Unlocking Flexibility: Q&A with Coaches Josh and Fran

In this week’s podcast join Lattice Training coach,Josh Hadley, and fellow coach
Fran Giacomozzi, as they answer your burning questions about flexibility training for climbers.

Josh and Fran dive into how to improve flexibility, starting with practical tips on specific stretches, including how to utilise different types of stretches such as tempo.

Key Topics Covered:

• Integrating flexibility with climbing
• At-home body weight exercises
• Essential strength training tips for climbers with hypermobility
• At-home body weight exercises, including upper body
• Managing soreness and dealing with injuries
• Strategies to maintain consistent stretching, including setting targets and measuring progress

Join us for this comprehensive episode as Josh and Fran share their expert insights on flexibility training for climbers. Whether you’re struggling with hypermobility, looking to improve your range of motion, or seeking motivation to stretch consistently, this episode is packed with valuable advice and practical tips.

If you enjoyed this episode, let us know! We’d love to do more Q&A sessions in the future. Plus, get 20% off the Flexibility Deep Dive course and our cork yoga Flex Mat - ends 1st July at Midnight.

https://latticetraining.com/product/flexibility-course-bundle/

Don’t miss out—tune in to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more! Enhance your climbing flexibility and performance with the expert guidance of Josh and Fran.

The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.

Transcript

josh (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another Lattice Training podcast. I'm joined by Fran. Hello, I am Fran and I'm a flexibility coach here at Lattice. And I'm Josh Hadley. I'm also a flexibility coach and we're going to try something a bit different today. So we actually put out some questions to the public and said, give us all of your deepest questions about flexibility training. And we're just going to go through them one by one and try and answer them. So there's no...

like specific intro to this podcast, because basically it's going to be a huge varied number of questions from the public about flexibility training and me and Fran being flexibility coaches, we're going to try and answer them. So I reckon let's just jump straight into it. Let's do it. Fran, I'm going to ask you the first question. And actually we had two of these. So this one probably crops up quite a lot. And this is my hamstrings are as stiff as boards. Help me. And the other one is my hamstrings are ultra contracted.

help me to? So first of all, a question that we get asked a lot, I would say. And it shows because it was the only question that was repeated. So it's interesting to talk about the hamstring for climbing related flexibility, because as you probably would agree with me, it's like the most important muscle basically that we can think about stretching when it comes to improving climbing flexibility. But it is also quite

complicated sometimes because it's a really big muscle. So it can be quite tricky to pinpoint how to stretch it properly. Yeah. I was going to add, I reckon the reason so many people have to hamstrings, not because of climbing, but because of like, I don't know, sitting, running. Like, I feel like it's a lifestyle muscle. And if you do any cardio, like running, cycling can get really tight. So one thing to think about when it comes to hamstring flexibility,

is to consider it as part of a bigger chain. So one thing that you could do easily to try and improve your hamstring flexibility would actually start by stretching your calves. Because if we're stretching our calves, we're stretching one of the two muscles called the gastrocnemius, and it kind of crosses over the knee. So you can think of a muscle running from your ankle up and over into the knee. And if you can stretch that,

It means that you're probably taking away some tension from the bottom part of the hamstring, which will in turn make your hamstring flexibility routine maybe a little less painful, a little bit more easy, and just overall give you like a nicer sensation when you try to, let's say, do a forward fall. So when you try and go and touch your toes. We talk about this in terms of facilitation, don't we? We know it's not stretching a hamstring muscle specifically, but...

I think stretching is a lot about sensation. You know, some people find it's uncomfortable and you have that neural tension, don't you? So all we're trying to do there is facilitate hamstring stretching. So actually maybe it seems a bit counterproductive, but often the first thing we do is we try to stretch around the calf before we actually, sorry, around the hamstring before we start stretching it specifically. And once you take care of the smaller muscles that can be in the way of hamstring stretching, then you could think of...

your stretching, maybe not as much as just a static routine or doing yoga, but perhaps considering doing stretching that requires or adds a little bit of weight. We love talking about tempo stretches as part of a flexibility routine. A tempo stretch is basically like a motion that goes into a rep that goes up and down really slowly. And we would normally use weights with this to increase sort of the

the ability to stretch into deeper muscles or to help you aid further into the range of motion. So one typical like tempo stretch would be, let's say you're working on your hamstring, single leg good morning is one of my favorites. We would place one leg forward and then sort of fold slowly down towards the leg, thinking about maintaining that nice straight spine and then pausing at the bottom to get a little bit of stretch and then coming out of it slowly as well.

I think if I could give a bit of global advice about stretching your hamstrings, and maybe this actually just relates to any any muscle, which is don't don't look at stretching as like passive stretching or, you know, just holding a stretch for 36 seconds, particularly if you feel like really tight and really stiff. I think the idea of exploring things like tempo stretching, contraction facilitated stretching, so like PNF stretching.

This seems just to be so much more effective for people which just feel that really intrinsic tightness and the idea that they just can't relax into a stretch. So if you're looking to use stretches that are asking you to relax and then go a bit deeper and relax and breathe and you just don't respond to that kind of stuff, I think like Fran's saying, explore tempo stretching, maybe look at using contractions to facilitate more relaxation, so PNF stretching or maybe just more isometric stretching, which is trying to strengthen the end range as well.

Definitely, I agree that when it comes to stretching, half of the job is neurological, comes from your brain. So if you don't know how to access that sort of relaxed state in the brain, maybe you can do that through doing exercises that resemble a little bit more strength training, but with a different tempo. Cool. Nice. Okay, I've got a question for you, Josh. Flexibility training for hypermobile brackets, easily injured climbers. Okay.

Yeah, so hypermobility, it's, I mean, it can be like a medical diagnosis. So I'm not going to go into giving advice around how to deal with hypermobility because that's not my remit. But it's important to remember that hypermobility is not always a negative thing. So there's going to be different grades of this. And as actually a test for this, you can look at different.

you know, different levels of hypermobility and see where you score, because it can be in certain parts of the body and not also in others. I think where it becomes kind of debilitating is when you have joint laxity, which is flexibility in your ligaments. And essentially when hypermobility is not useful and can be actually can cause pain and can sort of, you know, be unhelpful to just day to day life is when you're going to have like laxity or your joints are going to move in.

what we'd call like not normal ways. And that's not going to be helpful. So we want to make sure primarily that we're actually strengthening around these joints. So I think if someone's saying to me, I want to train flexibility, but I'm hypermobile, I think the route I would generally go down is say, well, before we think about increasing range of motion, the likelihood is you probably already have quite good range of motion.

it would be strengthening around those joints. And actually if you feel tension, you feel tight, that subjective feeling of feeling tension in your hamstrings, but also you are hypermobile and maybe you score really highly on that hypermobility test. Chances are maybe that you feel tight because you just don't have the strength that the muscles are supporting those joints. So they're always working quite hard to support the joints, particularly if you're proprioception, sensing that you have this joint laxity where your ligaments are more stretchy than someone else. And so,

actually the one bit of advice I'd give around flexibility training for hypermobility is make sure you're really strong in those ranges of motions. Just approach it with strength training primarily, and then we can look to see maybe there's certain areas which maybe you're not that flexible in. And we could look at flexibility training there, but again, it would be a strength focus for me. I agree. Essentially, we want to try to communicate our brain if you're hypermobile, that you're safe and all the ranges of motion that you already own. So strengthening is probably what I would go for as well. Yeah. And in fact, you can...

