Pancake / Straddle Leg Extension stalled

Didn't really know where to put this as my issue relates to multiple elements across Foundation, Handstand and the Stretch series - but I figured this would have the biggest audience!

So I've been working MN/SE7 twice a week for a while now with extra MN/SE10 iM work to develop compression and H2 pHS/PE8 also twice a week which is also pancake heavy. Middle & front split series also once per week and with HLL in my warmup (2x10r at the moment) on foundation days. My current problem is twofold - a depressing lack of progress on compressive flexibility and I seem to be backsliding a bit on the pancake. On a good day, I am chest to floor but abs 2 inches above and not enough APT for pHS/PE8 iM mastery. On a normal day however I am too sore to get anywhere close to that.

I'm thinking that any progress in compression is being held back or masked by my pancake limitations. So more recovery time right? But where should I cut back - I am trying not to push to hard on the iMs but personally for MN/SE7 and pHS/PE8 I need to be totally warmed up and at my full ROM to even work the strength element with good form. The only thing I can think of is to drop the middle split out completely for a bit or perhaps to dial back the pancake parts of it?

Or am I missing something obvious?

I made up a statistics along my clients that is pretty reasonable. if you want to achieve an active range of motion you should have appropriated passive range of motion.

If we talk about pancake from seated position the movement is a bending forward of 90°.

I noticed that when a person is able to do actively a 90° forward bending he has approximately the 20-25% more of passive range of motion. More specifically for active pancake (90° forward bending) is equal to 90° + (25% of 90°) of passive bending. talking with easy words if someone push you down through pancake you should go past the horizontal position of about 22°. 

I would like to emphasize that is not a law, it is a personal statistics I did with a group of 20 people during the last 1-1.5 years.

Would love to see more questions like this. Why would you want to cut down on the middle split or pancake practice?
Forgive me for stating the obvious, as an adult it takes months, years to gain degrees of active ROM you can control, not to mention that progress is not linear (one dimension). I picture it and experience it more like the stock market (up & down) on an upward or downward trend. Perhaps 'cycles' would be a better way to describe it. Don't know how long you've been practicing. Is it possible that you need more time to see the desired result? It sounds like you have a great program in place!

11 hours ago, Tony Sorensen said:

...  The only thing I can think of is to drop the middle split out completely for a bit or perhaps to dial back the pancake parts of it? ...

Do the exact opposite.  

More pancake work.  Vertical and inverted straddle work on the stall bars mixed with overhead seated good mornings.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

15 hours ago, Alessandro Mainente said:

I noticed that when a person is able to do actively a 90° forward bending he has approximately the 20-25% more of passive range of motion. More specifically for active pancake (90° forward bending) is equal to 90° + (25% of 90°) of passive bending. talking with easy words if someone push you down through pancake you should go past the horizontal position of about 22°.

Interesting Alessandro. It might be a small sample as you say but it puts my current position in perspective. I have more to do than I thought but at least I now have a better idea of where I'm headed!

9 hours ago, Eva Pelegrin said:

Forgive me for stating the obvious, as an adult it takes months, years to gain degrees of active ROM you can control, not to mention that progress is not linear (one dimension). I picture it and experience it more like the stock market (up & down) on an upward or downward trend.

That's my experience too - its taken three years to get this far and if it takes another three years to nail it then that's just how long it takes. I guess I was just concerned that I was overdoing it - not even close by the sounds of it! Doh!

7 hours ago, Coach Sommer said:

Do the exact opposite.  

More pancake work.  Vertical and inverted straddle work on the stall bars mixed with overhead seated good mornings.

Will do Coach, thanks. I hadn't seen the overhead seated good mornings before - looks like powerful stuff! 

In terms of scheduling, I'd been working to the premise of daily limbering to my ROM and one hard stretch session per week - does the hard session or the daily limbering get harder? Or even a second hard stretch session?  

7 hours ago, Coach Sommer said:

Do the exact opposite.  

More pancake work.  Vertical and inverted straddle work on the stall bars mixed with overhead seated good mornings.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Personally nothing beats the seated good mornings in order to achieve the cold pancake, I also do a little variation when i'm training with my brother, instead on use a bar of 20 kg, I ask him to relax on my upper back in this way on both descent and ascent I can actively resist to the fall (or push him to the start position) while holding my back straigth. I had the same sensation only with a bar of 35-40 kg but when you start to be sore sore it is hard to control both the bar and the back alignment. If I have some time I will do a video this evening.

