes and flat lines and dimensions of you know tapping is going to be always endlessly good to have return on investment , right ? I think that from a gymnastics technical point of view , we understand that .

But from a flexibility point of view , the best way to start to incorporate these things to actually show up in gymnastics is not to start with a really fancy drill or really fast technical drill . It's to start with . Can you lay on your back flat and get your arms over your head ?

Can you just swing on a bar and get your you know , your shoulders to open up properly right ? Doing a 10 minute basic circuit , maybe a couple of times per week , especially in line with a flexibility circuit that we'll talk about , those are probably going to be the best ways to make these things show up long-term .

Okay so , active flexibility drills we'll see a couple of here . So this is more for straddling . But this is called a reptile slide . So she's just kind of on her side , her hands are under her head to make sure she's nice and flat right . She's pulling her knee up to her elbow right Up and down , and you'll see some progressions of this .

So next is a standing version , so up and over a beam and I like doing these on crank beams because of how you can adjust the height based on the athlete you . You can also do these sideways . So the hands are on the head here just to allow cheating .

I don't want her to swing her hips or push down on the beam with her hand to hike her leg up higher . I really just want to see her only use her hip muscle and try to keep good proper core engagement and alignment here Up and over the wall . And the next progression you'll see are kind of some of my favorite for a group Doing these pyramid walks .

I think a lot of people have seen this drill uh , popularized on either my youtube channel or some other things , and lectures are kind of spreading around social media , which is awesome . But if you don't understand why we're doing it and how we got here with the four other steps , it's probably not going to be very helpful .

So what you do is you put three blocks in line with a nice ascending height and you slowly walk your way down until you get to the very end where you're high . And the reason I like this drill so much is one it's easy to set up . You just put three different height mats right . It's easy to scale to the athletes right .

Heather in this picture is not the tallest athlete , so she has a lot more work on these top ones here , but if you have an athlete who's really really tall , you can put another block at the end . That's higher If you have some really really down and get harder and harder and harder , versus having to set up you know 45 different drills for different athletes .

So they do this sideways and they also do this forwards . Again , her hands are behind her to kind of help her not lean too much , okay , so this is the next progression I really really like of head flexibility drills .

So in this position she's curled up in a ball like this , right , and the reason we do this is because when you're curled up in a ball like this and your back is rounded , you can't arch right , and I see a lot of girls who do hands and knees kind of kicking , and I used to have a lot of girls do that and really all it did was it just made their

back sore , right , they kinked a lot from their lower back and they were arching up top here in their spine and they weren't actually using their hip muscles , right .

So by curling somebody up like this , well , this kind of looks like the last end range of a split leap , which is where a lot of people have problems with performance , but also with back pain and hip pain , right .

So , teaching someone to curl up in a ball like this and use their hip muscles to lift their leg up as high as they can , that's going to probably be more specific to gymnastics , so it doesn't look nearly as impressive , but it's extremely hard , and you can do these to the side as well .

If someone's struggling with this and Taylor has long legs , she's showing this to be way too easy , or it's much , much harder than it looks . You can bend the leg to start to make this a shorter length of a lever arm , they call it . Or you could put a band holding from here and going around and kind of assisting their leg up when they go backwards .

The band would come down to here and help pull them up . There's a lot of different variations . You can scale to this to make it more appropriate to the younger athlete , to someone who's struggling , and you'll see all the progressions here . Next right .

So doing some leg drivers , just trying to get our active flex to kind of transfer over more of a kicking pattern for again hamstring leg lowers or like the opposite of that , sideways kicks , and again these are very challenging . It's just so . You have a lot of scalable athletes , from the younger athletes all the way up to the higher level athletes .

Needle walk-ins are also very , very good . They just slowly keep going more and more and they hold the last end range . One Stall bars if you have stall bars , are a really good way to progress . These Okay , and you'll see that a lot of these just progress naturally based on the athlete's ability .