You can train to be hypermobile. I think that one of the tests is can you get your palms to the floor in a forward fold? I never used to be able to do that. I really struggled to touch my toes, but now I can do it and I've scored much higher on the hypermobility test just because I trained to be more flexible. Exactly. Nice. Right. Okay. Question for you, Fran. Okay. So some exercises for flexibility at home without dumbbells. Well, good question. First of all,

I think that we can get a little bit stuck into thinking that if we don't have weights at home, we can't effectively do any type of stretching that isn't static stretching. But actually, if we're looking at all of the variety of the exercises that we offer in our flexibility plans, we can totally have an effective stretching routine without necessarily using weights.

So obviously we talked before about using weights when the hamstrings are tight because the weights can help you push into like a further range of motion that you perhaps wouldn't be able to access otherwise. But there are different ways like you were mentioning before, like the contracted relax facilitation stretches are really great because essentially you use your own strength, your own like body to create tension within the muscle fibers and that will ultimately lead you to...

finding more space to move into. Let's say for example in a butterfly pose, so when you sit on the floor with your sole of the feet touching together and the knees out wide. For a lot of people it can be quite tricky to access more range, we're just sitting there and waiting for things to happen. I for one really struggled with it for a long time and then I tried to use some PLF, so I basically used my own strength.

by pressing the hands onto my knees and trying to recruit my knees upwards in kind of a sort of isometric effort and it completely unlocked my tailor's pose and I didn't need to use dumbbells or kettlebells or any kind of weight to do that. I just needed to create strength by using the rest of my body to create a little bit of tension and it was really useful. So I would say that's a great way to find flexibility without weights and perhaps also dynamic stretching. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I like, I like dynamic stretching. I think you, you kind of, we've said this already in a sense that there's much more than tempo stretching. There's much more than static stretching. The idea of weights is ultimately just assistance to get you deeper into a stretch. Like I said, get you a little bit deeper than you would otherwise go. And so you can, you can find that little bit deeper, that little bit further, that intensity in loads of different ways. You said PNF stretching, which is a great example of using your own body or even sometimes a wall or the floor to create.

block and you push against that block. So it's like an overcoming style of isometric. And this this facilitates more relaxation upon relaxing. Actually, it's the tension which goes through the tendon, it creates more tension around the Golgi tendon organ, which is this little kind of receptor, which senses tension. And when you have an active, active contraction for that tendon, it amplifies the sensation of stretch. So upon relaxation, your muscles going to feel more relaxed than it was before the contraction. So there's

There's loads of different ways we can play around with getting more assistance into the stretch. And yeah, dynamic stretching, there's loads of different options. Fantastic. Okay, moving on. If I am sore from stretching the next day, more light stretching or stop for a bit? Yeah, good question. So stretching can cause DOMS or delayed onset muscle soreness, particularly if you're doing dynamic stretching, ballistic stretching.

tempo stretching, all these things that push you a bit further. And the more we look at like the science of stretching as well, we know that actually that's really important, particularly if you want to develop strength through range. And so you will get sore, most likely if you're pushing your stretching hard enough and the frequency of that's really important. And so generally if you're doing stretching, that is going to make you sore. You do not really want to repeat that the second day on. It's not the kind of stretching you're going to do daily. It's not relaxed stretching, but you can do some form of stretching the day after.

I think the question there is, is it useful? So your sore is the next day on, you're probably feeling a bit tight and that actually that gives you the sensation of, well, maybe I should do a bit more stretching just to regain my mobility and so that I can move a bit better with this delayed onset muscle soreness. And I think the argument here is yes, you definitely could do more, but the key which was in the question is, can I do some more relaxed stretching? So it needs to be really light if you're going to optimize recovery.

If you push yourself into hard stretching again, or even strength training when you've got soreness, the quality of that session is not going to be very good. You're probably not going to get to a good range of motion. So maybe it's not effective as a session itself. And yet you're going to reduce recovery. So I would say you can do relaxed stretching. It's probably not going to have the biggest impact on your long -term performance, but if it's going to help you move better that day, then absolutely. But you need to keep it relaxed just so you're not impacting that recovery.

So yeah, frequency is a really important thing, but it's always balanced with intensity as well. Totally. Like if you're feeling super sore after a session the next day and you want to have a climbing session and you need to gain a little bit of range of motion again, I would say go for it, light stretching all the way. But we are definitely putting the intention before the frequency, I would say, of the flexibility training. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can do that light stretching every day. Just go easy on it, you know, get nice and relaxed. Awesome. Cool.

Okay, this is a good question. It's going to be a depends, but what are the best flexibility exercises related to climbing? Big and broad question for sure. Great one as well. So I think we can think of flexibility for climbing into two different sort of categories. One would be your goals. So if you...

have like a specific project or if you're struggling with a specific move for climbing that will dictate, potentially dictate your flexibility training. And the other one, which sometimes can be kind of like the same in a way, is where your weaknesses lie in your flexibility, in your general flexibility. So let's say for example, you are a sport climber and you try in like a big route where it has only one decent rest and it's like a really wide high heel look.

La Rambla. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. And that is perhaps something that you're not terrible at, but you are really looking forward to sending this project or working on it. Maybe you could choose to go down the route of working something that is already a semi -strength just to get it to perform for you within your climbing. On the other hand, let's say you just enjoy climbing and there's no specific project, so no specific rush.

you perhaps want to train your flexibility more for your wellbeing or overall life quality, then I would say that you could start looking into improving first what the biggest weaknesses in your flexibility are. And you could find out what they are by doing our flex assessment, which is available on our website for free. And it would just show you basically...

the main components, the main muscle groups that we would look into improving for climbing like hamstrings, adductors, hip flexors, and lats and lower back. Yeah, we kind of break it down into movements, don't we? So you take the shoulder, you've got internal rotation, external rotation, overhead flexion, it's all limited by different muscles. So we're really trying to just isolate specific areas rather than look at climbing moves, for example. But I think, yeah, for me,

If I get asked what's the best exercise for climbing, then I'm probably just gonna say what do you do? I think we kind of categorize things a little bit like sport climbing. You can generalize a little bit that you're thinking about being more vertical terrain, open hips to the wall. So like the frog pose, like abductors. I think you said butterflies. The butterfly pose is like your absolute favorite stretch. And I was thinking if it's like that squat position, just being able to get down, just like basic squats.

