Flexibility exercises

These flexibility exercises can be done at home to help improve your health and mobility.

Don't worry if you've not done much for a while, these flexibility exercises are gentle and easy to follow.

If you're not very active or not sure how to start, you may want to get the all-clear from a GP before starting.

Wear loose, comfortable clothing and keep some water handy. Build up slowly and aim to gradually increase the repetitions of each exercise over time.

Try to do these exercises at least twice a week and combine them with the other routines in this series to help improve strength, balance and co-ordination.

Exercises to Improve Recovery After Hip Replacement Surgery

​​​​​​​​Begin After You Have Seen Your Surgeon or a Physical Therapist

It is important to exercise after surgery to increase the strength and flexibility in your new hip and to help prevent blood clots. You may feel uncomfortable at first, but exercising will help you to get back to your normal everyday activities sooner.

Your healthcare team may suggest you add some or all of the following exercises to the ones you began at home before surgery. Start doing them only after you have been seen by your surgeon at your first follow-up visit after surgery. Continue the exercises you were doing before surgery . Your healthcare team will give you the elastic loop you need for some of the exercises. They will tell you how often to do the exercises, how many times to repeat each one, and how much force or pressure you can put on your new hip. You will steadily increase the number of times you exercise daily, how often you repeat each exercise, and the amount of pressure.

Tips to Keep Your Hips Strong and Flexible

In this episode of the Outside Health and Fitness podcast we’re talking about your hips and you’ll learn some fantastic body weight and yoga routines for keeping them strong and flexible. In the Way Outside segment we’ll look at an unusual sport that combines brains and brawn kind of a Rocky meets Einstein mash-up. And I’ll wrap up the show with a fitness challenge to keep you motivated this week.

Tips for Your Hips

I recently got a question from a listener named Zanellie. She wrote in and asked “Hey Steve do you have any tips for exercises on the hips?”

Functions of the Hip Flexor

The hip flexor’s main function is to help the hip joints move properly in their full range. The hip flexor helps you draw your leg to your torso, and also helps you move your legs from side to side and backwards.

Improve Your Flexibility and Range of Motion

4 tips for improving your flexibility when you think you can’t improve your flexibility.

One of the most common questions I get asked is; How do I improve my flexibility? I’ve tried everything and no matter what I do I can’t increase my flexibility past a certain point.

Does this sound familiar? Is your flexibility stuck, and nothing you do makes any difference?

If so, don’t panic. This is quite normal. In fact it’s very common with all aspects of physical fitness, not just flexibility. Athletes and sports people often talk about reaching a “plateau,” where one aspect of their fitness seems to get stuck.

Improve Your Squat With 6 At-Home Hip Flexor Mobility Exercises

In any decent gym you will find the basics: squat racks, benches, medicine balls, plyometric boxes, etc. These tools can help you get stronger and produce force. But where are the hurdles, foam rollers, stretch bands and other tools that can help you increase range of motion?

The ability to successfully perform a Squat or Power Clean depends on strength, technique and flexibility. In my work as a sports performance coach, I often see athletes with limited range of motion, which hurts their ability to lift the bar from the floor. They don't have enough hip flexibility to do a deep Squat that maximizes force.

The movements listed below require very little equipment—nothing more than a basic foam roller and a piece of PVC pipe, both of which can be found or created from materials at your local hardware store. All of the exercises can be done in a small space and be used as a warm-up, stretching session or as part of a workout.

Get Better Hip Mobility: 9 Stretches and Exercises

A good hip mobility routine can improve your overall performance, allow you to get into powerful athletic positions and enhance your flexibility, speed and strength.

This particular routine can double as a dynamic warm-up.

Do these nine hip mobility exercises in order. The first time through, hold the peak of the stretch for one to two seconds. The second time through, do the exercises in a dynamic fashion to increase your heart rate and prepare your body for more strenuous activity.

Hip Mobility Stretches and Exercises

Deep Lunge with Twist

• Lunge forward with one leg.
• Place the opposite-side elbow on the ground.
• Once you reach the correct depth, rotate your inside arm vertically.

7 Tips to Increase Hip Flexibility

Tight Hips – A Modern Day Epidemic

One of the biggest complaints my clients present during their sessions is tight hips. With the high number of professional computer jockeys in today’s modern world, the common complaints are limited range of motion in the hips and shoulders, pain in the neck, back, and feet.

Sitting all day, especially at an ergonomically challenging computer set up, creates a shortening in your hip flexors (the muscles along the front of your hip and thigh that pull you down into a chair). These muscles in turn pull your lumbar spine forward, causing tension and stiffness in the low back, bracing in your hips and what are known as dysfunctional movement patterns.