10 hours ago, Eva Pelegrin said:

Would love to see more questions like this. Why would you want to cut down on the middle split or pancake practice?
Forgive me for stating the obvious, as an adult it takes months, years to gain degrees of active ROM you can control, not to mention that progress is not linear (one dimension). I picture it and experience it more like the stock market (up & down) on an upward or downward trend. Perhaps 'cycles' would be a better way to describe it. Don't know how long you've been practicing. Is it possible that you need more time to see the desired result? It sounds like you have a great program in place!

For middle split i've found that the SE24 of the middle split stretch series is very helpful if done multiple times in the week but with different protocol: once a week follow the cue point of the middlesplit series, the other day use a light approach.

On 3/30/2016 at 11:15 AM, Alessandro Mainente said:

Personally nothing beats the seated good mornings in order to achieve the cold pancake, I also do a little variation when i'm training with my brother, instead on use a bar of 20 kg, I ask him to relax on my upper back in this way on both descent and ascent I can actively resist to the fall (or push him to the start position) while holding my back straigth. I had the same sensation only with a bar of 35-40 kg but when you start to be sore sore it is hard to control both the bar and the back alignment. If I have some time I will do a video this evening.

I tried a few of these today to get a feel for how to schedule them - I see what you mean about the bar being hard to control after a while. I found it hard to keep it from rolling further up my neck in the descent so I ended up positioning it near the bottom of my scaps (which obviously decreased the resistance), I need a sandbag or similar. 

How many times a week do you work these?

Daily, when you reach the point where you 've finished legs for foundation 4 or very close to its end, your are already strong to approach this work more frequently.

If F4 it is not finished, 2 times a week is fine. notice that I cited a 35-40 kg, if you cannot control it probably more time should be spent on the handstand one mobility work, IM 7 and IM8.

3 hours ago, Tony Sorensen said:

I tried a few of these today to get a feel for how to schedule them - I see what you mean about the bar being hard to control after a while. I found it hard to keep it from rolling further up my neck in the descent so I ended up positioning it near the bottom of my scaps (which obviously decreased the resistance), I need a sandbag or similar. 

How many times a week do you work these?

Seated good mornings are not performed with the bar on your neck or back; rather they are done with straight arms and a wide grip holding the weighted bar overhead with the shoulders rolling externally as you descend into the pancake and then internally rotating as you ascend back to the seated position.  

The bar should remain directly above the shoulders at all points of the movement.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Noted. Thank you both, this kind of feedback is priceless. 

Tony, I believe it is imperative to keep you lower back flat during your pancake work.

You said above that on some days you can get your chest to ground but your abs a few inches off, this means that you are definitely rounding the spine and the pelvis has reached it's limit in anterior tilt. Ideally it will be the abdomen that arrives at the floor before the chest, meaning the anterior pelvic tilt has been achieved and the movement comes from lengthening of the adductors and hamstrings without undue lumbar compression.

I personally have found over the last year that if I allow this to happen, I experience a significant shortening and tightening in my hamstrings that can last for upto a week. In my case, I believe I put too much pressure on my lower back which already has some historical issues, it causes irritation to some of the lumbar spine structures and I get a reflexive tightening of the hamstrings as they are largely innervated via L5/S1 spinal segments.

As a note, it is definitely not DOMs I experience either, as this can happen with and without load. If I perform seated good mornings as Coach describes above with perfect form, I am capable of getting chest to floor with 20kg, but if I rush it with bad form I always suffer!!!!!

38 minutes ago, Wesley Tan said:

I personally have found over the last year that if I allow this to happen, I experience a significant shortening and tightening in my hamstrings that can last for upto a week. In my case, I believe I put too much pressure on my lower back which already has some historical issues, it causes irritation to some of the lumbar spine structures and I get a reflexive tightening of the hamstrings as they are largely innervated via L5/S1 spinal segments.

As a note, it is definitely not DOMs I experience either, as this can happen with and without load. If I perform seated good mornings as Coach describes above with perfect form, I am capable of getting chest to floor with 20kg, but if I rush it with bad form I always suffer!!!!!

now this.....resonates with my experience lately. one day, boom, epic new ROM. for a few weeks, it vanishes and boom, new rom? how incredibly interesting. putting this into practice to see how things pan out in the next few months. thanks for the experience, Wes

7 hours ago, Wesley Tan said:

Tony, I believe it is imperative to keep you lower back flat during your pancake work.

You said above that on some days you can get your chest to ground but your abs a few inches off, this means that you are definitely rounding the spine and the pelvis has reached it's limit in anterior tilt. Ideally it will be the abdomen that arrives at the floor before the chest, meaning the anterior pelvic tilt has been achieved and the movement comes from lengthening of the adductors and hamstrings without undue lumbar compression.

