5 Stretches We ALL Could Use! (TAKES 5 MINUTES)

If your muscles are feeling tight and you are tight on time, I’m going to show you how to unlock your flexibility in 5 minutes. In this video, I not only show you how to unlock your flexibility in 5 minutes, but I am going to explain how you can do this anywhere.

In order to help you out, I’m going to need you  to do two things for me. First thing is pull up a chair and then take a seat. And not only are  we going to sit here and actually learn what we need to do to fix these muscle tightness, but  we’re actually going to do the first stretch. And the first muscle that I want you to target is  called the perineal muscles. And it’s a muscle group actually on the outside of our lower  leg.

And probably if you just run your hand up and over this area here, you might feel that  it gets kind of painful. Oftentimes this muscle can get tight people with flat feet because as  the arches collapse down, this muscle becomes shorter and shorter. So how do we target this? All you gotta do from this sitting position is take the soles of your feet and put them flat  together, which is going to require you to roll them out. And from this position here we’ve got a  good stretch because those muscles wrap under the foot.

Now I want to use our hands on the seat and  just try to stand up as much as we can bringing our knees together. You’re going to be limited by  the tightness in this muscle, and you’ll feel it here. And that’s what you want that good stretch  for about a minute to a minute and a half. Now you can do this at any time of the day, you can do it  at night, as I recommend most static stretches. Or you can simply do it during the day because it’s  going to make you feel better.

Just make sure you stop forgetting this muscle altogether. The second muscle is actually one you can’t even touch, and we’re talking about the subscapularis  because it’s actually underneath this shoulder blade. You can see it’s the one that runs right  up under here, and you can’t even palpate it even if you wanted to. But it doesn’t mean that  it’s not doing its damage by becoming tight. And we need to do something about it.

And how do we  do that with one of these? Just a regular broom, a mop or anything. A PVC pipe that you could use  as a dowel. And all you have to do is just throw it over your shoulder like this, as if you’re  carrying a jacket. You line it up with the middle of your bicep, and then you reach in front  and grab the broomstick from the front side.

And then you open your chest up nice and wide and  start to pull up on that stick. And what this is doing is you can see it’s getting external  rotation at the shoulder. That subscapularis muscle is ironically one of the rotator cuff  muscles, but it’s the only one that internally rotates the shoulder of the four. You obviously  have a lot more internal rotation going on with other muscles too, so you want to make sure  you’re doing your best to increase your range of motion into external rotation. This stretch  is one that you can do any time during the day.

Hold it for 45 to 60s. Make sure you work both  sides, and I promise this shoulder of yours is going to feel a hell of a lot better. I think we all can agree that we’ve become pretty imbalanced people, at least postural. We  lost the war against gravity a long time ago, because we’ve let those anterior chain muscles  pull us down and forward without doing enough work for those posterior chain muscles to  create that balance that we need. However, it’s actually one of those anterior chain muscles  that we never even focus our attention on that’s doing a lot of the damage.

And the easiest  way to fix that is with one of these. Yes, there’s actually still a use for a physio ball. And the muscle we’re talking about is the rectus abdominus, the abs. The function of which is to  pull your ribcage closer to your pelvis to round out that lower back. Now, if it rounds out the low  back, it also tends to round out the upper back, contributing to this poor posture that we have.

But we can stretch it with this physio ball simply by allowing ourselves to contour over the ball. And you do that first by dropping your hips down, allowing them to drop over the front side of the  ball and pull those arms up over your head. And what this is doing is creating that separation  that we’re looking for. Between the lower ribs here and your pelvis and that’s going to place  a really nice stretch on the abs. 45 to 60s at a time, 2 to 3 times a day, especially if  you’re demonstrating either that rounded shoulder posture or if you just sit a lot.

The fourth muscle is another one of those out of sight, out of mind, or actually out of  touch muscles, because this one is really, really deep. And we’re talking about the QL or  the quadratus lumborum. You can see that it’s the muscle that attaches here to your pelvis and  then to the vertebrae in your lumbar spine. And what it does is it hikes the hip up from one side  or the other. And it also has a really important role of stabilizing you while you walk.

But what  happens is we oftentimes don’t even sit right, right. We’re doing too much sitting as it  is, but we don’t even sit properly because we usually choose one cheek over the other. And what happens there is when you do it, you get that lateral shift and then that hip will  get higher and shorten this muscle. So, what are we supposed to do about it? Well, we’ve got to  stretch it.

And the best way to do this is what we call a QL slide. You get this all-fours position,  you’re going to slide one leg back just like that, allow it to drop down to the ground so that the  outside of your hip hits the ground. And you can see that muscles actually being targeted nicely  here, stretching from the top of that pelvis into that lumbar spine, getting some of the lateral  flexion that drops the hip down, but also allowing you to post off of this arm over here to intensify  the stretch. And again, we hold this for about a minute or a minute and a half, making sure we do  both sides. Not only will you start to feel looser in this area, but for those of you that have a  lot of back pain that’s unexplainable, this is oftentimes the cause.

Start working this in and I  promise you you’re going to feel a lot better. And that brings us to muscle group number  five. And maybe it’s actually one you even try to stretch. And we’re talking about the lats. And this is what you’re doing to stretch it.

Can I ask you to consider something different? I  actually made an entire video on how to stretch the lats. And it’s actually going to help you to  stretch that QL at the same time. You can watch that right here. And if you haven’t done so guys,  make sure you click Subscribe and turn on your Notifications so you never miss a video when we  put one out.

All right guys, I’ll see you soon.