Like a goblet squat or wait, what's the yoga squat called? Malasana. Yeah, Malasana squat. It's the same. Just being able to do that, I think is a wicked skill that transfers to your high steps, to your glute flexibility, to your ankle flexibility. Pick something that does a lot of things in one movement. Yeah, definitely. Especially if you don't have a lot of time to commit to flexibility training, it's best to just start with one solid exercise and then start to build it on slowly.

so that you can get maybe a little bit of buy -in before you move into a more complex training as well. But yeah. yeah. I mean, I think my training got more complex, but it's also now gotten way simpler again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, same, same. It started with like, I'm stretching my hamstring in a static pose to do a tempo stretches and strength like development. And then now it's like back to static stretching before climbing. Yeah, yeah. It changes over time, doesn't it? Yeah. Okay, moving on.

Upper body stretches for climbing. This question, this person says that they have a lot of effective lower body, but not many upper body exercises. Okay, yeah, good question. So I think if you see a lot more emphasis on lower body stretches just in the climbing community in general, that's because it probably impacts performance a bit faster, right? So more movement options become available.

when you have more lower body flexibility. But of course upper body flexibility is really important. And I think I'm going to go and kind of refer to what you're just saying here as well, Fran, about it depends what you want to stretch in your upper body. So I think when we just reach our hand overhead, which is what most climbers want to be able to do and maintain and be good at, then you need to look at the muscles which might limit that. And so when we move our hand overhead, the pec gets stretched, the lats gets stretched, and also the internal rotator cuff.

the interesting thing that the pec getting stretched is why that's so important for doing the one -arm pull -up and like shoulder stability because that, that overhead position stretches out the pec. So this is a strong internal rotator. so I think if you're looking at doing that, I personally would try and pick maybe just three exercises, which look at external rotation of the shoulder joint. So this is the rotator cuff. I've seen some people with really tight internal rotation, but, and you'll see a difference between left and right.

Myself. If you've ever had a shoulder injury, it's worth testing. I've definitely seen this in a lot, including myself, like a shoulder that was annoying me for six months to a year. And when I looked at internal rotation, it was so different. And so opening up that really benefited me. And I think that's kind of a prerequisite. You want a decent amount of external rotation of the shoulder joint. And then you're looking at the bigger muscle groups like the pecs and the lats. And if those are really tight, that will also limit your overhead movement.

It's super important for how you apply strength as well. If you're in a stretch position, you'd have less crossover of the contractile elements of the muscles. So you're just not strong. And we can improve our strength through range by getting more flexible. It's super important part of our training. So yeah, I think the only one I haven't mentioned is internal rotation of the shoulder joint. And you'll see this in like mantles, if you ever climbed in like sandstone bouldering where you slope your top outs, awkward mantles, competition bouldering where you're stemming in corners and stuff.

internal rotation comes into that a bit there too, but I think we're getting maybe getting a bit niche. So I just look at shoulder flexion first, being able to reach overhead and not be limited by range of motion. Yeah, totally agree there. And I would say that as well, it's important to remember that the shoulders are also a part of the body that is really in demand in climbing. So we want to find the perfect balance between being strong and being flexible whilst.

maybe with the legs and the lower body, we can push the range a little bit more without sort of thinking necessarily that we're going to like increase the risk of injury whilst the shoulders can be a little bit trickier. And so we are usually a bit more careful with it. Yeah. Good point. And in fact, I think your question was what's like the best exercise and I didn't even suggest an exercise today. I skirted around that one, but you made a good point about the strength of the shoulder being almost more important than the strength of the hip.

And that's partly because of the anatomy of that. That joint is so much more mobile. And when I say mobile, I mean the, the arthrokinematics of the joint itself. It's, it's a smaller cup. and so we need to have more strength around that to, to make sure it's stable. You'll hear loads more shoulder dislocations and you do hip locations. And that's because the anatomy of that joint is just able to go in more ranges of motion. and so you want to be really strong there. So if I was to give one exercise that I really like is.

a modified dumbbell lat pullover. And if you just Google dumbbell lat pullover, you'll see a lot of like bodybuilders doing this exercise. You just lay on a bench and you'll probably be perpendicular to it. So it's just your shoulders resting on that bench and you offer the weight behind you and it pulls you into shoulder overhead shoulder flexion with weight. And so you can do tempo stretching here. You could just hold that weight for 30 seconds stretch if you wanted to. Feels pretty awesome. Yeah, it's really nice stretch through the mid back as well. Like you can get thoracic extension there.

And if you ever want to like explode out of a dyno, you want to be able to go through extension, not just in your shoulders, but through your, your spine, through your rib cage. so I think that I love that exercise because you can make it more of a range flexibility exercise. So you're looking at just more longer holds, slower tempo, lighter weight, but you can also then just go, right, I'm not going to push the range anymore, but I'm going to get really strong in this and start lifting heavier weights for that range of motion. But you know, be careful with that one. You don't want to go really heavy and maximal range at the same time. Yeah.

It would be hard to come back from the full extended position. Yeah, well, you can always let go of the weight and it just drops behind you. But like it's a funny looks in the gym. But yeah, it's a good exercise that one. Definitely. Okay, right. Next one. How am I already kind of touched upon this one, but let's go into this a bit more. How to increase range of motion in your rotator cuff. Okay. So the rotator cuff, we're talking about the shoulder joints. So the one that sits basically.

where your arm attaches to your torso. And when I think of rotator cuff, as the name suggests, the most important function of a rotator cuff is that it makes your arm rotate relative to your shoulder, relative to your torso. And when we look at the sports demands, we can definitely see that external and internal rotation, as well as flexion, which is touched upon before. So being able to raise your arm overhead are the things that come up the most.

And so when we're looking at external rotation, we're thinking about sort of that baseball like throw where you're bringing your arm behind, your hand behind your shoulder. And when we're looking at internal rotation, we can think of like arm wrestling, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like the example of external rotation. If you, in fact, Google like external rotation, baseball pitcher or baseball player, the amount of external rotation they have is wild. Like I've never seen any other sport have that much.

level of external rotation, it goes, it goes like, it goes beyond what you think is like 90 degrees beyond what you're normally seeing climbers going further past. You'll say there's like a specific surgery called Tommy surgery, which is about repairing the, the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow because they go to such extreme range of motion and they're doing it with as much power as they can. So you see a lot of injuries when the movement patterns a little bit off of that one.

