stretching | Ryan C. Stebbins

Succeeding in fitness is all about consistency. NEVER QUIT. It is a life-long journey. If you stray off the path, just get back on it. It is as simple as that. Here are five tips to help keep you on that track, and to help you get back on it if you lose your way…

1. Take pictures of yourself. Vain? Maybe. Helpful toward your fitness goals? Definitely. When it seems like you aren’t making any progress, it’s great to be able to look back at old pictures and realize that you are.

2. Log every workout. EVERY workout. Make it as hard as – or harder than – the one before it. Log the weight that you used for each exercise (if any), the number of reps, the number of sets, and keep track of how much rest you are taking between sets.

3. Log what you eat, every day. Improve your diet, slowly but surely, and keep improving it. Sure, there will be periods where you lull in your regimen, but log it anyway. Log cheat days and cheat foods. This will help you figure out how much you are actually cheating, as well as how on-track you actually are.

4. Listen to your body. This means possibly even skipping a workout if you are still recovering from a previous one. If you need to push your 1-week split into 2 weeks, do it. The important thing is to be honest with yourself. Do you really need more time to recover, or are you just being lazy?

5. Stretch and do trigger point massage therapy every day. Do dynamic stretches in the morning, as a bare minimum. Do trigger point massage therapy at night, on the places you need it most. Personally, my hamstrings often get out of whack, and trigger point work helps. Use a PVC pipe, if nothing else. It actually works even better than the foam rollers, but it takes some getting used to.

dietary logging, fitness, stretching, succeeding, tracking workouts, trigger point therapy

Way too many people seem to go through their entire day in a half-asleep daze, without even fully waking up. Some people don’t even stretch in the morning – much less do an organized routine of dynamic stretches – and yet they wonder where all of their childhood energy and flexibility has gone. They follow their little daily routines – wake up, eat, go to school / work, etcetera, and then crash and relax at the end of the day. Chances are they have a dead-end job that they hate, or they hate school, and their mind does not get stimulated hardly any throughout the entire day, much less their body.

You should get some kind of exercise every day – an organized stretching routine is the bare minimum. If you’re interested in really developing your flexibility and doing real stretching routines – which is incredibly useful for nearly all sports, but especially martial arts / gymnastics – then you really need to check out Thomas Kurz’ Stretching Scientifically: A Guide to Flexibility Training. This is the best book ever written for flexibility training, hands-down. And no, I don’t get any money for saying that. It covers dynamic stretching, static stretching, isometric stretching, and more. Just doing a small dynamic stretching routine in the morning and a relaxed, static stretching (yoga-like) routine at night will have you well on your way to improving your flexibility – not to mention your well-being in general.

On a side note, I ran across an interesting video a while back called the “Fuzz Speech.” It discusses exactly why we lose flexibility as we age. (Be warned, it includes footage of cadavers in a medical setting – but it’s not bloody.) In any case, it will definitely make you want to stretch every day.

dynamic stretches, energy, flexibility, stretching

5 Tips to Help You Succeed

Stretch Every Day