Flexibility Expert Shares Important Tips

Flexibility. We all secretly hope we'll wake up one morning and be freakishly flexible. Flexibility expert, Stacey Nemour, is also known as a "miracle worker" when it comes to flexibility. Stacey has worked with people in various fields on how to improve their flexibility that will help them specifically in their field. Stacey created a specific order of stretches, methods and exercises to help the body open up and perform at optimum levels. 

How did you get into learning about flexibility?

When I was very young I became obsessed with gymnastics, dance and fitness. My next door neighbor and I started practicing gymnastics outside on the grass daily. We had a race to see who could get into the pancake straddle stretch and splits first and I won. What's interesting is, I innately knew how to stretch. My Intuition was always guiding me. I started to make up stretches to support whatever need I had and as I got older did the same for my clients. I was self-taught in the beginning. I went on to study all forms of dance, gymnastics, martial arts, and healing and meditation. In high school, I started teaching gymnastics at the YMCA. Then I was asked to teach advanced Kung Fu students how to do gymnastics so they could incorporate it into their performance routines.

When Flexibility Becomes A Liability. ~ Michaelle Edwards

Preventing hip replacements and sacral injuries starts for many people with their yoga or fitness practice.  

Last year, approximately 400,000 people had their hips replaced in the United States—and most of them were women.

Why do women’s hips wear out more than men?

Excessive flexibility and weak stabilizing muscles are often the key factors leading to hip joint deterioration.

Women have looser ligaments to allow the pelvis to open for the act of childbirth. Beyond birthing, flexibility can be a liability because the lumbar and hip joints must have strong and tight ligaments to keep the parts stable for proper joint function, and shock absorption during movement.

Flexibility: Loosen Up

Give us three weeks and we'll take your running to a new level.

When runners take on a training program, they focus on building endurance and speed. Improving their flexibility never seems to make it into the game plan. Yet, a flexible body is more efficient, sees more gains in strength and endurance, enjoys more range of motion, is less injury-prone, recovers more quickly, and simply feels better.

As musculoskeletal therapists to pro, amateur, and Olympic athletes, we've confirmed that, by increasing flexibility, runners can enhance their performance without increasing their mileage or spending more time on the track. When one simple link--ROME (Range of Motion Exercises)--is added to the chain, the whole chain gets stronger.

Hip Flexibility

These exercises develop mobility and range of motion in the hip joint - a connection between your leg and pelvis. Some of them are good for strengthening the muscles surrounding your hip joint. You can move your leg relative to the pelvis, or your pelvis relative to the leg. You do not need to do them all. Choose one or two from each sector that appeal to you.

1. All around stretch

Make sure the surface of your floor is not slippery. Stand in front of the mirror, feet parallel to each other, legs straight and apart. Spread your legs only to the feeling of the very comfortable stretch in your hip joints. Mildly engage all muscles in your legs to feel really sturdy. Keep your pelvis in a neutral position. Breathe evenly and hold this stretch for 30 seconds. Now start pushing your left hip forward and your right hip back. Do this slowly. Watch yourself in the mirror. Keep your hips level and legs straight and toned. You will not be able to push a lot, so do not try to go beyond the mild stretch feeling. Hold the stretch for 30 seconds. Do the same in the opposite direction. Observe in which direction you have more range of motion. Hold longer for the stiffer side. For someone who knows Yoga, the triangle poses, angle poses and lunge poses are good exercises to stretch the hip joints. All of the above stretches have a benefit of strengthening ligaments and muscles around the hip joint.

Hip Flexibility For Seniors And The Elderly; Partial Squats

Hip flexibility exercises for seniors and the elderly are important components of your daily program of stretching.

Lower body flexibility training will improve your balance and add to your quality of life.

Increased flexibility in the hips will allow you to step higher, avoiding stumbling due to the inability to lift the leg high enough.

Working on your strength in your thigh is important for standing up, getting out of a chair or out of a bathtub.

The partial squat exercise below is a classic and a standard leg strengthener and stretcher. Give it a try!

5 Barre Moves Yogis Need to Try

Are you ready to mix up your daily routine with something new? Ab work may not be the kind of fun you had in mind, but building a strong core is paramount to your yoga practice. Barre classes help build strength from deep within the core—by hitting muscles your regular rotation of asanas might not. Start supplementing your yoga practice with this sequence of five barre moves from Elisabeth Halfpapp, founding member of Exhale Spa and co-creator of the Core Fusion® Barre Program.

Get Hip to the Perfect Props

When you get up after a long stint in your desk chair, or when you sit down to meditate, do your hips talk to you, telling you their tales of tight, achy woe? For most people, they do. Even if you did Pigeon Pose yesterday, that bittersweet stretch of the outer hip and buttocks never seems to last long enough. Put in just a little time every day, though, and your hips will thank you. You’ll feel more at ease in your body, and your meditation practice will feel less like a chore.