But climbers don't need that much external rotation in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely not. I would almost be counterproductive maybe. But we definitely want to see at least maybe like a 10, 15 degrees of external rotation if you think of zero being your hand and your elbow are sitting in 90 degrees to your shoulder, like straight to your shoulder. Yeah, pointing up towards the sky. Yeah, exactly. Because it can be really useful to be able to kind of pull...

and engage the shoulders in that position if you think of movements like gas stones or really vertig, critical stuff in which there needs to be as much power from the shoulder as well as from the fingers. And contrary, internalization is also really important for mantling and Magnus Mitber style climbing. Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah. He's like, kind of gets like a volume by his chest and like presses down on it. Yeah. So I think that if I had to go for two...

exercises related to external and internal rotation, I would go for maybe like a external rotation contract relax or banded pull where you get like a band attached to a solid structure and you just pull your hand forward towards the front of your body and create the sort of that both stretching and extension and strengthening of the rotator cuff.

and then maybe if you are lacking in internal rotation, one of my favorite is sleeper stretch. Yeah, the sleeper stretch is really good. As the name says, it kind of get into a sleeping position and then sideways. And then you just work on opening up the range into the internal rotation. Yeah, nice. Cool. So let's see, what would you be, what would you be your advice for a nerve induced range limitation from the sciatic?

Right. Okay. This is, I think you kind of touched upon this with the hamstrings as well. We can feel tension through the back of the leg. I've got like a bunch of medical ones. They have the hypermobility one as well. So I'll, it's probably worth mentioning here that I think sciatica again is like a medical diagnosis and there can be different causes for sciatica and different severity. So I'm not going to try and give advice on how to get rid of sciatica or treat it. But I do have some advice around working around it as a condition because it's.

something that I've worked with people that have satica. And so I think the first thing here is when we're stretching, it can make satica worse because it puts compression over the satic nerve. Like as soon as your hamstrings tighten up and your calves tighten up around that nerve, it can increase that sensation of satica is, you know, compressing and pulling on that nerve at the same time, which is ultimately going to kind of piss it off. And you don't want to, you don't want to piss it off, especially nerves. They can, they can be angry for a while if you do really frustrate them. So.

What I would say first off, Fran mentioned at the beginning, stretching your calves like that sciatic nerve runs all the way down into the calf as well. So stretching the calf in isolation to the hamstring is a nice way to sometimes remove that sensation of sciatica in the hamstring when you stretch that individually too. The other thing we pretty much always say, and sometimes it just goes for people that don't have sciatica as well and can feel that nerve tension is stretch your hamstrings with a bend in the knee.

remember that the hamstring muscles, they start at the hip joint, but they're connected to the pelvis. So they cross the joint at the hip and they cross the joint at the knee. And so you can flex the knee or flex the hip and bring hamstrings into a stretch. You're just doing it from the other end. Most people when they stretch hamstrings, they have a straight leg and they fold at the hip. And what this means is obviously that knee is straight and sometimes, especially if you're a little, you kind of hyperextended the knee a bit, you can get compression.

or you can pull that static nerve over the back of the knee joint. And you can get that feeling if you've ever had that feeling of tension in the back of the knee, when you're doing a hamstring stretch, the muscles don't cross over the back of the knee, they kind of run on the medial and lateral like the inside outside of the knee. So that tension you're feeling is not really a muscle stretch. That's probably tension over the static nerve. Yeah, so, so essentially, that soft bend in the knee, if you're bending from the hip, or just think about, you know,

bending, extending from the knee when you've already got flexion in the hip. You can do different forms of stretching. So I would, my recommendation is work around it. Stretch the calves and make sure if you're doing hamstring stretching, you try to avoid ever having a fully locked out knee because that can make it worse too. It's also really hard to find like a good hip hinge with a fully locked out knee, I would say. So that makes it even harder to target the hamstring in general. So I always kind of recommend a soft bend in the knee.

despite like whether it's for sciatic nerve or not, because I think it just makes the experience of stretching the hamstring a lot nicer. Yeah, totally. And if you can improve the experience of stretching, that will help a lot of people, I think. Definitely. Okay, cool. So, just mentioned motivation. This is a timely question. I can't seem to find the motivation to stretch consistently. What could motivate me to stretch more often? We all have been there, haven't we? I feel like...

any type of training, there is that kind of like, dip in of motivation at some point. And I just want to start by saying that it's completely normal to not always have motivations behind your training. And it's also completely normal to go through cycles of training and not training in my opinion. But when it comes down to flexibility, especially maybe at the beginning of a flexibility training, it is quite important, as we mentioned before, that we maintain some kind of frequency to it because the...

stimulus needs to be quite high for a body to start changing and seeing results and the flexibility. And so there are a few ways that maybe we can make a stretching a bit more interesting or a little bit more engaging. So rather than maybe going into a stretching session thinking, God, I'm going to have to hold this for 30 seconds and then this three times or whatever, you can think perhaps of putting an intention or a focus into your stretching. So you can think of...

for example, task tracking your stretching by creating a target for yourself. So let's take again a hamstring stretch, since the hamstring seems to be so popular. If we are looking to just do a stretch of the hamstring, you might just think of, okay, I'm going to fold forward six times and hold the stretch, whatever. But if we put in a track into it, if we put in an intention, we could think, all right, I'm going to try and aim to touch.

my toes with the tip of my fingers and then as you progress you will notice that maybe even if it hasn't changed much in the next three sets you will be able to touch your toes with the knuckles or even between the fingers and the knuckles and so that can make it a little bit more interesting, exciting, engaging to see smaller changes in the body without necessarily having to do a flex assessment every time you do a flexibility session. And the other one that I really like to think about is...

Again, the intention in terms of where your focus is. So it's easy to kind of get lost a little bit in your thoughts, especially if you're doing static stretching, you can sit into, let's take a butterfly pose again, and then just sit there and wait for things to happen. But you could also think of what sensations you're feeling and how you can increase them. Say, you can think about contracting your glutes and try and recruit your knees further apart and pushing down into the ground.

or you can think of staying nice and upright with the spine and really find that kind of nice anterior tilt of the pelvis. And so there's little thoughts that can happen whilst you train, I think can be quite motivating and also can be quite nice to sort of start to learn. I feel like I know my body a lot better since I started stretching because I am more in tune with it and I know how it feels moving into certain positions, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I think I can...

I can hear your yoga background coming through in that answer. You get a lot of motivation out of awareness and like kind of movement literacy and stuff. Yeah, definitely. But I think it's a good experience. It's like for people who like stretching also for like this, I guess more like mental side of it. I think that becoming aware of your body, it can be quite a nice like breakthrough experience. What would you say? What is it for you? Motivation in stretching?