I personally have found over the last year that if I allow this to happen, I experience a significant shortening and tightening in my hamstrings that can last for upto a week. In my case, I believe I put too much pressure on my lower back which already has some historical issues, it causes irritation to some of the lumbar spine structures and I get a reflexive tightening of the hamstrings as they are largely innervated via L5/S1 spinal segments.

As a note, it is definitely not DOMs I experience either, as this can happen with and without load. If I perform seated good mornings as Coach describes above with perfect form, I am capable of getting chest to floor with 20kg, but if I rush it with bad form I always suffer!!!!!

Very well said, Wesley.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

11 hours ago, Wesley Tan said:

Tony, I believe it is imperative to keep you lower back flat during your pancake work...

Guilty as charged sir. It does round too much - weirdly though, I can do seated good mornings (as per pHS/PE6>iM or MSs/SE16) fairly slow with hands at ears with a flat back (momentum hides control I guess) and it was the additional incentive towards APT that led to my mistaken assumption that the bar in a seated good morning was across the shoulders. I can see how the proper form with bar overhead has that sorted and then some!

Regarding what you say about the muscular feedback - I didn't even know that could happen! So my current strategy of get down and then work on stretching forward to flatten the back could be part of the issue? Lots to implement this cycle then!  Really glad I asked about this. 

On 02/04/2016 at 10:55 AM, Keilani Gutierrez said:

now this.....resonates with my experience lately. one day, boom, epic new ROM. for a few weeks, it vanishes and boom, new rom? how incredibly interesting. putting this into practice to see how things pan out in the next few months. thanks for the experience, Wes

This is also the single most important  point of learning pancake it is definitely  not stressed enough. It is extremely hard for most adults to be able to initiate apt with straight back, the hams are nearly always just too tight. I used to think i had good pancake mobility as i could touch chest to floor.

Haha good joke, i was simply compressing my spine leading to exactly the same irritations described. Now its getting better i can negative stalder press but have no chance of getting in proper pancake position initially i always need a partner to assist my stretch. After a bit  of time i can relax into it and actually have good rom but it takes a while  to loosen up. I still do not know how to disengage my muscles to allow myself to actively  pull into position properly though...

When my back feels a bit better ill do overhead good mornings again but i cannot recommend inverted pancake in stall bars... it compresses the lower back pretty much most of the time i try, i get irritation in my back thereafter...

Which muscles are responsible for apt and closing the hips primarily? Should the focus be equal between strengthening them and lengthening the antagonists? Great topic 

Been there Done that. After a GB seminar I learnt about the apt importance in the pancake. I probably spent 6 months doing the pancake work with my butt elevated after that seminar. That's when I started to progress! Now I'm on the floor and a que I like is to think of pulling my gluts/butt behind me.

My issue when trying these is that my quads feel incredibly tight (and a little painful) when I try to extend my leg out.I've tried stretching them but that doesn't help. I suppose I should work on pancakes too?

You quads are simply weak. what you are experimenting it is a natural body strategy to increase hamstring stretch : squeeze the opposite muscles.

Fast forward to today and the past four months of weighted pancake good mornings and weighted hanging straddle leg raises have brought me more progress than the previous eight or so combined. Another plateaux overcome - thanks all (I am happy about it - that's just my straddle L face...).

Very nice work.

my progress is slow but im also getting there. Im doing heavy leg work at the moment so it is not easy for me. 

Seeing flexibility pictures of "ordinary" men is very inspiring! What automatically comes to mind is extraordinary men. Respect.

19 hours ago, John Koliopoulos said:

my progress is slow but im also getting there. Im doing heavy leg work at the moment so it is not easy for me. 

Looking good there John! This is the hardest bit of any sufficiently broad exercise regime IME. I've had it before when I was lifting and competing in duathlon; as I'm not especially gifted, I get to a point where I either tread water in both/all areas or I have to make a choice and prioritise something. In this case, I put leg strength on maintenance (1 x FLS/SE7 per week), stopped my weekly runs and it all began to fall into place. I'm looking eventually to work through SE8/SE9 before adding some powercleans / deadlifts / squats on 5/3/1 programming once I have the leg extension nailed (it still needs a thorough warm-up and a several more degrees of compression). How heavy are you going?

Thank you mate,

Im currently in the hypertrophy phase building to 5 x 10r x 120kg ATG back squat with 2min rest. Afterwards we will drop reps and increase the load and max out. I have never seriously trained legs before as it makes planches, ring work and everything way harder. But you can't call yourself a well rounded athlete in my opinion if you can't atg squat double bw and it helps strengthen the upper body alot aswell. But of course you can kiss harder lever skills goodbye due to the increased mass.^^

I actually progressed in both regards so far, but I have a slight strain in the right hamstring when doing pancake so I'm dialling my weighted mobility back a notch.