So if you have older athletes you might get to some of these . If you have younger athletes , you're probably just going to be doing some of the more simple drills that they can do well and not kind of cheat with .

But all these active flex drills are going to be again the fourth part of that circuit that we're going to talk about at the end , trying to transfer over the screening . We know what's going on . We did some soft tissue care . We did some specific stretching . We've done some eccentrics , we're filling in that strength balance .

This is how we can kind of compliment moving down the pathway of actually making a show up in skills . Okay , and I'm going to definitely I tried to make it green so I could highlight that these are not my drills , no-transcript .

So here you'll see again those five dimensions of a flat line that Nick has people do , which is laying flat on your back , laying flat on your stomach , standing with your arms over your head , doing a handstand and then hang from a bar .

Can you do those five positions with flat , open hips , right Open shoulders , obviously , but also can you use your new hip flexibility just to be flat in a line . And you'll see that there's sometimes when she struggles a little bit and her knees pop up because she's still working on this , but can you just get overhead right .

We do a lot of basics with uppers and lowers to try to build in the shoulder flexibility but also the lower body kind of lower ab strength to help our hips work a little harder . So they do 10 uppers , 10 lowers , 10 togethers and they do the same thing on their stomach A 10 second hold . Sorry as well , I think I got this off flow gymnastics somewhere .

But then upper body as well , okay , trying to work in just the upper components . She should have her head a little bit more tucked in , but that's okay . Again , arching , trying to work on the hip flexor opening up , trying to work on it for gymnastic-specific tapping maybe . Okay , doing a little bit together . This is a hard one for her .

Okay , doing some rolling drills . Can you keep your hips flat ? Can you engage your core and engage your glutes in just a flat shape where you learn how to control different positions of gravity pushing down on you Good , positions of gravity pushing down on you . I do a lot of wall shaping .

I think that wall shaping is a really low risk , kind of easy way to kind of learn the scooped position that's so important in many drills . So what you'll see happen is they're going to do 10 seconds in this position . They'll flip over and do 10 seconds with their hands in a back hamstring position . Then they'll flip over to their hands .

They'll do 10 seconds with their feet on the wall . 10 seconds with their hands on the wall , sorry , with their feet on the wall and their stomach up in an arch position .

And again , it just kind of incorporates global arching and global hollowing as a specific shape first , and then it moves on to actual shape changing and tapping , again , just trying to find ways that are , you know know , not specific high level hip drills like kicking or dip cuts and things like that . They're specific to just shape changing .

So hollow art , shape changing , hanging from a bar , you can do it on the ground , on our back and on our stomach , and then , lastly , we can do it in a handstand with a spot trying to work on turning over for capping or for back handsprings and vaulting and things like that .

Again , for a lot , a lot of guys too that maybe work in moyes or tapels and stuff like that , I kind of think that those are all probably really applicable for their hip and shoulder mobility before you move on to high-level drills , all right .

So lastly , moving on here we're almost finished is if you get all the best flexibility drills , the best active flex drills , the medical providers screen them and you do everything right , but then you finally get to the end of it and you don't actually work on technique and gymnastics specific skills .

Unfortunately , that's going to fall apart . It's not going to last too long and it's not going to really show up in the things that you want , you're going to feel really frustrated . The athlete's going to be curious about why it's not actually working out , and the biggest reason is because it's not specific .

If you had to , you know , learn how to throw a baseball . It doesn't really work to get your arm nice and loose until you actually learn how to throw .

Same thing goes for gymnastics , right , if you did all the best flexi good in the world , but you don't actually learn where your , where your hips , have to go in a split jump , or learn how to how to get your dip cut drive , or how to get a good stall , their snap at the bottom , how to scoop and drop to the bottom and bounce the bar like it's not

going to go . Well , skill you're trying to improve , whether that's , you know , jumps , leaps again , dip cuts , pommels , whatever . It is Right .