Yeah, okay. So for me, I think I would absolutely agree with the first point you said. That's probably the number one for me is being able to measure your increases in range of motion. I think the reason a lot of people just give up with stretching or even would say that it's not effective is because they've often not measured it acutely enough to know if a session is effective, if an exercise is effective.

And there's loads of little clever ways you can just measure it. So like you said, if you're, if you're just folding towards your feet, can you touch it with your fingers, your knuckles, your fists, your palms? Like, and if you can't touch the floor, put a yoga block on the floor. Can you touch that yoga block, your finger, fist, knuckles, palms? Like you have all these little touch points and like, if you're doing a tempo exercise, can you get that dumbbell to hit a target? And then can you make the target smaller and smaller and smaller? and I've, I've, you know, the past like three, four years, pretty much most of my stretching has always had some measurability in it so that I know.

if I'm doing well that session, if the session is getting better over weeks and months. And so I just know if my training is working. And I also am confident that I'm not doing training, which just feels pointless to me. I don't think anyone's motivated by training, which feels pointless, right? So yeah, know if it's working. And if it isn't working, you're probably right to get a bit demotivated with it and just feel like it's not worth doing. But then we would always argue there's something else to do, something else to try, because there's lots of options. So many options. Yeah, I think that's maybe...

Like the final point is that if you have lost motivation, maybe it could also just be time to switch it up. Maybe you've had the same routine for like, I don't know, a whole year and you've lost motivation. It can be quite like normal to lose motivation when you keep the same exercises for a long time. So looking into new ways of stretching could be motivating itself. Yeah. I might add one more point and say that sometimes there is a school of thought that motivation is not a good thing to use for your training.

And I don't know if I fully agree with this, because I think enjoyment is really important. But sometimes you have to push through dips in motivation, particularly if you're really committed to a goal. And so I would say there is another thing that I always try to employ when I'm working with clients is there is some training that you'll do, which is not motivating, and it's not fun to do. But I would always try and build habits around that so that it becomes something you just do and you don't need to be motivated for.

You know, you're not motivated to brush your teeth in the evening necessarily, but you know it's a long -term thing that's good for you, so you do it anyways. It's not like, I'm psyched to go brush my teeth tonight. So you're not going to necessarily feel that about your stretching sessions. But if you can have that calf that in the evening or just as part of your warmup, as part of your cool down or something, and it just becomes a habit, then you don't need motivation for it. It's just something you do. Very true, very true. Okay, we're going for a very,

specific question here. What do you think of eccentric induced sarcoplasmic hypoplasia? What do I think of it? Eccentric induced sarcoplasmic hypoplasia? Okay, we should explain what it is. I'm gonna I'm gonna break that down a little bit. I'm also not 100 % sure how to answer what do I think of it? Because it's kind of it's just a physiological response. So let's talk about sarcoplasmic hypoplasia first. Let's just say

When we strength train, and including when we stretch, we can see muscle growth, right? Our muscles actually get bigger. And I may well take it in that direction, because there's some cool stuff about stretching and muscle growth. So typically in research, you measure muscle growth as cross sectional area. And so the muscle is getting bigger. But within that, there's different forms of muscle growth. And we can separate hypertrophy and hyperplasia, at least.

sarcoplasmic hyperplasia, that kind of refers to the increase in volume, almost like water inside the muscle fibers themselves. They're getting larger, but we're not getting an increase necessarily in the contractile units of that muscle. And so I guess it's kind of what you would assume if you're feeling like you get a pump, maybe you've got big show muscles, but they're not very strong. We might think that there's quite a lot of sarcoplasmic hyperplasia. So we're growing muscle size, but we're not necessarily growing in contractile elements.

But what we typically want from training is the hypertrophy. And so maybe what we're saying here is that eccentric training is going to increase a psychoplasmic hyperplasia more so than other forms of training. And actually, I'm not an expert in that. I don't really know if that's true or not. From what I've seen, that the studies that do look at this kind of thing in the hypertrophy is that...

This is shown quite a lot in animal studies, but I don't know if this is shown so much in human studies. So I can't say whether eccentric training is, is going to excessively increase the size of a muscle without actually increasing its strength. potentially that's true because we know there's less muscle activity and eccentric contraction and then concentric contraction. But if I can pull this into the world of stretching a little bit where we're not going to be doing really heavy eccentrics or accentuated eccentrics, we are doing slow eccentrics and then a lot of isometrics too.

What we really want and what I am more psyched about is the hypertrophy of the muscle, which is due to increase and contract our units, because this increases our strength. This is the really cool bit. This is really important bit. But what I think is even cooler again, is that there's two different forms of hypertrophy and to pull it into strength versus flexibility training that depending on what we do, we're going to get different forms of hypertrophy. The first is like a contraction mediated hypertrophy. And this is going to be increases in.

the cross sectional area, the more contractile units within the muscle fiber itself. But when we do stretching, and importantly, when we're stretching at a sufficient intensity and sufficient durations, we're going to get more muscle fiber length, right? So we're increasing the length of the muscle fiber. And this is what we're doing is we're adding sarcomeres in series. So the interesting thing about this is when we're...

creating more sarcomeres. These are the little contractile units that kind of like stacked on each other within a muscle fiber. And you can think of these contractile units as like your fingers being intertwined and like sliding in and grasping each other. When we create more of these in series, it means the resting length of the muscle fiber actually has more crossover. And so the most cool part of flexibility training for climbing is this increase in sarcomeres, sarcomereogenesis.

it increases or rather stretches out the strength length relationship or force length relationship. Sorry, tension, length tension relationship. That's a mouthful. There's a lot of big words really hard to say. Okay. And so what we end up doing when we have this growth of sarcomeres, we get stronger at longer muscle lengths. So if you want to be able to apply force when stretched out, you want to be able to pull harder on a heel hook when it's by your head.

What we really want is not just to be more flexible, more bendy, be able to relax and get your foot there. You want to have sufficient intensity in your training so that you are creating longer muscle length, more sarcomeres so that you're stretching out that length tension relationship. And then you're stronger at longer muscle lengths. And so this is the coolest part of what we're always trying to do with our flexibility training. The research suggests it needs to be quite intense. You need to do it for quite a long time. That's why we're going to use things like tempo stretching to make sure we're getting that stretch.

into a far enough position, that's what stimulates sarcomyrogenesis. If we're doing lots of relaxed stretching, the time might be quite high, but if the intensity isn't there, if we're not stressing those sarcomy to stretch to a certain point, we won't reach the threshold for that sarcomyogenesis, that increase in muscle length. And yeah, so I've gone off on a tangent now, but honestly, I don't know too much about the increase in cross sectional area due to non -contractile hypertrophy, just that, you know, what do we call it?

