Flexibility @ Salto

I made a trip to Edmonton on boxing day for 5 days to work with Rebecca Sykes from Salto Gymnastics. I learned a lot from working with her and her girls were SO much fun to work with. I had the amazing opportunity to do some flexibility training with them for an hour on 3 of the days I was there. Rebecca videotaped some of what we did and put together a compilation.
The above video has 6 stretches and 2 flex/strength exercises.
A couple notes.
I like to the "kickout" exercise before the pike side to side because it warms up the same area. What you're watching for in the pike stretch is that the knee that is bending is going directly over the toe. The leg that is straight is pushing down through the heel and the back of the knee as well as pushing the hip out to the side. This is one of my favorite stretches, way more effective than just sitting in pike and pushing kids forward.
Bounce bounce up is great for active flexibility and strength in an area that is challenging.


The next video is mostly arms with a straddle stretch at the end. After the girls do the bridge pushes, I showed them a better way to stretch out their back instead of rolling on the floor.

Thanks for watching!
Andrea

Flexibility: Breaking down splits Part 1

Sitting in splits is probably the LEAST effective way to increase your flexibility for them. Sure, doing this repetitively will get results eventually and increase where you were when you started however, breaking down splits into smaller muscle group stretches will increase your flexibility faster.
Jamie and I (Andrea) coached the annual MAG (men's artistic gymnastics) provincial level training camp this past December. Most of what we do is a combination of active and passive stretching in each stretch to get the benefit of both.
We would get the boys to show us their splits and then walk them through a series of stretches (approximately 35 mins) and then they would try their splits afterwards. I'm going to say that 60% of the boys had a significant change in their splits, and some of those boys had HUGE change. The other 40% were already pretty flexible and saw change but maybe not as significant. When I say the word change, I'm not just talking about how many inches they are off the floor. I'm talking about how square they can sit, are their shoulders over top of their hips and facing forward? Are they tense, in pain and making the "flex face"?

This is my son. This is his "flex face"

The boys that saw huge change were blown away when they did their splits at the end of their time with us. They might not have been flat but moving into splits was easy and it wasn't painful to sit in them anymore. 

Here's the first video in our Breaking Down Splits series. The elevated lunge. Adding height to any stretch will allow the athlete to use their own body weight to increase the intensity.