Flexibility Week: Day 1

This week I'm starting a new fitness challenge - I'm going to be trying to improve my flexibilty. After my 10k race at the weekend I felt so stiff, all I wanted to do was stretch and massage every muscle in my body. So my mission this week is to improve my flexibility. I'll be concentrating on a few muscle groups and combining exercise, yoga, static stretching, massage and diet to see what results I can get.

I need a start point, so I've chosen a few stretches which I'm going to use as a test and some exercises to see how effective my increased flexibility is. I've done them today and will do again at the end of the week to see if there's been a significant change.

So, starting with the flexibility testing then. I used the following video as a guide and scored myself out of 5 each side for each of the leg tests and out of 10 for the last two. There's a maximum of 25 for each leg and 70 overall.

	Left	Right	Total
Knees to chest	4	4	8
Leg in air	3	4	7
Leg out to side	3	3.5	6.5
Leg over to side	1	1	2
Leg bent and over	2	3	5
Down dog	4		4
Kneeling back	9		9
Totals	13	15.5	41.5

Before the stretches I also did some plyometrics. If you're not sure what it is, don't worry - I didn't either until recently! Basically, it's jumping, but hardcore jumping. I did two sets of eight for each jump and scored out of five for how easy I found the exercise (with one being hard and 5 being easy) and five for form, a total of 10 points possible for each jump, 40 overall.

	Ease	Form	Total
Squat Jump	3	1	4
Standing Long Jump	2	2	4
Diagonal Jumps	1	1	2
Lateral Jumps	1	1	2
			12

So why not give these a go yourself, see how you score, then join me back here to analyse my results.

Night night. x