This one should go without saying. Turn the TV off and stop browsing on your phone. Actually focus on what you do. You wouldn’t watch TV when training your handstands so why allow yourself not to be fully focused whilst stretching. I know it might not be as exciting and I know watching TV whilst stretching has become normal but force yourself to really tune into your workouts and let nothing distract you!

Here is where things start to get serious. When working through your flexibility workout do you actually know which muscle you are working on?! I truly hope the answer is yes! Picture this muscle as you are stretching. Visualize where it lays in your body, how it gets longer, how tension releases and how you must hold the rest of your body in order to work on the targeted muscles.

A great way to identify the working muscle is to go into a stretch like the frog for example and to engage against gravity. Pushing the hips up sligthly will force you to engage your adducteurs. If you can engage a muscle you can locate it and with enough practice you will be able to relax the muscle when needed as well.

The goal here is not just to warm up the muscle that you are trying to stretch but especially to prep your mind muscle connection, in other words to get you zoned in. Picture yourself sitting down to study, to do your taxes or to do anything that takes your focus. The first 15min don’t go as smooth as the next 30. This is because your focus has to warm up.

Here in our case we naturally use easier stretches at the beginning of the workout to loosen the muscles and to get into deeper stretches but we especially want to use these easier progressions to connect the brain to the muscles.

So make sure you are well focus from the very beginning of your workout. Get your head in the game! Each exercise has a reason when I program a workout for you! Especially progressions that seem easy can often make the biggest difference to your training.

This is something I had to learn the hard way when I started performing hand balancing on bigger stages. Especially my more dynamic movements would work sometimes and other times they simply would not and I could not figure out why. Key to getting perfectly stable and consistent was to always do the exact same order of things. Only like this I was truly able to analyze if what I am doing is helping or not. By always going through the same motions it was easy to make corrections and fine tunings. If you do a drill sligthly different each time you can never truly analyze why it works or doesn’t.

This “checklist” that I would personally work through did not only include physical movements but also my breath and thoughts. I was getting almost obsessive but it helped.

For your flexibility training you should take the same approach. Make a mental or even physical checklist of all the things that matter in each exercise in order and go through this list as you move into your stretch. Not only will this assure that your form is correct but also will this force you to stay focused on your stretch and your own body.

BONUS TIP: Don’t trust yourself on your cues?! Write them down on a list, film yourself with a 3-5sec freeze between each cue and watch the video after your set checking if you have followed all cues as intended.

Training is about making improvements, obviously. In order to improve we need to change things. In other words we need to add new cues to our checklist.

Here it is important to only add a single cue per workout. Only make things sligthly more complex and more complicated. Take it slow and climb 1 step at the time. Your body can not digest more! Better to do 1 things right than 5 things wrong whilst you mess up 7 old cues along the way!

Increasing time under tension when training is an obvious key to growth. We all know that but it is not the only reason here. By increasing time under tension you spend more time in the stretch and your brain gains valuable extra time to connect to the working muscles.

There are 2 ways to increase this extra time under tension. For a static stretch you will increase hold times by 15-10sec and in more dynamic stretches you can simply move slower. This will not be easy. It will force you to work and focus much harder!

Adding weight or working with different forms of resistance can be a great way to further increase your mind muscle connection. If an exercise is harder or your body heavier your muscle has to work harder. If your muscle has to work harder it will take more energy, focus and possibly even get sore. This will make it much easier to identify the muscle and use it in a targeted fashion.