Putting Your Legs Where Your Head Is . . . Not: The Flexibility Self-Test

Performing a stretch that involves more than one muscle group makes it difficult to determine which muscle is tight or which ones cause limited range of motion. For example, you may have heard of the “sit and reach” test — where you sit on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, and you bend forward while someone measures with a ruler how far you can reach toward your toes (you may have done this test in high school; it’s a popular test on Fitness Day).

Even though this test is common for flexibility, I’m not a big fan of it because it gives you very little information — it tells you if your muscles are tight or not, but it doesn’t tell you which muscles; is it your lower back, your hamstrings, or your calves that are tight? Who knows?

So my test is different. My stretch test isolates individual muscles to give you the most useful information possible to design your own customized stretching program. At first, the following sections of stretches may seem like a lot, but unfortunately there’s no such thing as just a few moves to determine flexibility.

After you completed the self-test, you know exactly what muscles in your body need the most attention. At that point, you can head to the chapter in this book that contains specific stretches for the areas you want to work and then choose the exercise(s) that feels most comfortable for your body.

Also, you may notice that most of the stretches test both the right and left sides of your body. It’s not uncommon to have one side more flexible than the other, which creates an imbalance, but it’s important to try to get both sides of your body equal in flexibility for symmetry, balance, and injury prevention, and this test helps you achieve that goal.

Before you start, I want to give you a few pointers:

• You get better results if you warm up before you attempt these tests. I recommend doing the same warm-up routine every time you do this stretch test — that way you get more consistent and accurate results.
• When you retest to check your progress, make sure that you always test in similar situations: time of day, amount of warm-up, workout schedule, and so on. As you perform the stretch, imagine a large clock around you with the center of the clock pinned to the axis of the stretch. For instance, when standing up and twisting, the clock would be on the ground, directly beneath the centerline of your body — the axis around which you are stretching. Midnight would be looking straight ahead. If you’re sitting on the ground leaning forward, the clock would be centered on your hip, the axis of your stretch. Midnight would be when you’re sitting up straight.
• Because this is only an assessment, not an attempt to increase your range of motion, don’t hold the stretches for an extended period of time. Just get into the correct position, inhale deeply and as you exhale make a note of your position as it corresponds to the hands on a clock.

Let the testing begin!