How to Get the Splits as a Beginner! *Science Explained*

my friends welcome back this is a video i've i've wanted to make it for so long like when i actually when i started my channel i wanted to make this video but there was just a small catch you know it's still a little bit of a hang up i just felt like i needed to be able to do the splits before i could explain how i got the splits you know just one follows the other in my mind there's two types of people in this world you know there's the elastic bands the ones that just chuck a foot behind their head you know it's just not a thing and there's there's the rest of us i was the kind of girl that just kind of avoided stretching it's just not really my thing i just want to get straight into the meat of the workout that's that's me i'm not saying that's the best thing to do and it's not like i wasn't told to stretch like my athletics coaches were all about the stretching i would just do the bare minimum you know they'd look around and i'd be like i'd make it look like i was stretching but i wasn't stretching which is kind of an art in itself and when i started to do the front splits i was a long way off so far you know my crotch in the ground they didn't know each other you know it was a long-distance relationship and i feel like if i was that far away from being able to do the front splits as a complete beginner then you guys can do it as well there's no reason why you can't do it so we're gonna go through exactly what i did to get the front split then we're gonna look at the science to see the most effective way to improve your range of motion or flexibility and then we'll apply that to the front splits and then before you know it that'll be you with your leg behind your head actually that'll be you with two legs behind your head i'm just saying prepare yourself to be the flexible friend [Music] so the good thing is that the front plates can easily be broken down into flexibility of two areas the hip flexors of the legs going backwards and then the hamstrings of the legs going forwards and yeah i basically looked at lots of different stretches the most effective stretches to stretch the hip flexors and the hamstrings they really worked for me obviously there's more but these ones are first we're gonna start with the hip flexors i've got my um stretching my stretching buddy you know just find yourself a little cushion and you guys will be best friends whilst you get the splits okay so this is the knee flip okay so this is the kneeling hip flexor stretch this is amazing for feeling your hip flexors all you want to do is make sure that your hips are facing forward you really push your glutes forward so that you can feel the stretch in the front of your leg and then just breathe nice deep breaths you don't want it to be too painful it should just feel like a nice stretch make sure that your foot and your knee are facing down that's why i have like a pillow which basically just saves my life and you just really want to feel that stretch like on the front of your hip that's your hip flexors and then to make it more advanced you can just bring your foot up but again make sure that your hips are facing forwards so obviously a hip flexor stretch is unilateral so you want to make sure that you're doing the same amount of time on one leg as you do on the other as well to keep that stretching balanced out and that's basically it for hip flexors honestly you don't need to have a ton of stretches you just need like a couple that you can really really feel so now we're moving on to stretching the hamstrings the hamstrings are being stretched on the leg going forward in the splits a couple of stretches that i like here the first is the kneeling bent over hamstring stretch and you really want to make sure that you're sticking your butt out and behind you so that you really feel that stretch in the back of your leg not like your glutes not your lower back but really in your hamstrings and then the second stretch that i really love to do for my hamstrings is the standing hamstring stretch so you basically want to pick a box or a table in my case that is just slightly lower than your hip height and then put your foot up onto it keep your leg nice and straight keep both of your feet facing forwards push back at the hip keep your back nice and neutral and you should feel a really nice stretch on the hamstring of the leg that's up on the table if you guys want to make this extra hard for yourself because you're having like a really flexible day you can start bending forward just make sure that your hips stay in the same position like you're still like sticking your butt out you're gonna feel it i swear it's just having a bit of a wiggle none of this is me that's all that's all its own doing and i'll split my time evenly between both of these hamstring stretches and i'll also make sure to do it on both sides so now we've stretched our hip flexors left and right with two stretches we've stretched our hamstrings left and right with two stretches and then we can go into we can go into the splits so i like to do the splits right at the end of stretching my hamstrings and my hip flexors it's like a little bit of a warm up but it's good to get into the splits and when you're starting off you might need some support so either with some chairs or with some cushions underneath your crotch or both you know and over time as your crotch to floor distance decreases you can start to use less support so maybe get rid of the chairs maybe put your hands down by your side on the ground slowly remove the cushions from under your crotch think about it like a chat with your parents about sex you know like it's uncomfortable but it's not painful that's that's where you want to be with the front splits you want to be uncomfortable but not in excruciating pain and just a couple of tips for when you're in the front split stretch making sure that you're always rotating your hips so that you're facing forwards and then that your