Sarcoplasmic hypoplasia. Yeah, okay. So yeah, what do I think about it? It's not that interesting for me. I'm way more interested in the idea of growing muscle length because we get stronger at longer lengths and that's what I want for climbing and my clients. Exactly, we are all about climbing, I suppose. So that's what we're focusing on and yeah. Sorry if that's like a...

bit of kermacross is a bit gibberish there. Lots of big words and it's kind of hard to make it simplified. Hopefully that makes sense. But basically, we stretch hard enough, long enough, we get longer muscles, we apply force at longer lengths, and we kind of simplify this present strength through range, right? You want to be stronger, longer muscle lengths, and that's super important. Perfect. They summed it up quite well. Okay, right.

Can you train flexibility and strength at the same time? I feel like we keep setting these up. But honestly, I'm just like, I haven't even ordered this list of questions. Maybe it's the universe that is feeding us into nicely going one question after the other. Well, as you may have just heard, of course, you can train flexibility and strength at the same time. And I think this is where perhaps a lot of people are still...

Not going wrong, but perhaps I still have misconceptions of flexibility training. Maybe coming from a yoga background, I've come across so many people that just considered stretching or flexibility training as like static stretching or isometric holds. And whilst these can be really beneficial, it's not necessarily the only way. And what we have seen with climbers specifically or sports that demand to be

strong and flexible at the same time, the strength through flexibility, strength through range is like almost fundamental. Like we would not give out a flexibility training plan without considering whether the client needs to also strengthen the range that they're working with. Yeah, I mean, that's ultimately bridging the gap between training flexibility and applying it to our sport. Right. Exactly. So,

Yeah, the short answer is yes, you can definitely train flexibility and strength. And the way that you do it is to apply more intense stretching, more intense exercises to your flexibility training. Like we mentioned before, tempo stretching with weights or contract, relax, facilitate stretching can also be quite useful, especially at like the super short or the super long ranges of muscles.

And generally just considering flexibility training as an active motion rather than a static one in which we use gravity or external forces to feel the stretch. We want to really think about being able to find the stretch by actively engaging our muscles. And that's how we can, yeah, more or less find strength through range, I guess is the easiest way of saying it. Yeah. To make the strength part of that more nuanced is there's two sides to.

the joint, there's two sides to the coin, because we want to be strong in lifting, there's the lifting or shortening side of the joint. So if you're picking your foot up for a high step, you want your hamstrings potentially, your glutes and all these muscles to lengthen without resistance, you don't want that internal resistance to stop you from getting your foot up. Then there's also the strength of your hip flexors, which is the shortening side of the joint. So

You want to be strong lifting and then you'll be strong standing up on that foot when your muscles are lengthened. So there's two sides of that strength and we want to be strong in both of those. And that's typically what we train in both days. So I think I'd add one bit here with the strength element, which I think maybe people get wrong sometimes as well. As I said before, if you just get longer muscles, your strength kind of shifts to longer muscle lengths. That's super important. Powerlifters do that.

you know, strength training, people do that. You see people doing deficit deadlifts, they're training to get stronger in a conventional deadlift because they can pick up the weight from deeper, it's going to shift their strength further down so that the first portion of that lift gets easier to do. But the other side of it is just getting like really strong by doing isometrics or doing, you know, tempo stretching. But what you need to be careful for is you don't want to train at maximum intensity.

and maximum length at the same time. I think that's risky. I think you're going to get too much muscle soreness. I think when you're going to maximum lengths, be understanding that your muscle is not strong when it's at maximum lengths, so you don't need much weight and you don't need to go too heavy. You're going to gain control, you're going to coordinate the muscle at those lengths, you're going to shift the length tension curve and that's all really important. And then you can lift really heavy and change strength and flexibility at the same time but...

you need to understand that you're probably not going to get maximum range if you start lifting heavier weights. In fact, maybe you shouldn't be going maximum range. You can almost tell, right? Because if you get a weight that is a little bit too heavy for your full range of motion, you feel really protective around your joint. You almost don't want to let go or relax into the position deeper. So that might be a good tell sign to go a little lighter with your weight. If you feel like, let's say, for example, you're doing a pancake rep in which you're...

are straddle with your legs and fall forward towards the ground with like 15 kilos behind your back. And you get only like halfway and then you start feeling all of your muscles contracting. It's probably because they're trying to protect you from getting injured or going further. And if you diminish the weight and you are able to go further, then it's a sign that the 15 kilos are definitely too heavy. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It can go the other way as well. The strength focus can get in the way of your flexibility focus and vice versa. Okay.

Okay, so next up is in wide bridge rest. So yeah, I guess wide bridge rest. Okay. I can't maximize the time due to glute medius cramping. Any advice? Okay, cool. Right. We kind of mentioned this in the previous question. I mentioned that there's two sides to the strength. There's so the glute medius cramp you're feeling is in what I call or we call the shortening side of the joint. So when you go into that bridge position,

your legs are getting wider, your adductors are lengthening, potentially hamstrings are lengthening. But the shortening side is the glutes, which are kind of pulling your leg up into that position. And you're feeling cramping in that muscle. Now we do a lot of exercises, right, where we actually train the shortening side of the joint. And if we'd have worked with your clients, we're like, just to let you know, you might get cramps when you're doing this. And...

I don't understand fully why this happens, but I believe it's because you're putting your muscle to really short length and your muscle's not necessarily very good at coordinating a contraction. And so it just kind of goes haywire and you get like an overstimulation of muscle signals and it just cramps up because it's in a really short length. And if you've ever experienced like a cramp in your foot, sometimes it's happened because you've put on a tight pair of shoes and you've got like an arch, which is a really short length. So these cramps tend to happen at like short lengths.

What I would say is, and we do this with clients, is we tell them it gets better over time. You just got to stick with the exercise. And as you get more coordinated and as your muscle understands how to contract at these shorter lengths, the cramping just kind of goes away after time. Unless you get more flexible and then you push it to a shorter range again, which is what we're also trying to do often. It never ends. But what I would suggest is there's an exercise we call the fire hydrant. It's also sometimes called the pissing dog.

or rather it's more, we're often called pissing dog. I call it far hydrant because it feels a little bit more PC, but, essentially you're like on all fours, and on your hands and knees and you just like, you cock a leg to the side and you're going to have a bent leg or a straight leg. You kind of want it to be in line with your hip line and you pull it up to the side. And this, this, contracts the glutes basically. You're lifting your leg to a bridge and this is an exercise to train your glute strength.

to adduct the leg in that kind of position. And I'd work on doing that in a position where you get as far as you can. Don't use much resistance. You want to be nice and light so you can really maximize range of motion and do this exercise to basically train your glutes to contract at that really short muscle length. And you should find that the cramping starts to go away, but also you get stronger and more control in that position. So your bridging will get more stable too.