The hips are constantly on the job. They’re densely packed with strong muscles and tendons that keep the joints stable, but they are also mobile enough to move you around from place to place. It takes awareness and attention to strike this sweet balance between ease of movement and stability. In addition, sitting in a chair and bearing weight on your pelvis all day limits circulation, and when you don’t regularly put your hips through their full range of motion, they get tight. It’s essential to do more than just the occasional Pigeon to keep your hips open and agile. Herewith, we present three creative—dare we say fun?—ways to incorporate more hip-opening poses in your daily routine.

Flexibility Stretches For Seniors And The Elderly; Hip Rotation

Flexibility stretches for seniors and the elderly are necessary to maintain normal functional movement.

When we make our bed or take a shower, our muscles continually lengthen and shorten during the movements.

This joint movement is how we maintain our flexibility.

As we age and begin to use our arms and legs less, they become tight.

This is called adaptive shortening of the joints and muscles. This tightness can usually be corrected with a program of progressive stretching.

The hip rotation exercise below is an example of stretching for tightness.

Dear Mark: Flexibility vs. Mobility, Orange Skin, and Radioactive Matcha

I’m going to keep today’s question and answer session rather brief. I’ll be covering three topics: flexibility and mobility; carotenoderma, or the orange-ing of the skin following ingestion of carotenoid-containing foods; and whether matcha green tea from Japan poses any threat due to radioactive contamination. For the first, I discuss whether it’s flexibility or mobility we want. Second, I explore whether getting orange skin from eating lots of carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash is something to worry about. And finally, I talk about drinking matcha from Japan in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear event.

Rather than what most people think of when they say “flexibility” – the ability to hold ridiculously contrived poses and lengthen the muscles beyond the point of practical use – I favor optimizing one’s mobility. Mobility is essentially the ability to move freely, easily, and safely, but we can break that up into subcategories.

How to Maintain Shoulder Mobility and Scapular Stability

More than perhaps any other joint in our bodies, the shoulders demand close and careful attention. We use them on a daily basis and they travel a wide-ranging path; it’s in our best interest to assure that the path is the one of least resistance.

The tricky thing about maintaining good shoulder function is that it doesn’t just require strong deltoids or big traps. Those are important for moving big weight and being strong enough to handle anything life throws at you, but real shoulder function – pain-free, unimpeded shoulder function – depends on certain supporting muscles and joints of which most people are simply unaware. I mean, did you realize just how integral the scapular are? And because the shoulders’ function seems relatively straightforward and because we can work out for years without lending serious thought to how our joints move and work, now’s the time to start thinking about proper joint function before it’s too late.

The Importance of Shoulder Mobility and Scapular Stability

If you’ve been following my series on joint mobility you’ll know that I’ve already covered how to improve and maintain joint mobility for the hips, thoracic spine, and ankles and wrists. Today and tomorrow I’ll be going over the shoulder. The shoulder is a tricky joint because it has to provide adequate stability while maintaining full mobility to prevent injury and maximize function and performance. If you look at yourself in the mirror and wave your arms around, you’ll see what I mean. If that doesn’t work, watch a swimmer, preferably one doing the IM, and watch the incredible range of motion in those shoulders. That’s what the human body is capable of.

Know what you’re looking for and you should be able to count ten different types of shoulder articulations. Ten! Contrast that with the hips (eight), the ankles (two), the wrists (four), or the spine (five), and the shoulder is clearly the most complicated joint with the greatest range of motion. Because “with great power comes great responsibility,” the shoulder is also perhaps the joint most vulnerable to injury. You can do a whole lot with a well-functioning shoulder joint, but you can also really mess yourself up and curtail your activity level for a long time if you get haphazard with its maintenance. Take it from a guy who messed his shoulder up more than once: shoulder health is absolutely required for an active, enriched life. And if you plan on attaining any sort of athletic competency on any level, you need good shoulders.

How to Improve Wrist and Ankle Mobility

Most people have enough wrist and ankle mobility to get around life all aright, but most people think they’re doing just fine with grains, sweets, and seed oils comprising the bulk of their diets. We can always improve our abilities to rotate, extend, and flex our various joints. We must, if we’re interested in retaining maximum mobility through old age and beyond.

How does one go about obtaining that much-vaunted wrist and ankle mobility?

Wrists

Let’s first figure out the extent of your immobility. To test the wrists, explore a few situations and ask yourself some questions:

Do you wrists ache after long days at the office sitting behind a keyboard? You may have poor wrist mobility, and it’s probably exacerbated by your sitting/typing/working conditions and wrist position.

