What do you attribute your current level of flexibility to? How trainable is flexibility?
I find it interesting what people attribute aspects of their fitness to, and especially so flexibility. Typically it is an “external” cause – the most common being variations on having bad ‘genetics’.
It is interesting in a slightly cynical way, because I strongly believe that “internal” causes are much more important in determining your flexibility than ‘genetics’.
We have all seen gymnasts stretching in absolutely insane positions, and think you must possess some kind of super-power to have this range of motion.
I do agree that in a few exceptional people this may be the case – people with extremely lax ligaments for example, however for the rest of us our flexibility is strongly correlated to the amount of time we spend ‘stretching’ our bodies. The more time we spend ‘training’ flexibility the more flexible we will become. Simply put, Flexibility is very trainable.
And so what is the benefit of being more flexible (party tricks and circus performing aside)? I will write about this at a later date.