And that would be probably a weekend lecture , which is what a lot of people already have , but it would be an entire lecture in itself to go through the specific drills that are good for , you know , hip or shoulder flexibility , right , this clear hip drill is specific to a toe shoot .

You're specific to arm opening and flat hips opening up out of a out of a toe shoot , right . So that might be good for her , but it might not work for another athlete who has a huge problem with leaps or with jumps or with with in bars that are different types , like stall there .

So you have to make sure that whatever you're working on , maybe in your circuit , you say , okay , that last step is , I want you to do one drill that's specific to the skill that you're struggling with , and and you can add that all together and that will be kind of the best way to make it tailored to the athlete .

So what are we really doing in real life ? I know I've kept alluding to this circuit at the end , but , like , what do we actually do when we have 20 minutes at the gym and we have 10 athletes in front of us and we're going to go okay , guys , we're going to change our flexibility programs a little bit , we're going to try helpful , right ?

So what you need to do first is you need to take a big step back and look at the whole lecture and say , okay , what two drills really work for me , right ? I don't have sliders . I don't have , you know , beam space , because there's a recreational class there . I don't have the coaching staff to watch . You know , 20 kids at the same time .

It's just me with my 10 athletes . So pick two things that work with right . Pick two or three things in each of these categories . So the screening everybody can probably do if they just have a line right or somewhere to look at . You don't need the wall space if it's not essential . Right , maybe you have some lacrosse balls that the athlete can bring in .

Maybe you have some foam rollers . Maybe you have a stick , some sort of soft tissue specific stretching , like okay , a lot of my kids have inner thigh flexibility issues . Their straddles aren't great . Let's do a specific soft tissue to that . And then let's work on the inner thigh a little bit with that targeted stretching .

Let's maybe do a few of those direct hip training or clamshell exercises or weighted hip lifts . Let's do maybe a few of those beam drills that I like because I have a low beam available . Or maybe I can stack up the pyramids and let's do a few shape changing drills and a few jumping and leaping drills on tumble track or rod strip after .

So what I would do is I would screen , do the split , see how it feels on the line , do maybe 30 to 60 seconds of soft tissue and then 30 to 60 seconds of a specific two or three stretches . Then I would do specific strength work for the opposite side , so the clamshells , the side planks , whatever it is .

We do a few active flex drills , we do a technical circuit and then we'd start back over , right ? So if you it takes time to learn and teach these athletes the concepts , don't get me wrong . I'm not going to say that this is going to happen fast . But if you take maybe a half hour and say , hey , we're going to learn some new stuff .

I watched a webinar that was really cool and they had some good ideas .

We're going to teach you how to do these things well , we're going to monitor you and watch you do it , not just go you know , kind of like let you go on your own and see how it works , but we're going to sit here and we're going to walk you through it , but your job is to be responsible for doing it correctly .

And then what happens is , once they learn the exercises and learn the circuits maybe have three or four circuits that you like to for the upper body , two for the lower body the athletes can knock this out in like five or 10 minutes , right ?

So what we'll do is we'll have , uh , two times a week we'll do 15 minutes of a circuit for the upper body , 15 minutes of a circuit for the lower body , and we'll do that maybe once or twice per week and that's how we've seen athletes make the most progress without , you know , getting really cranky hips or cranky shoulders .

Uh , because we're consistently doing those flexibility circuits twice a week , along with our normal daily stretching in the morning , sorry , in the beginning of practice , and then also , you know , maybe some soft tissue work early before practice .

That's been what I've found to be the most significant progress , because it really hits stiff shoulders , it really hits stiff hips . So kind of take that I call these performance complexes taking the best of what the research offers , medical providers offer , coaches offer , and also some of the more classic gymnastics-based stretching and stuff like that .

