Photo: Snapped! by Becca Clark
I’ve had so many questions about this topic! Everyone wants a better heel stretch – it’s one of the most basic flyer body positions. Mastering it will make flying a whole lot easier and get you closer to a bow and arrow too!
Most athletes have been told to just keep pulling their heel stretch to make it better, but there’s a whole lot more that goes into developing flexibility for this position. Not only do you need to understand the anatomy of it, but you also need to incorporate the right kind of stretches, use a specific technique and strengthen certain areas.
Here are some tips:
1. Know Which Muscles Need to Be Stretched
Heel stretches require flexibility from one main muscle group: the hamstrings. So, if you’re doing anything flexibility-related to try and improve your heel stretch, it should be centered around them.
2. Know Which Areas Require Strength
Having a good heel stretch doesn’t only require good flexibility, it also requires good strength! In order to kick your leg up and hold it there with ease, you need to have strong hip flexors. The hip flexors are the main muscle group that acts to lift your leg up and keep it there. If they’re strong enough (combined with good flexibility), you’ll be less likely to bend your bottom leg or hunch over when trying to pull the heel stretch.
3. Do Some Eccentrics
Eccentric exercises are slow, lengthening muscle contractions. An eccentric contraction is the opposite of the muscle contraction you normally think of during an exercise. For example, when doing a chin up, the pull on the way up would be a concentric (shortening) contraction. When lowering down back to the bottom, the biceps would go through an eccentric (lengthening) contraction.
Eccentric hamstring exercises can actually help improve hamstring flexibility. One easy exercise to do is Nordic hamstring curls. Watch a tutorial here.
4. Dynamic Before Static
Dynamic hamstring stretches include things like forward kicks, leg swings, “needle” kicks and pike walk. Static hamstring stretches include pike hold, holding a heel stretch, splits and any other seated or laying down hamstring stretches.
Dynamic stretches are great for warming up before sitting down to stretch. They also help you increase your range of motion, improve stretch tolerance and decrease passive stiffness. If you’re ONLY doing static stretches and are seeing no results, try adding in some dynamic stretches to kickstart your stretching session and speed up the progress over time.
5. Tilt Your Hips
Depending on which muscle group you’re stretching, your pelvis needs to tilt anteriorly (forward) or posteriorly (backward). This will not happen naturally as you stretch, so you need to force the position to make it happen.
In the photo below, the neutral pelvis diagram shows how our hips should be positioned normally. To get to the anterior pelvic tilt position, the front of our hips must tilt downward, causing a slight arch in our back. In a posterior pelvic tilt, the front of our hips tilts upward and flattens the back. This position is usually referred to as “rolling the hips under.”
To get a more intense hamstring stretch, you’ll want to tilt your hips anteriorly. This creates more distance between the origin and insertion of the muscle group (i.e. creates more distance between each end of the muscle), which lengthens it more. This does not need to be done by everyone – just those who don’t feel much when doing a regular hamstring stretch and want to increase the intensity.
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