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I want to get a better mobility and flexibility. A first goal I have is touching my feet with outstretched legs. Also, I want to be able to lift the outstretched leg into a horizontal position while standing upright. How can I accomplish that? Is it effective to do a stretching workout on one day a week? Or is it better to stretch before a 'normal' workout? I really appreciate any help!

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  • Your question is too get involved to get into, but basically do standing bend-over & touch-toe stretches that everyone does, whatever they are called. At least 3 for 30-60 seconds. Raising your leg into a "front kick" position (I assume that's what you mean) requires not only flexibility, but the strengths to do so, which comes from quads and hip flexors here. You need to strengthen those muscles. You either do leg extensions on a machine or simply stand up straight and raise your leg slowly. This is assuming you don't got to the gym and do squats.
    – VSO
    Commented Sep 13, 2016 at 20:30

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There are a lot of activities you can do. You can do activities where the flexibility is a by-product, and important to the activity, but not the main goal, itself - dance, yoga, martial arts are a few obvious candidates.

If you want to improve your flexibility, at all, stretching once a week won't cut it. If you want to drastically improve it, daily is more like it. Maybe you could see some decent improvements with every other day, but much less than that probably won't do much of anything for you.

If you are exercising with other activities more active or "ballistic," movements as part of the warmup are okay. Traditional static stretching before a workout is pretty useless and actually increases the likelihood of injury. That kind of stretching is much more beneficial as part of your post-activity warm-down.

My daughter is flexible to the contortionist level. She says she spends about 45 minutes every evening exclusively doing stretching/flexibility work.

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  • Does it matter whether you do stretching in the evening or let's say in the afternoon or in the morning? As far as I know the muscles are more flexible in the afternoon. Is that right?
    – user23495
    Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 11:59
  • It seems like the consensus answer is "anytime you can stretch is good," but, yes, just from the activity of the day, you are probably going to have warmer, more limber muscles at the end of the day vs. just after waking up.
    – PoloHoleSet
    Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 19:30

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