Lucas Rockwood – Gravity Yoga Video Series – Double Your Flexibility

Improve Posture

If you look at modern bodies in profile, you’ll often see a forward tilted pelvis, sway back, hunched shoulders, and a text neck. Postural imbalanced often begin in teenage years and become problematic by middle age. A misaligned body moves inefficiently and is much more prone to injury. Fortunately, many of these conditions can be corrected with targeted training.

Reverse Aging

Can you get up and down from the floor without using your hands? Can you sit cross-legged comfortably? Are you able to interlace your hands behind your back with straight arms? How does your body look when you’re tying your shoes? Through flexibility training, you can regain the mobility of someone 10 years younger. This helps you enjoy your favorite activities, move without pain, and gives you confidence in your body.

Travel in Comfort

A huge part of the discomfort you experience from long car and airplane rides is due to poor mobility. When you regain your natural flexibility, it becomes easier and more comfortable to sit for long stretches of time—and yes, even cross-legged on the floor (that was always a huge one for me).

Improve Your Sleep

Muscle cramps, poor posture, and abnormal breathing patterns can be greatly reduced with proper pre-bed stretching exercises. Many find that with just 15 minutes of targeted stretching before bed, they sleep deeper and wake up refreshed.

Enjoy an Active Life

Whether you’re passionate about yoga, skiing, mountain biking, or just being able to throw a frisbee around in the park, when your body is open and limber, everything works and feels better. Movement becomes fun again.

Better Love Life

There is no need to explain how flexibility can help in this department; you can use your imagination.

Avoid Injuries

Tight muscles don’t cause injuries, poor movement patterns do. When you’re tight and imbalanced, your body creates work-arounds that get you into trouble. People with tight hips and hamstrings often externally rotate their hips and swing their legs when they walk or run. People with tight psoas muscles often sway their back and stick out their bum. People with tight shoulders are often in a constant hunch. These imbalances lead to lower back, neck, and knee injuries, among others.

The number one reason people stop running, going to the gym, or doing the activities they love is because they get hurt and lose momentum. Once you stop exercising, many people never get back to it. The good news is that with an intelligent self-care flexibility training regimen, you can move toward a balanced body and reduce your risk of injury for life.

Flexibility training is most useful for a prehab / rehab routine after exercise. Forget about bobbing up and down over your toes before a run, this intense approach uses a targeted mobility routine to transform your body, correct imbalances, and increase range of motion (ROM).

Reduce Pain, Stress & Tension

You are all-too-familiar with what it feels like to have soreness and post-workout pain, but did you know that mental and emotional stress can also get trapped in your shoulders, hips, and lower back? Stress changes your body language, and when that becomes chronic, pain and tension can manifest in trigger points in your body. Targeted stretching is perhaps the best remedy.

Joint pain, muscle soreness, and cramping can be reduced (and even eliminated) with intelligent mobility training. Your body is designed to express itself with a wide range of motion, and the more you tap into those natural patterns, the more the aches and pains of sedentary life fade. Many are surprised to learn that lower back pain is often a result of tight hip flexors, that neck pain can be due to locked-up shoulders, and that their hamstrings can trigger dozens of aches in the body.

Improve Circulation

Research shows that an intelligent stretching routine promotes vasodilation, increasing circulation, and boosting the health of the effected tissues. Cardiovascular strength is not the only factor affecting circulation. Since stiffness is often systemic, the tightness in the backs of your legs could indicate you have impaired circulation to your extremities and connective tissues. Flexibility training unblocks stuck areas and helps to naturally improve whole body circulation.

Why Yoga Classes Often Fail
(for flexibility)

There is a stereotype that yoga classes are all about flexibility, but that’s almost never the case. Most classes focus on strength, balance, breath, concentration, and the mind-body connection. Flexibility is surely on the list, but it’s usually at the bottom of the list of priorities in most classes.

I didn’t know that, so I became a yoga maniac going to class every day. The other students seemed pretty limber, so I thought it was logical to sign up for a membership. Much to my surprise, after weeks of suffering through classes, I hadn’t achieved noticeable results.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved yoga. I felt more calm, my balance was improving, and I was even losing weight; but I was still as stiff as a board and didn’t see that changing anytime soon.

Then I met this weird guy named Anthony.

In yoga class, you’re supposed to stay focused, but I couldn’t help staring. After six weeks, Anthony could lay flat against his shins in forward bends, cross his legs in full lotus, and go three times as deep as I could in backbends. He had leaped from beginner to intermediate extremely quickly. Whatever he was doing, it was working; and what I was doing clearly wasn’t.

Finally, I had to say something.

After two painful months of Hot Yoga torture (I was going every day), I finally got up the nerve to invite Anthony for pizza after class (this was before I learned how to eat properly for flexibility). Anthony reluctantly agreed, and although he didn’t eat anything during our meeting, he did tell me three secrets to stretching flexibility that I later learned are true for almost everyone.