Andrew Huberman

but it does appear that that frequency about the week, getting those repeated sessions, even if they are short for an individual muscle group, turns out to be important.

They're going to offset the age-related losses in flexibility for sure, if one is dedicated about these practices.

Some of you may be familiar with the so-called Anderson method.

It's been around for a long time.

Anderson has an interesting idea and principle, which is thread through a lot of his teachings that I think are very much in keeping with the study that I'm about to describe next, where...

He emphasizes to, yes, to stretch to the end of the range of motion, but not to focus so much on where that range of motion happens to be that day.

So for instance, not thinking, oh, I can always touch my toes, for instance, and therefore that's the starting place for my flexibility training today, but rather take the entirety of your system into account each day and understand that, okay, provided you're warmed up appropriately,

that you're now going to stretch your hamstrings, for instance, and you're going to reach down for your toes, but that your range of motion might be adjusted that day by way of tension and stress or by way of ambient temperature in the room.

And to basically define the end range of motion as...

the place where you can feel the stretch in the relevant muscle groups.

So what does this mean?

This means feel the muscles as you stretch them.

Don't just go through the motions.

And this means don't get so attached to being able to always achieve, for instance, a stretch of a given distance within a given session.

You might actually find that by just finding the place where you can't get much further and holding the static stretch there, that on the second and third set that you happen to be doing that day, that your range of motion will be increased considerably.

Now, along these lines, there's this even more nebulous variable, this even more kind of subjective thing of how much effort to put into it.

Should you push into the stretch?

Do you even want to bounce a tiny bit?

Would you want to reach into that end point and try and extend it within a given set and session?

And for that reason, I was excited to find this paper entitled A Comparison of Two Stretching Modalities on Lower Limb Range of Motion Measurements in Recreational Dancers.