Stretch my hamstrings until I can palm the floor

As a sportsman, I always suffered with tight hamstrings. I eventually found a product called Idealstretch. It helped me so much, I eventually bought the patent from the inventor and have sold a few thousand now. For $45, you could never get a safe effective stretch by yourself. www.IdealStretch.com offers a money back guarantee. I lie on the floor in front of the TV at night and enjoy effortless stretching and feel so much better about my flexibility. Please let me know if it helps. Clint

there is one exercise in tai chi which can improve your stretch in mins….serious.

I was never able to do this until I enrolled in gymnastics in college. We practiced this three times a week and the girls in the class had more experience than me. Towards the end of the semester I was able to do it to and even put my palms behind my feet face down. Now I practice it about once a week and I can just palm the floor. I can’t put my palms behind my feet anymore cuz I don’t practice enough.

The trick to hamstring stretches is to find a way to relax into the stretch and breathe, and stay at a very slight level of discomfort (not pain!) in the stretch, for at least 30 seconds—more whenever possible (ie. don’t bounce, it’ll defeat the whole purpose). If you can hold and breathe into a a stretched position for as much as 2 minutes, in no time you’ll see positive results. I can do stretches much further than what your goal is, and I just did it a little bit at a time, like 5 minutes every night before bed time. Within a month, there was a significant improvement in flexibility.

As I have now crossed the 40 yeard old threshold [shudder], I’ve realized that, physically speaking, I have some habits to change or I could end up pretty hosed in a about 10-20 more years.

Let me put it another way: it’s not dying I’m afraid of-it’s half dying. My dad had a stroke at 55 and I saw what he had to do to turn his life around and beat the odds (90% or more of those who have had strokes just keep having them, Dad didn’t-he’s my hero).

So I looked around to see what kinds of excercises out there would be like golf—something I could do and improve upon until I die. That ruled out my favorite sport, soccer (although I’ll keep it in my life as long as I can) and a host of other exercises that shorten/tighten muscles.

Pilates and Yoga are what I opted for as the foundation for my lifelong exercise program. They tend more toward lengthening and strengthening of the muscles. And it’s definitely something I could do for life.

I started around May 1, 2005. The first two months were brutal as I coaxed my body out of about a 3 year exercise hiatus (we had 3 kids in 4.5 years…d’oh!). Right away I started feeling better, like I was undoing 40 years of pretzel-like muscular habits and formations. There was even a period of about a week or two where I overloaded my lymph nodes due to a heavy toxin release which was occurring (this yoga I do heats the body up a lot and is known to purify the muscles and blood, etc.).

Anywho, all this to say I still have a long way to go. My hamstrings are better (have gone from not touching toes to “knuckling the floor” now).

One day I wondered whether I’d ever get to palm the floor completely, touching my nose to my knees. So I probed around on alt.yoga to see if anyone else had similar concerns about how long it might take to stretch out tight hamstrings. The answer which seemed the rightest to me was: 8 years.

Isn’t that great?! I love it. It means I can spend the next 8 years working through this and there’s no rush. As they say about yoga, it’s 99% practice and 1% theory. You have to do it over and over and over and over again to make it really work for you. This is something I can do the for the long haul and that’s what I love about it.