Definitely, that was a game changer for my side splits. So I would definitely recommend it before doing five hydrants. I was barely able to hold it in a wide straddle. And then after, well, six months of training, I was able to feel really comfortable in the same length that I wasn't before. So, yep. Cool. I'm going to need your help to read this because I'm...

I'm dyslexic and I have no idea how you say this word. What are some propadiotic exercises to do before starting to train the pancake stretch? Okay, so propadiotic, I suppose it just means that can teach you or they can like help you understand the movement before you do the movement. So, thanks. I was like, I only know this because I'm Italian and it's the same word in Italian. Okay. Well, I suppose it's Latin, but.

So yes, I guess that we do have a few that we would consider applying to pancake training, especially when there's little awareness around the position of the hip and the pelvis and the spine in pancake. So before I mentioned the exercises, maybe we should talk a little bit about the hip hinge and the anterior pelvic tilt in the pancake position. Actually, can you tell us what a pancake is? I feel like some people don't know what a pancake is and that's they're going to be thinking of the food, which is completely fair.

So it's probably worth describing what a pancake stretch is. Yes, so effectively a pancake is a straddle position with your legs, so you will have your feet nice and wide. And then on top of that, you fold forward with your chest to the floor. So that's the ultimate goal, I guess. Trying to get as flat as a pancake. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So there is a lot of anatomy involved when it comes to doing that with your body. First of all, like having your hamstring

extending quite a lot and then as well as that you are in a straddle position which means that your abductors and adductors are also taken into consideration so in an after thigh and on top of that we also are folding forward so there is a lot of recruitment through the hip flexors and there needs to be like a little bit of a positioning that happens in the spine in the lower back. So to make it simple,

The one thing that we need to look out for is to be able to kind of be able to fold with a straight spine. And we see this a lot with clients. They are aiming maybe to get into their deepest pancake, but they are going down by bringing their head down and then everything else stays like kind of rounded and away from the floor, which is totally fair. But over time you want to really focus on recruiting and opening up that sort of lower back and hip area. And...

When you start training pancake, one of the first things that we would consider giving you is maybe like a standing or a leaning pancake so that you can find that sort of 90 degree fold of the hips without necessarily having to move your upper body but just moving the legs.

Moving on.

final for you actually. I've got more questions for you than you have for me. Is it necessary to warm up before a flex routine? Is it necessary? yeah okay I like this question. I like this question a lot because there's nuance to it. Is it necessary? No. That's the short answer. Is it beneficial? Yes. If you can warm up for stretching you will have a better session. The amount you need to warm up is going to be individual. Too much is going to be...

negative. Your muscles don't like stretching if they're tired. So that's why you don't really want to have a good stretching session after a 30 minute run. Maybe after warming up for like three to five minutes, that's fine. But ultimately, I don't warm up that much myself. And if my clients ask me, do I need to do a good warm up for this? I'll say, do whatever you think is necessary for your warm up. But generally, I wouldn't spend more than five minutes on it because it

becomes a huge barrier to training. And maybe this comes back to the motivation question we had before is remove all barriers, remove exercises you don't like, that's a big barrier. And when people feel like they need to do a big warmup for a session that, or maybe you're already not that psyched on, it just adds another barrier to exercise. So what I always suggest with the stretches is always add one set of that stretch in, which is basically just to relax into it and open up that range of motion. The first set's never gonna be that good. If I'm in a pancake and I do my first set of pancake folds,

I'm not going to reach my maximum range and therefore I'm not going to have time and attention built up at long muscle lengths, which is required to improve my flexibility. And so I'm going to do one set just to essentially warm up that specific position. And I'm going to do a second set and maybe a third set. And so I think it's important that you do some warming up. You need your stretching to be effective, but I wouldn't suggest that you need to do like a long general warmup. You need to do a pulse razor. You need to move everything. So generally my, my.

take on this is do a little bit of cardio if you want to get your muscles warmer, your core temperature up. I generally skip that because I think it's just a little bit awkward to do in the house. I'm not going to do star jumps. What I generally do do is I do like Cossack squats and split squats. So I'm doing an active movement with just body weight and I'll do enough reps. That's going to make me feel warm. And I might do a couple of sets of those too. And this is for lower body stretching anyways. But if I do a couple of sets of Cossack squats, a couple of sets of split squats.

I could do that within a few minutes and then I can go straight into my exercises. Something we mentioned earlier as well is like calf stretching for hamstring stretching. I'll do stuff to facilitate the session as well. Like if I'm going to do some hamstring stretches, I might stretch my calves. Yeah, basic things like that. But I actually think... It's very personal, isn't it? It is very personal, but being really strict on the warmup, I think just is going to get in the way for a lot of people. So yes, it makes it better if you can be really good with your warmup, but ultimately you're still going to have good...

I've had good sessions and I shouldn't just rely on my own anecdotal evidence here, but I've seen lots of clients make really good progress with my kind of approach to doing a really minimal warmup with just squatting, maybe some leg swings and that's about it really. Yeah, I come from a bit of a dancing background and like I'm a bit of a sucker for dynamic stretching before doing a session, but I use that more as a pulse raiser than anything else. So I'll do some front kicks, side kicks and that usually does it. Yeah.

So yeah. Minimal warmup.

should I do if I sprained my hip flexor? okay. So this is my medical question, I guess. Have you ever sprained hip flexor by the way?

that I can remember. I think I have doing a really wide drop knee. I was basically doing like a front split on the wall. so the front hip flexor contracted or was it the one that you was... The back leg? Yeah, the back leg which is extended so I think I sprained it at like a long muscle length just trying to like basically be in a front split like bridge position and then like trying to like push and pull at the same time and I definitely felt it go and I was like kind of struggled to walk for about three days afterwards. no.

Well, I had like massive cramps after like long runs, but they were probably just from muscle fatigue than anything else. But I would say generally, first of all, again, we're not medical professionals, so we can't advise on what exactly you should do for a sprained hip flexor. But if we're looking at flexibility training, let's say you are currently training flexibility and you happen to be sprain your hip flexor, the first thing that you want to do is drop the intensity and the volume.

making sure that you're not making it worse by aggravating it or adding stretching of any kind. And then I suppose if it persists, then it's definitely worth talking to a physio or someone that can advise on what's the best way to move forward. Yeah, I would say that generally we are trying to stay away from advising the public to what to do with injuries, but we always try to...

kind of work around it, like you said before with the, what was it, the rotator cuff? Yeah, yeah, it's just about modifying your sessions to work around it, which is what we generally do when we come into injuries. And we work to be with work leads climbers and climbers get injured. So it just happens. And yeah, we're not there to prescribe rehab, such that should always come from a medical professional, a physiotherapist, but we will try and work around it.

