Try These Flexibility Tests
In the last month of 2019, we’re going to do some exercises to measure progress and set goals. Whether you’ve been training hard this year or just starting out, taking a specific test now will help you gauge your current and future progress. Today we’ll start with flexibility.
However, let’s be clear about one thing: the point is to compare yourself to yourself, not to live up to some arbitrary standard. (We talked about strength standards yesterday , remember?) If you’ve done these stretches before, you can compare them to what you’ve done before. Our tests later this month will cover other areas of fitness such as strength and endurance.
But an even more important reason to test is as a gift to yourself in the future. If you work on your flexibility in the coming year, you can do another test in December (or do them monthly, depending on what is helping your boat) and see how you have improved.
So let’s try this. Before you start, remember that warmed up muscles stretch more than if you just tried cold stretching, so consider doing this at the end of your workout. Write it down – whether you warmed up or not and how – so you can do the same on your next test.
Sit and stretch, or toe while standing
If you’ve ever taken a fitness assessment, such as with a personal trainer, you may have already taken the sit-and-stretch test. You sit on the floor with your feet in front of you, then touch your toes, and the box at your feet measures how far forward you can reach.
You can recreate this at home by placing your feet on a step, ledge, or curb in front of you. Pull a piece of tape forward, glue it to the step if you can, and then measure.
Standing touch may be less standard, but it measures hamstring flexibility in a similar way. Just stand up and video yourself (or have a friend take a photo) as you try to touch your toes. Maybe you can only reach your shins; maybe you can get up to your toes; maybe you can put your palms on the floor. The video will also show you whether you succeeded in the round back movement or flat back (which is more difficult). There are no judgments here, we just measure and move on.
Other ways to measure flexibility
The aforementioned stretches really just measure how flexible your posterior chain muscles, mainly the hamstrings, are. There is also an element of technique: you can get better at these particular stretches if you practice without ever increasing your flexibility too much. But these are popular ways to measure flexibility because they are simple and, in the case of the sit-and-reach test, lend themselves well to specific numerical measurements.
But maybe you don’t give a damn about your hamstrings. If you have another area of ​​flexibility that interests you, document that too. Some ideas:
- Can you touch your hands behind your back , one stretching down and the other up?
- How close can you get your knees to the floor while doing the butterfly stretch ?
- How low can you squat without lifting your heels off the ground?
Taking videos with your phone is the easiest way to measure your progress on these or any other exercises you might want to do. Save the video – or even just a screenshot of the deepest part of the stretch – and then you can put together the before and after editing the next time you try.