Flexibility is a subtle thing. It develops and erodes slowly. We don’t tend to notice it the way we notice cardio endurance (Hey! I am not out of breath at the top of the stairs!) or strength (Take that, you evil jar lid!). And yet, if we ignore it, suddenly everything gets more difficult (Were my shoelaces always that far away?).
Because of the subtlety, flexibility can be hard to remember to fit in to our routines. Also, it feels good to stretch and far too many of us think that we should skip the good parts of our workouts, that we’re not doing it right if we are having fun. We are wrong. Workouts should be as much fun as possible.
Personally, I think most of us do best with a specific flexibility practice like Pilates or yoga. We follow along and don’t have to figure out what to do or how to do it and we have someone (or someone’s list) there guiding us. However, sneaky flexibility is good, too—that stretch we take at the end of the thirty-hundredth Zoom meeting of the day, the twist to reach the box of crackers on the table behind us.
However we fit it in, it does make life better. We hurt less, we feel less tense, and we discover we have larger range of motion than we thought. It’s also good practice for our brains.
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