front and back leg are forming a nice straight line when i first started my back leg was kind of doing its own thing but it wasn't really a straight line it was like a like a half moon and also keeping your chest up and your back nice and upright because i also want to always lean forward by keeping your back upright you're doing a nice even stretch between your hip flexors and your hamstrings now for some science okay so now that we've got our stretches down the next thing that we can use the science for is figuring out how much and how often to stretch now i'll be honest there's not like a great body of literature i feel like a lot of the methodologies are flawed so i don't feel super comfortable coming up with like a definitive conclusion but i still think there are some suggestions that help us find like a really good routine for us so there's a systematic review which has looked at some of the highest quality research in this area so they've looked at 23 papers and there are a couple of areas where we can start to form some conclusions so the first was in the area of total duration of stretching per week so how long you should be stretching per muscle per week to get the best results or the most improvement in range of motion so they separated the 23 studies into three different groups subjects that were stretched for less than five minutes per muscle per week uh subjects that stretched my god such a tongue twister subjects that stretched for between five and ten minutes and subjects that stretched over ten minutes per muscle per week and what they found was that there was a statistically significant difference between the groups that stretched less than five minutes and those that stretched five minutes or over so their conclusion in their words was there seems to be a timely relation with range of motion improvements being this mainly related to total volume per week with a minimum of five minutes per week needed to elicit a significant response but there was no statistically significant difference between the groups that stretched between five and ten minutes and those that stretched ten minutes plus so this is really interesting because the early research is suggesting that there's a plateau in additional flexibility gained beyond a certain point so stretching for longer beyond that point doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get more flexible quicker so it seems like the optimal amount of time to be stretching per muscle per week seems to be about 5 to 10 minutes so you're increasing your range of motion but you're also not wasting time because that time is money you know and i know there's loads of youtube videos out there that are like i got my splits in the month i got my splits in a week even i even saw one that said i got my splits in a day i'm not even lying i'm not saying that it's impossible i'm just saying if that is true we just all need to take a step back and just appreciate the miracle that we have seen um because it is so unlikely i mean there are outliers flexibility depends on lots of different factors i'm just saying that for the majority of us if you're going in thinking that you can get the splits in a day i do even though you might have put in like the right amount of active stretching time and your body needs longer than a week for it to kind of repair and elicit those physiological responses so in my case it took me like three to four months and i think the trick here is finding a routine that you enjoy that you can stick to that's easy for you to do regularly several times a week for the medium term like two to four months so the next conclusion that we can start to draw from this early research is to do with the frequency of sessions so now we know how many minutes we should be spending in a stretch per muscle per week how do we split that across the week how many days should we be spreading that across so across the studies in this systematic review those where subjects stretched five six or seven days per week showed statistically significant improvements in range of motion compared to those that only stretched two or three times a week so on top of that earlier conclusion where the authors said that we needed at least five minutes per muscle per week to elicit a significant response in range of motion they also conclude that five days is the minimum weakly recommended frequency to achieve significant range of motion improvements so now we can combine both conclusions so we can take our five to ten minutes per muscle per week of stretching and then split that across five six or seven days now i personally like to lean towards five days because i'm really busy and it just works on my schedule plus i like to have a few rest days okay it just works better with me and to be honest i also felt that five days was my sweet spot because it allowed me to recover from my stretching so if five or six sessions a week feels a little bit too often then you can always reduce it to like three or four just make sure that you keep that same total time stretched per muscle per week so then each stretching session so hard to say each stretching session will be a little bit longer on a personal note as well i would just like to say that this science has been eye-opening for me um and i think i know why i'm not getting my box blitz i mean if the science is telling me anything it's that you've got to stretch little and often you know just a little bit do it often um which has been the complete opposite of what i've done for my box splits what i do for my box splits or middle splits same thing is i leave about two months between my stretching sessions and when i do a stretching session i go hard and i just think i think that maybe that's where i'm going wrong here i have footage of me in the box blitz for over a year now me trying to get into the box blitz and i'll tell you what nothing has changed the height hasn't has not gone down i've changed hair color i've changed hairstyles i've changed clothes