Combine that in a circuit and use everything available to you . And so here's an example of this . This is five ago , pre buzzed head , with Dave . So you'll see a nice luscious lock of hair which he's doing some inner thigh stretching , such from an entire foam rolling , and she does some quad foam rolling . She's an inner thigh .

Again , she was a little cross bond her hip a little bit before . So both of these done for about 20 to 30 seconds and she has her hamstrings as well .

Cassie was just really struggling with her splits you could see in that first picture Just because she had really really long legs and she was growing really fast and she went on to become a very successful track athlete , which is phenomenal . But just after the soft tissue work and stretching we're starting to get a little lower .

The only reason I held her leg on the leg lower is because the camera was facing sideways and I wanted people to be able to see it . So normally she would just lay on the edge of the block by herself and do it . But she has 10 leg lowers on each side and then you'll see her come back and she's actually starting to get a little more progress Now .

Again , the muscular soft tissue is getting better . Okay , we're doing some leg drivers here , trying to transfer . Again , her biggest issues were inner thigh and were hamstring , so we're trying to get it to transfer over to split leaps and to jumps and to sprinting , which she was really , really struggling with .

Doing just some basic kicks , some needle kicks will be the opposite of that . You can see , I went from leg lowers to the leg drivers , to the needle kicks , because those are all really hamstring specific and now we're starting to see a lot of progress .

Right , she's about four inches lower than she was at the start and you know there's no way that that's going to show up , you know , permanently . That was three hours later , but I'm not going to tell you that . That was like the golden fix . It worked one day and you know I have all the secrets actually show up long term .

So , again , this is just like the start of it , but consistency and making sure it's based on assessment is going to be kind of your best point here .

Okay , so what do we do with the athletes who just really really struggle right , just really have stiff hips , who just , unfortunately , despite all their stretching , despite all the screening , just cannot seem to get a better split and whether that's they don't have enough time in the gym or whether it's just again , they just just doesn't really work for them .

They're naturally mobile . Again , my , I'm a whopping five , six . I'm probably not going to play in the NBA anytime soon . It's my height just disadvantaged me genetically

, right . There's definitely athletes who , unfortunately , I just don't have the greatest hip mobility , right , but they love gymnastics , they want to do it and it's their thing , and they're a good kid and they work super hard . They should be in the gym just as much as anybody else , right ? So what do you do with these athletes ? Right ?

Number one be a good person . Right ? Just kind of take a step back and be like okay , I understand that this is maybe not the easiest thing for you , but we're going to work on it . Right , we have some tools and just keep're being a good person here , and if you do that , you're on board , you can stay and you can hang out , no matter what .

Right , but you have to have a really good , honest conversation with people and saying , hey , uh , listen , gymnastics is really hard . It has a lot of things that you have to do really , really well at .

Uh , this might just be your thing , you know , maybe you're just a naturally more powerful athlete and you have a lot more , you know leg , but that comes at , maybe , the sacrifice of being really , really mobile , and I think that you saw in the video Taylor , who's that blonde ? She's one of the most mobile athletes I've ever seen in my life right .

However , she couldn't pull up her way or do a push-up to save her life when she first came to the gym . So she had to work five times as hard as anybody else on all of the strengths . So every time we did leg strength or we did active flexibility drills , it was super hard for her because of how mobile she was and how long her legs were .

The opposite side of that is athletes who are really really stiff . They maybe do really really well in strength . It's not that hard for them . They have really good power and whatever , but it's just that their flexibility is not that great . Everybody has something they have to really really focus on .

Trying to involve a medical provider is probably the best thing you can ever do , because those medical providers have , again , in-depth knowledge of the hip and they're going to really narrow in on it instead of being like , okay , just try these five things in a circuit . They can say , no , it's these two things that are really , really important .

This area here , this area here . Let's focus on just those and make a customized circuit and that might be better long-term for you , always trying to modify their skill profile right .

So we've had a couple of athletes who have we've had an issue with their hip flexibility and every time we try to work these advanced leaps or we try to work new skills that are very hip intensive , they just get a cranky you know hip joint and they get a cranky little back .

