5 Minutes a Day to Gain Flexibility – By gaining flexibility, you act for your health, giving yourself a better chance of not injuring yourself and performing better in your sports practice. With a mini routine of only 5 minutes a day to integrate into your habits. Become more flexible in a few weeks and for a long time!
Flexibility: the key to Sports Performance
5 minutes a day to gain – Gaining flexibility is an often underused lever for better athletic performance. However, being more flexible offers many advantages, both daily and to improve the precision and range of motion:
Being flexible allows you to increase your mobility and acquire greater ease, useful, for example, to succeed in a precise throw, avoid injuries, or even link more movements by measuring your effort.
Flexibility affects the quality of the postures adopted in daily life: it helps to limit lumbar or back pain and prevent the effects of joint ageing.
By increasing the flexibility of their joints, athletes have more momentum and mobilize their muscles more efficiently.
How to Gain Flexibility? – 5 Minutes a Day to Gain
A fitness discipline is dedicated explicitly to relaxation: stretching. By combining different stretches and relaxation exercises, you quickly gain flexibility. The four main types of stretching are:
Passive static stretching: This technique is the gentlest and least likely to cause muscle damage. It consists of soliciting a different group of muscles than the one targeted to obtain relaxation and suppleness. By using the weight of the body or the surrounding frame (wall, chair, barrier, step, etc.), the athlete lengthens. The muscle and stops the movement when it reaches maximum amplitude. He stays in this position for a while before releasing.
Isometric static stretching: if the stretching is always static (maintaining a position for a few seconds), this time. The targeted muscle contracted.
Active static stretching of the CRAC type (Contracted-Relaxed-Contraction of the Antagonist muscle): this technique consists of putting tension on the muscle group opposite to that targeted.
Dynamic stretching also called ballistic stretching: here, the execution of the stretch is done in motion, by repeating a gesture several times until reaching the maximum amplitude of the joint. This method should be used with carefulness as it is more explosive.
Your Routine: 5 Minutes a Day to Become more Flexible
By integrating a series of 5 simple stretches into your daily routines, you will quickly obtain results:
Begin by stretching your entire body, raising your arms above your head and standing on your tiptoes, staring at a point at eye level far in front of you. Hold the place for a few seconds when the whole body tensed. If you stretch as soon as you wake up, which is a great habit, you can do it the same way lying on your bed. Breathe deeply throughout the exercise.
To stretch the transverse abdominal muscles and improve the mobility of the trunk, position yourself upright. Arms and legs apart, in a star shape. Turn one foot outward and keep the other straight. On the side where you moved your foot, lean your chest sideways until you can touch your knees, shin, or ankle without tipping forward. Change the position of your feet to perform the movement on the other side.
You were sitting on the floor. Legs stretched out in front of you, try to reach your feet with your hands to stretch and soften the entire posterior chain (cervical and dorsal muscles, lumbar muscles, hamstrings and calves).
CRAC stretch for the hamstrings: without sitting down, put one knee on the ground. Then extend the other leg in front of you so that you are resting on the heel. The tip of the foot in the air. Maintain the tension on the back of the thighs for 5 seconds, release 3 seconds, then repeat the movement by contracting the quadriceps (located at the front of the thigh). Stay in this position, with the antagonist’s muscle contracted, for 30 seconds.
To make your back more flexible. Squat down, heels anchored to the ground, place your hands flat in front of you, then gradually straighten your legs (keeping your back well rolled up). Arms relaxed; unroll your back very slowly until you straighten up completely. Then place your hands behind your neck and lower back to your original position. Perform this movement several times per session.