And so I think for me, it's about dropping the intensity, dropping the range of motion, which is kind of how we drop intensity and flexibility training. And then making sure that when you get back to it, and I imagine you want to get back to stretching the hip flexor, because that's something that is sprained, is trying to regain range of motion, but slowly with slow intensity. When the range of motion comes back, then you can start building the intensity. But I would go for range of motion before intensity. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Cool.

Right, one more question. We could do this. How to translate flexibility onto the wall mobility. So I guess how to, yeah. Yeah, how to move better. Bring your flexibility training into your application, into your climbing. Yeah. Okay, so personally, let's go personally. Let's answer this from a perspective. I like to kind of warm up.

with some kind of flexibility routine, maybe like a short one. And then when I start climbing, I usually start climbing with really easy climbs that just get like my body warm, my fingers warm. And at the same time, I really love, maybe this is a little bit weird, but I really love like doing the down climb by pushing like my high step more and more. So I do like a reverse high step. And it has been like really useful to then feel.

ready to do an actual high step under the wall. So let's say like I'm climbing a white at the depo or like an easy one, a VB, VBasics. And I'll just like, instead of jumping down, I'll use the opportunity of down climbing to explore ranges of motion in like an eccentric motion, which should feel a little easier. And I'll just...

slowly move, maybe get into like a little bit of a frog or like drop the knee as I move down just to explore how my body feels that day and it does usually do the job. I do the same with heel hooks as well, you know, like put your heel by your hand but then like lower into it so you can like stretch through the hamstrings and stuff. Yeah, I think that's a good tactic for warming up the flexibility. Yeah, I think one thing that I've noticed with quite a few clients is that it kind of naturally happens as well, like the application on the wall.

Let's say you've been stiff your whole life and then finally you gain a little bit of range of motion. Perhaps it's not the first instinct to think that you can actually place a higher heel or a wider foot or whatever it is that you're trying to do. But then maybe one day you'll think, I'll give that a go and then it'll start clicking together and you will then naturally slowly start to apply new movements to your climbing. It might just take a little bit of like...

integrating, thinking about it. Yeah, there's a coach in America, I think he's in Washington. Where is he? I think anyways, I think he climbs in like Leavenworth or something called Jesse Firestein and he had a really good point that he said like, when you start training flexibility, change your mindset to say you are a flexible climber. If your mindset is I'm a flexible climber, you look for those options. I think me and you do that intuitively now. We're like.

well, that's the typical like beta for this boulder, but I'm going to try and find something that just looks absolutely whack, but makes it like, you know, I can cheat my way through it. Like I kind of take that approach into a lot of stuff these days, just because I have more flexibility than the average person that tries that boulder. So I go in with this mindset that I'm a flexible climber, I'm going to look for those options. And I think that's really important for the sort of like tactics and mindfulness approach to climbing and applying it as well.

So my, my take on how to translate flexibility into on the wall. If you've watched my YouTube videos, you know, I always bang on about stretching in a warmup and it's, it's so controversial for some people because I think...

There's this big history of worrying that it's going to reduce your force. And I've tried to make the point that the research is just, it's so unpractical. Like it was like five minutes of maximum intensity stretching with like five seconds rest in between each minute. And then, and then straight into like a maximum voluntary contraction, they showed a reduced force and that just doesn't happen in practice. And the stuff that, that has looked at it and in practice shows that like just.

then going on the wall and doing some easier boulders before you actually try anything hard, like the drop in force is negligible, maybe like 1%. So if you need to access 99 .9 % of your hamstring strength on a hill hook move, then maybe you don't do stretching in a warm up, but it's not applicable to most people that actually just want to get more flexible. So anyways, tangent, I'm just so bad on that point, aren't I? I can't let it go. So the reason I think flexibility is in your warm up.

is so important for translating it. Because if you've ever stretched, you'll know that immediately after your stretching session, you feel nice and bendy, you feel flexy. And when you wake up the next day, you're like, that's all gone away. You got to start again. And that is kind of what we do with flexibility training. It feels like two steps forwards, one step back, but ultimately you're moving forwards. So flexibility training is very transient. It's like you need to warm up your range of motion, just like you would warm up your pulling muscles and your fingers before climbing. And so if you want to get on the wall and...

practice using your flexibility to its maximum and ultimately also strengthening that range because you're being mobile, you're training your mobility, you're pulling on that heel hook, you're standing up on that high step in a new range of motion because you maximized it in your warmup. That's how you're going to see the best transfer, in my opinion, into your climbing. So I always stretch my warmup. It's not as intense or as long as my main flexibility training, but I'm definitely trying to make sure I've got like...

80, 90 % of my flexibility I can, I'm not going to push it as hard as I would in my sessions. And then I'm going to be really mindful about using it on the wall. You know, that quote from Jessie, which was like, pretend, or like just change your mindset that you are now a flexible climber that applies to it. And then just look for those options, just be like, what can I do which uses my flexibility to its maximum? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But that's the whole point of like learning from mistakes. So.

I find it also really fun to just try different things, trying to break the beta or like, yeah, it's just fantastic to be able to know that your body can potentially one day get to do some cool stuff, some cool moves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So I don't think I necessarily have any like specific flexibility drills other than, you know, going in and repeating boulders and looking for options that you can use your flexibility to as maximum. For me, it's like a, it is a mindset and a...

and a tactics kind of thing that you're going to take that intention into your climbing sessions. And maybe that's not in your projecting, but maybe that's in the first 20, 30 minutes of your session, you're trying to apply it as much as you possibly can. Using those things that you said about warming up, seeing like, where can you get your foot? When can you get your heel by your head and actually like lower into it? Like maybe that will work on some clients for you. I think outside of the specific session stuff, I think something I've seen with other people that maybe have trained flexibility.

and are quite flexible, but don't have the strength there. Look for the strength in both sides of those joints. You might be flexible, but you can't lift your foot that high. So this is what most people will term mobility, is train the shortening side of the joint to increase your mobility. So now you can actually lift your foot to those footholds. And then sometimes people are so bendy and flexible that they have no resistance, that they can lift their foot really high. And so maybe the idea of mobility is not that important.

But the strength through range is really important. So yeah, you got your heel on that foot, but you look like you were barely pulling on it. And they were like, I just don't think I've got the flexibility. What they mean is they've not got the strength to use that range of motion. So then make sure you're getting strong in that range of motion. That's how you apply it to your climbing. Ultimately, they're getting more flexible off the wall is in a way it's training to train. Like that's the prerequisite. Then you get strong in that range. Then you apply it to the wall. So it's kind of a little bit periodized in that sense. And.

That's just an ongoing cycle for your flexibility training. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've done really well. Maybe that's a good place to leave it there. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay, right? A little bit of rambling, a lot of knowledge, hopefully, to take home and yeah, move it on. Yeah, so if this goes down well and people like Q &As and we don't ramble too much, maybe we'll do another one in the future. Yes. Cool. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye.