 The best way to improve functional flexibility is to lift weights. All right, let's talk about this a little bit. All right, well, let's define functional flexibility and how is it different than regular flexibility? I heard that term in a while. It used to be the buzz term of the day. Yes, so there's a myth out there that resistance training makes you tight. You lose mobility, right? The myth of the stiff, you know, tight bodybuilder who's got really bad flexibility. So, you know, what you said, Adam, I think it's important. Let's define functional flexibility. So, regular flexibility is your ability to move through or be moved through a wide range of motion. So, if I'm on the floor, let's say, and let's say Justin grabs my leg and tests my hamstring flexibility, passively he would bring my leg up and bring it, you know, far back or whatever. And that would be my flexibility. Oh, yeah. Functional flexibility is different. Functional flexibility is flexibility You can control it through that. You own flexibility that you have strength through. So, I like to use this example, right? I have a 15-month-old son. He's extremely flexible. I mean, I could bring his feet and put them by his head and twist them and do all kinds. But he's got almost no functional flexibility, right? Because he has no strength. Flexibility without control and strength is instability. It's actually one of the highest risks of injury is being hyper-flexible but also being weak. Now, proper resistance training, and I say proper because this is the important thing to understand, you train in a very full range of motion and the goal is to increase your ranges of motion through proper mobility training and proper application of exercise. But when you train in those full ranges of motion, you improve your flexibility, but you're stronger in it. So, not only can you sit in a squat, but you can do it with weight and you can get out of it if you need to very quickly versus just being flexible without strength, which is totally unstable. And again, a recipe for injury. The best example of this that I have ever seen in myself that like blew my mind was one of the first times that we hung out with Dr. Brink. And he told me to sit down in a 90-90 position, which you guys have seen me probably do on the YouTube channel a bunch of times. And he grabbed my back leg and he took it and he lifted it like- Yeah, like internally rotated and brought your foot up. Yeah, almost to hit your butt. All the way, like I was looking at it. So I'm sitting here in the 90-90 position. He brings my heel up and I'm looking at my foot going like, holy shit, I did not know that I have that much flexibility. And then he lets it go and he goes, okay, now bring it back up to yourself. And it's like, I, you know, like a half an inch, I could bring it off the ground and that was it. So that was flexibility versus what you actually own. Right, right. So, and it just kind of blew my mind that I technically have that flexibility, but I've lost all the control and strength. It's not usable. In that range of motion. And that's, I was like, wow. And there's an examples of that with every joint, right? Everybody has that, but that was the greatest expression that I'd ever seen someone or had someone show to me how much I was lacking in that area. He did the same thing to me and it was strange because I was same thing. He brought my foot way up here and I looked at it and I felt detached. It was like I was looking at another foot. Now to take it a step further, imagine being put in that position and then someone jump on you or you have to get out of that position real quick on your own. You will tear your hip. Injury. You will injure your knee. You'll injure yourself. So, and if you, you know, think about this, right? Imagine somebody stretching your, just your pack. This is an area that most people don't really think about, but imagine bringing your arm back as far as you possibly can or someone bring it back and then you have to explode out of that position or move, right? You wouldn't do it because you know, you know, instinctively that would tear, that would hurt my, that's the difference between flexibility and functional flexibility. This is why a lot of, you know, like if we go back to our certifications and we look at all the limitations in terms of the degrees of range of motion where they stop you because of safety protocol, it like had to throw all that out because like that really wasn't preparing a lot of the athletes I was training for success on the field. In fact, it was limiting their abilities substantially in terms of them because when you're actually moving and aggressively moving on the field and all these different variables and different ways that you're controlling your body, you're in pretty crazy angles. And you have to be able to know how to navigate and have access to that range of motion in order and be strong in that range of motion in order to thrive as an athlete. Yeah, I remember when there were some breakthrough studies that came out that flipped what we thought we knew on its head in regards to warming up. In the 80s and I'd say early to mid 90s, the way you warmed up before a game or before a competition was you did static stretching. You would sit in a hamstring stretch and then hold your quad, do a stretch and then do a hip flexor stretch and do all this static stretching. And this was just standard, you know, in PE class is how we warmed up and this is what you would see athletes doing before a competition. Then a study came out that showed that static stretching before competition increases risk. Increases risk of injury. Reduces performance and increases risk of injury. And you think to yourself, how is this possible? Like I get looser when I static stretch, how am I hurting myself? Cause this is what happens. When you stretch a muscle and you hold a stretch, the muscle isn't becoming looser or longer. You're not, it's not like a rubber where a rubber's cold and it's not flexible and you warm it up and it gets more elastic. That's not how it works. What it literally is is your central nervous system keeps a muscle tight. And when you hold a stretch long enough it sends a signal to the CNS, tells it to relax. And then it kind of loosens its grip on that muscle allowing it to stretch out further. So static stretching temporarily increases your flexibility and your range of motion by shutting off the CNS a little bit. So now you go off on the field and you run and you're kicking or you're jumping and you move in a new range of motion you normally wouldn't because your CNS now has allowed that muscle to elongate a little more but you have no strength in that new range of motion. Boom, injuries are more common. So they found like stretching the hamstrings, static stretching caused more hamstring pulls than when people did nothing at all. This was compared to nothing at all. Now of course there's a superior way to warm up and that's dynamic and priming which is turning the CNS on. There's just a massive difference between passive and active. Yes. Which is where the active is really where they found the most benefit when you're approaching a lot of these types of like ranges of motion. Can I have access to that? Can I control my body to go in and out of these degrees of angles that are a little bit like further than these 90 degrees sort of stops? Yes and also when you think about everyday life you don't need lots of flexibility you need functional flexibility. To be able to get into the splits it's not really valuable in everyday life but being able to squat down or rotate well let's say your kid spills something in the back at the car and you got a turnbill fast or you're walking and you step off a curb or you lose your footing a little bit and you move in a new range of motion but you got to control it and have some connection to that so you don't hurt yourself. That's the important kind of flexibility that you need. Now the super long ranges of motion they can be valuable for certain sports but in those sports you still need like for example if you're a taekwondo you know if you practice taekwondo for example and you need to do these really high kicks you need that range of motion but that range of motion is worthless if you can't bring your leg up yourself and you can't control that range of motion. So static stretching does have a place in improving functional flexibility but it has to be combined with some kind of resistance but if you compare head to head traditional flexibility type exercises and programs and traditional being mostly static stretching to good full range of motion appropriate resistance training the functional flexibility from resistance training is superior will result in less injuries will make people feel more stable in their everyday lives will decrease the pain in everyday life more than just improving flexibility. So there's the myth of by the way the reason why you see some people who do a lot of resistance training who are very tight because I know people are watching right now saying well that's true that's part of that is not true because I know bodybuilders and let me tell you I know a guy can't even wipe his own butt he's so tight. Part of it is there's muscle gets in the way when you're massive but here's the other part when people train and shorten ranges of motion which a lot of bodybuilders do. That's right when you do that you build strength in a short range of motion which means it's disproportionate to the range of motion that you maybe don't own but that you have so you essentially make yourself tighter. In other words if I only do quarter squats and I get really strong with quarter squats I am gonna move very tightly because my body's gonna know you get outside that quarter squat position you have no strength, you have no stability. So when I say functional flexibility with resistance training I'm referring to appropriate and full ranges of motion and making that a priority with your training. That's what'll give you that functional flexibility. It also build a lot more muscle that way too. That's true. And you have to, I remember when I, so I used to be the 90 degree bench press guy for a long time. That's what we learned in our service. Yeah so for a long time and then I remember reading and learning how important it was for me to take these joints for full range of motion and then getting to the place where I would do a bench press where I brought like dumbbells all the way down when I was, and initially I was weaker. So initially doing that I had to pull back. I was able to, back then I was doing like 110 pound dumbbells. I had to scale all the way back to like 80 pound dumbbells was now my, like my new max but it didn't take long for that to catch up. And then when I finally got to the place where I was now pressing that same weight that I was pressing before in the shortened range of motion I had more muscle than I had built. So there's tremendous value besides like health and protecting your joints. There's also those that are paying attention that like all I wanna do is build this amazing physique. Well, you'll actually build a better physique if you take your body through it's fullest range of motion also. Yeah there was a debate maybe 20 years ago where they would say, you know maybe partial reps are more effective, true. You can't get a full range of motion but because you could load partial reps so much more that offsets the fact that you're not doing a full range of motion and therefore you should be able to build more muscle. In fact, there was a whole book that was sold on this and it was about, you know lifting in these quarter half ranges of motion but just maxing out the weight and they tried to sell it. No, studies actually show even when you do that, it doesn't matter fuller ranges of motion if you compare head to head just build more muscle. Head to head in long term because you could show a study that shows, you know somebody who's training in this light full range of motion and you put them in a small six week window where you overload, you know more than 110% of what they would normally be doing through full range of motion. Absolutely novelty. The body is going to adapt it's going to show it's going to build some muscle. So that's how they cherry pick stuff like that and to try and prove their point but the truth is over an extended period of time training through a full range of motion is going to benefit you not only health wise but then also for building muscle. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.