The Importance of Wrist and Ankle Mobility

How mobile are your wrists and ankles? They’re the primary hinges for our two major sets of extremities – hands and feet – and yet they often go neglected. They’re two of the most common sites of debilitating pain and acute injury, and yet people do little else to correct the problem than tightening the high tops, strapping on some constrictive sleeves, or avoiding activity altogether. All those “solutions” miss the point entirely, in my opinion. Rather than fix the root issue, they skirt it and apply expensive band aids. If you know anything about how I approach other issues of health and wellness, you can guess that I’m not satisfied with the band aid approach to wrist and ankle mobility. We can do a whole lot better than that.

How to Improve Thoracic Spine Mobility

By now, you should be convinced that attaining and maintaining mobility in your thoracic spine is a good idea for many reasons. Kyphosis of the thoracic spine is a virtual epidemic (just take a look around at everyone the next time you’re in a coffee shop or classroom – rounded backs abound) and everyone at some time or another has felt a little twinge of shoulder pain when doing a particularly adamant set of pull-ups.

Before you start with the exercises, let’s first figure out the extent of your thoracic immobility. The industry standardized way of determination is a simple one:

1. Lie down on the floor, back flat against it.

2. Your knees should be up with your feet and glutes flat on the floor.

3. Lock your elbows and bring your arms directly overhead, attempting to touch your wrists to the ground above your head.

4. Make sure to maintain contact between your lower back and the floor; don’t arch your back to get your hands in place.

The Importance of Thoracic Spine Mobility

Do your shoulders slump and round when you walk, sit, or stand?

Do you have trouble keeping your chest up when squatting under a bar or lifting heavy things off the ground?

Do you get lower back or neck pain when doing twisting or rotational movements?

Have you resigned yourself to living with that nagging rotator cuff pain that flares up during workouts and in bed?

If you answered “yes” to any of those (and most people will answer yes to at least one), you may have poor thoracic spine mobility. Even if you don’t notice any of the symptoms leaping out at you, it never hurts to get more mobility, especially in the thoracic spine. And establishing good habits by actively maintaining and training mobility, as opposed to being content with what you have (even if it’s not optimum), is always a good move. Scoff at the prospect of thoracic spine mobility all you want; you still gotta have it.

The Importance of Mobility: The Hips

People are exceedingly mobile these days. We can jet halfway across the world at a moment’s notice, check email on our phones, hop in the car and be in another state in five hours, conduct business from anywhere, transfer schools, and shave while reading the paper on the morning commute. Social mobility, financial mobility, spatial mobility, information mobility. Mobile workforce, mobile phone, Google Mobile. Yeah, clearly, mobility is highly prized.

What about joint mobility?

Too many people discount, or even outright ignore, this crucial aspect of physical fitness. Raw strength, speed, and stamina are all important, especially to athletes or weekend warriors, but everyone of any age or fitness level needs the ability to move their limbs and joints through their full range of motion as ordained by nature. That goes for grandmothers, teens, and couch potatoes alike. Though not everyone will be picking up barbells or running sprints or long jumping, we all have to function in a three-dimensional world. We all have space and gravity with which to contend if we’re planning on enjoying and experiencing all life offers, and that’s accomplished by moving through spatiality and against gravity. To thrive in this environment, we require the full, unfettered use of our limbs, joints, and muscles. Losing the shoes is a big step; so is getting strong and fit. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is regaining and maintaining maximum joint mobility.

Filling in the Gaps: How to Incorporate Joint Mobility Drills

By now, I hope the importance of joint mobility is clear, and the benefits myriad. It isn’t the sexiest topic around to be sure. “The Importance of Shoulder Mobility” certainly isn’t as attention-grabbing as “How to Lose 10 lbs in 10 days!,” but it’s one of those often overlooked aspects of fitness that with just a little attention could save you years of pain, frustration, rehab and maybe even surgery – not to mention a boatload of cash in doctor bills. Incorporating just a few minutes of mobility drills a few times each week is a great way to round out an otherwise complete routine. 

Before I get to how to incorporate the mobility drills into your regular physical activities, a recap of why joint mobility is so important:

How to Regain and Maintain Hip Mobility

Yesterday, I made a case for the necessity of good hip mobility in, well, everyone. Athletes will get faster, stronger, and more powerful. Lifters will be able to lift more weight and squat heavier without rounding the lower back. Regular folks will spare their lower back from the stress of chronic sitting and bending over to pick things up. Extensive hip mobility will improve your love life (seriously, think about it – hip thrust, range of motion!), your deadlift, your Grok squat, and your posture. If you own a set of hips, the ability to traverse their full range of motion will improve your life in many ways. They are the fulcrum upon which most activity depends. Treat them well, keep them well lubed and tuned up, and you will reap the benefits and reduce your chance of injury. That much is pretty clear by now.

So, how do you do it? How do you get hip mobility, and how do you maintain it?