It's like , okay , well , let's start looking at the code and seeing what other skills you can work on in optionals . I know that's not the reality with all compulsories , but you can definitely try to modify some of their jumps . Think about if you take away maybe one switch leap on the floor and you add a different jump to get the fulfillment of their element .

Or maybe you work on a toe shoot or a free hip instead of a staller because they're not that mobile in the pancake position , you might have saved them thousands and thousands of repetitions of skills that are going to be really , really painful on their hip joints . So trying to take a step back and make okay , how else can we work on this ?

And I think that in the shoulder lecture we talked about you know back handspring skills versus , you know soup skills or things like that , and on beam and on floor or maybe on men's parallel bar , you know doing some other skills that can get PCD value without making it really aggressive on their hips might be the best choice for them .

That's just the reality of working in such a hard sport like gymnastics , and these are examples of those specific medical things that I made . So obviously I'm lucky to be a medical provider , so I screen the athletes and do medical assessments . But coaches can screen and coaches can do all that stuff just fine . They can figure out what's going on .

But you can also work with a medical provider and get a specific program that they do , and so I made these all for the athletes . There was this is an athlete on this side who was having a lot of trouble with her hip flexibility and maybe some shoulder stuff , and this athlete was having a lot of problem with calf flexibility as well .

So we screened them out and said , okay , these this list . When you come to practice , if you can get here 10 minutes early , run this list one time , right , and if not , when we do flexibility circuits , this is your list .

You're going to do this list because this is super specific to what you need help with , right , and I've even had athletes who they can't get here after school on time .

They they just one isn't enough during the week and say , all right , well , you know , maybe you can knock this out on Saturday in the morning , just real quick If you have time to take 10 minutes and I know that's hard and it's unrealistic , but athletes who really struggled , they just need to spend a little extra time on it .

And again , open communication and a good discussion about why it's so important for your health and keep you safe and keep you progressing in skills . Sometimes athletes buy in , they're willing to do it , hey . So here's just two slides of a ton of research articles that really opened my eyes to why I changed stretching .

I know a lot of stuff we've talked about here is really not what traditional gymnastics talks about . And again , I was in that same boat of just doing passive stretching and over splits . And we know we still do some static stretching after , you know , in our warmup and we still do stuff .

It's not that we don't do that , but we've just changed , completely overhauled the way we approach flexibility training based on what articles and research were coming out . So these six articles were extremely valuable to me to kind of open my eyes , to pick . Okay , maybe there's something else I need to think about .

And so if you're someone who's on the nerdier side or you're trying to find , you know , almost like a defense argument for why people are like , no , we can't change you know , we can't do anything differently , I would point them in the direction of these articles and be like , okay , well , take a peek at some of these and you know , really understand the

material and think about what they're saying happens in these big , big research studies , and these scientific facts are are very , very high level across many , many studies . It's not just , like you know , a randomized . You know we picked five people off the street and tested their flexibility and tried to see if they got better . These are legit .

These are really really good , well-done studies . So these are six really good ones . And then these are also really good ones as well , more so about you know why foam rolling works and what happens , like the 26 reviews and systematic review about how much stretching works . So that's

a really good one to do . If you're someone asking you know , why don't we hold for two minutes anymore ? Or like , what are we doing ? Just because , again , the pressure on the ligaments might be a little bit higher after 60 seconds . So just really good tools for you guys to use and have .

Okay , these are the more specific references if you want to look them up online . So we have quite a bit in here that you can do . I'll put these in the notes section as well , and thank you guys so much .

I mean , if you're here and you're listening and you want to get new ideas , I mean that's just unbelievably valuable to the athletes that you work with . So if you have questions , which I'm sure many people will , that's totally fine .

I'd love to have a discussion about this on the Facebook channel , so head on over there and post your questions if you're confused about it .