Yesterday, I suspected that kicking, in particular, side kicks, might help you achieve better flexibility for side splits ("Kicking Can Improve Your Hip Flexibility?" (Monday, November 02, 2009)). I did more experimentation tonight and now I have a different theory.

First, some background info: When I attempt side spits, I have an exercise bench in front of me. The length of the bench is placed perpendicular to the line formed by my spread legs. So seen from above, the bench and my body together form an upside-down T. Hope it makes sense to you. I use this bench to prop up my upper body with my arms, so my entire weight will not be on my legs.

Tonight I did kicking practice (including side kicks) before I attempted side splits. My flexibility was not particularly good. Then I had someone else pull my feet (one by one) outward to the sides so I would spread my legs more, like I did two nights ago, I could go as far as I did then.

Hmm, OK, so it seems that it was not the prior kicking, but the external help that made the difference. Then I had this epiphany: it's the fact that I had most of my weight on my arms that helped. This relieved the legs from the most of the duty of supporting my body weight. The muscles (in this case adductors mostly) thus did not have to flex much, which ultimately made it easier for them to stretch. To increase the stretch, having someone else do it is crucial; if you try to do it by yourself, you will end up contracting the target muscles. Why didn't I think of this sooner? Of course it's difficult to stretch muscles when you are flexing them!

We often use the gravitational pull to our own body as the force to stretch for splits, as I was doing in the videos in "Update on My Splits, or My Miserable Attemps for Them" (Sunday, February 10, 2008). In the videos, I did put my hands down and had them support my weight partially, but I was trying to leave as much weight as possible on the legs. At that time, I thought that'd help me stretch better. It still worked to a certain extent (after all, I got there that way), but the process was quite painful and unpleasant.

Even if you consciously shift most of you weight to your arms, you have to shift your weight back to you legs when you want to go deeper in the stretch if you are doing this kind of stretching alone. That's how this kind of self stretching works. But the moment you try to do it, your target muscles contract to support the weight, and you have to overcome it to stretch them. No wonder it is so hard. This means it is not just desirable but imperative to have the optimal results that you have someone else's help when you increase the stretch. This might be the same underlying idea of the Mattes Method ("Active Isolated Strengthening: The Mattes Method" (Wednesday, September 23, 2009)), whose primary M.O. seems to be assisted stretching, not solo stretching.

By the way, I now have another reason to consider such gravitation-driven solo stretching not good: not only is it hard to address asymmetry in your right-side flexibility and the left-side and balance them, but it could make it even worse. Unfortunately, though, I do not know if any effective "one-sided" stretching for adductors. Well, there is one (shown in the illustration at the end of "Pain in the Shin" (Saturday, October 03, 2009)) but I think I've already gone as far as I can go with it.