i've you know i've even gone through like injuries and out of injuries and the one constant in my life is that height of my box splits like it just has not the process i was doing was not working okay so i feel like i've tested out the other extreme and it's been highly unsuccessful so i feel like little and often probably the way to go so now we've got our exercises we know how much and how often to stretch now we can combine and find the best splits stretching routine so let's say we're going for 10 minutes per muscle per week and we've got four areas that we're hitting hip flexor left hip flexor right i don't know my left and right okay it doesn't matter here hamstrings left and right right um and that's it so the hip flexor stretches and the hamstring stretches target one of those groups at a time and then the splits targets two of those groups at a time so across the whole week we want to stretch five minutes for the hip flexor left five minutes for the hip flexor right five minutes for the hamstring left five minutes for the hamstring right five minutes for the splits left five minutes for the splits right and then that totals thirty minutes of total stretching for your splits and it hits ten minutes of stretching per muscle per week in all of the muscles so now we split that total week into five days that's gonna be per day one minute of hip flexor left one minute of hip flexor right one minute of hamstring left one minute of hamstring right one minute of splits left and one minute of splits right now the research isn't clear of whether you should split that 60 seconds up into two lots of 30 seconds or just go for the whole minute i personally like to go through the whole minute because it actually allows me to like relax my muscles and just chill and i know that i showed you like two different exercises for the hip flexor stretches and for hamstring i just pick one that i'm fancying to do that day and i go for the full 60 seconds i don't worry about doing both of those exercises i just pick one the next thing i want to talk about is intensity and this is never something that i considered i didn't even think about it when it came to stretching think of intensity as like how much do you just want to cry out for help to your mum to cradle you in her arms that's how that's just think of intensity in that way i know when i was stretching for gymnastics i know that the culture there was just like attack it like go for it if you let out a little tear it's all part of it you know um but some of the research that i was looking at suggested that actually there wasn't any significant differences between stretching at low intensity and high intensity which is really good so specifically there was one high quality study that was looking at low intensity stretching versus high intensity stretching on range of motion and they found that there was no statistically significant difference in range of motion improvements between those that stretched lightly and those that stretched all out and there are a couple of mechanisms that might explain why high-intensity stretching isn't the way to go first of all high-intensity stretching might induce a stretch reflex so if you're stretching like really intensely your body wants to contract your muscles to bring them back to its normal length the second is that high intensity stretching can actually create inflammation and put strain on your tendons rather than increasing the length of the fibers in the muscle by adding contractile units which is known as a process called sarcoma genesis now i know this is only early research but i think it's useful to call out that stretching like super super intensely isn't necessarily proven to be more effective than low intensity stretching so that's good news i feel like i want to bring good news and i feel like that is just great news to hear the last thing i want to talk about is periodization so periodization is basically dividing your training up into low intensity or volume phases and high intensity or volume phases periodization is something that's really well researched when it comes to sports performance and building muscle but it's only just started to be studied when it comes to flexibility speaking to gymnastics coaches and again this isn't like science based um so we can't fully know um but they seem to believe that taking like a week off from stretching if you've been stretching regularly for a six week period can actually help you just help you recover and then you can get back to doing some stretching and personally from my experience that's been the case as well like there is a point where everything just kind of like hurts a little bit but this is your friend natasha talking this isn't science natasha talking all i'm saying is that if you find yourself at a plateau maybe it can help to take like a week off and then go back to stretching maybe that just gives you enough of a recovery to help you find like improvement gains in range of motion so that's pretty much everything i wanted to cover like coming up with the exercises we know how much to stretch we know how often to stretch we've combined them so that we get our perfect stretch splitting routine splits in and then we've also got like a couple of other tips to do with like how intensely we should be stretching taking a little break now and then and that's basically got you covered now you should be good to go now i want to be seeing you guys head around the back of it round back oh my god i don't know what i'm saying i hope you guys enjoyed it give me a big thumbs up if you did hit the subscribe button if you want to see more videos and i will see you guys very soon i love you bye [Music] you

Channel: Natacha Océane

Views: 1,538,600

Keywords: splits, tutorial, how, to, beginner, stretch, stretching, flexibility, routine, science, explained, follow, along, fit, fitness, health, healthy, natacha, Natacha Oceane

Id: yHksRj6285A

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021