Pike Stretches and Lower Back?

[Neal Winkler]

Is obvious that the core is meant to move, or else the ribs would just connect to the hips.

Why do pandas have "thumbs" the way they do?

In either case, the panda's thumb is a contrivance that is an artifact of the history of the panda. It is not an ideal design fitted perfectly for holding bamboo, it is an evolved contraption. The original function of the radial sesamoid was to reduce the chance of tears in the tendon that runs to the thumb from a muscle in the arm (the sesamoid forms where this tendon bends around the edge of the wrist). The radial sesamoid was then co-opted to serve its present role in handling bamboo. Indeed, much of the panda's anatomy speaks of contrivance - it is a bear from a meat eating ancestry that has evolved to eat bamboo. Many details of its anatomy appear to be strange contrivances that reflect this history.

I think this evolutionary argument might go too far when inferring that the mid-section shouldn't move because we weren't designed to stand upright.

We have the bodies we have, not the best design possible for carrying load, but the evolutionary argument would make me think that there should be more powerful mobility in the mid section, after all that's part of how how four legged animals develop thrust, dynamically loading and unloading the spine, flexion and extension.

I guess I didn't make my point well.

What I was trying to say is that you can't necessarily say, "x body part can do y, therefore we should do y" because evolution does not "mean", as you stated, to do anything.

The design of the human mind is such that we commit systemic errors on a variety of subjects. So I could say, "Obviously we are meant to commit these errors, or else our minds would be different," and furthermore insist that trying to correct for these errors is not beneficial.

Would you agree that we should not try to correct our cognitive biases since we are made that way?

[Tarun Suri]

How... in the world... did this conversation get to where it is?

Let's take a second and slow down, and examine the basic structure of the hips and spine. These joints are designed for potentially extreme mobility.

What do we know about mobility? Mobility, especially extreme mobility, without sufficient strength = injury waiting to happen. Strength(especially extreme strength) without sufficient mobility, interestingly enough, is also an injury waiting to happen.

There are almost certainly certain positions where you would not want much of an external load, but with just BW they are not an issue. As an example, plank position on the back of the hands. Done properly this is a great exercise for the wrists for both mobility and strength, as it is the beginning of our wrist push ups. Now, if you start doing this with 300 extra lbs you may be in for quite a nasty surprise. Many times it is ALL about taking an informed and balanced approach to each position.

There is also a lot to be said for HOW you do things. How many people here have tried inlocate/exlocate drills and made their shoulders hurt? I've done that before. Now that I've been to the seminars and been shown how this SHOULD be done, I have no problems and my shoulders are rapidly feeling better than they have in years. This applies directly to pike stretches.

The potential issue with pike stretching is that when you reach the current limit of your glute/ham/lower leg flexibility you can still reach further down your legs by curling your lower back. This does not create any extra stretch in the glutes or hamstrings or lower legs, it simply magnifies the forces acting on the ligaments and discs of the lower back by multiples. If you stretch this way you do not understand what the goal of the stretch is or how to effectively enhance your flexibility. With straight legs, a change in pelvic anterior or posterior tilt relative to the position of the femur is the only thing that is going to lengthen OR shorten your hamstrings or glutes. Curling your back has nothing to do with it.

Ok, so now we have some basic facts about our bodies. Now it is time to make them useful. So far this is all just trivia, fun facts. Now we go beyond that.

The purpose of the pike stretch is to lengthen the glutes, hamstrings, and if necessary the lower leg muscles. To do this, there are two joints we can manipulate: knees and hips. If you bend your knees 90 degrees or so you will notice that you have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM laying your chest right onto your quads with little to no curling of the lower back. Notice where your belly button is. Whenever you work pike, your goal will be to touch THAT spot with your belly button. This can only be done with a straight lower back. If you curl it, the belly button gets pulled up closer to the hips. Try it out as you sit in your chair: you'll see right away. Touch your belly button while you're in that perfect bent-knee pike and then touch the spot on your leg that it is touching. Now curl your lower back. Even a little bit of curling will pull the belly button away from that spot.

One way to work the pike, and this absolutely DOES work, is to start here and start straightening your legs. By always concentrating on keeping your belly button pressed tightly into this spot. wherever it is for you, curling of the lower back will be avoided. Advantages of this method are extreme low risk of you hurting your back and the fact that this is active flexibility you are developing. Disadvantages are that this, like other active flexibility work, will not be comfortable. This will absolutely help your passive flexibility as well. You can do this sitting or standing.

The second way to work pike is to first go as far down as you can into a straight leg pike without curling your lower back. REMEMBER THAT SPOT THE BELLY BUTTON SHOULD BE TOUCHING! Now, bend your knees SLIGHTLY and as you do so you will be able to bring your belly button closer to that spot. Now, concentrate on flexing your quads and hip flexors. This will take practice, but eventually you will be able to just use those muscles to pull down into the stretch, and this will allow the hamstrings to relax into the stretch. As you maintain this contraction, use it to slowly straighten the knees. This may take several minutes, and it will not be super comfortable, but it WILL happen. Don't be afraid. Work slow, don't push too hard, and over time your flexibility will improve without you screwing up your back. Again, this can be done on the ground. Advantages: This is more similar to the actual pike and will allow you to make direct progress in the true pike stretch, as this is an active flexibility method that moves you INTO a deeper pike stretch than you could get into with JUST the straight leg pike stretch alone.

The last method that I will discuss is the hardest: Traditional pike. It takes some muscle control to do this correctly without curling the lower back. I often use the other two techniques for my earlier stretches and use this once I am ready for my deepest stretching, as this method is the one that will build the correct neural patterns for actual pike work. The others just help me train my muscles to lengthen. As I get better at it I can use this technique earlier and earlier into my stretches. Again, you will just use your hip flexors to pull the front of the hips down towards the thighs(anterior tilt) and you will be using your quads to keep the legs straight. Actively try not to engage the glutes, hamstrings, or lower back. This was a challenge for me for quite a while, but I am starting to get very good at it ans as I get better my flexibility gets better too!

You have to remember that a fair amount of flexibility is in the nervous system and not the muscle tissue itself. You have to teach your body how to move, and this can take some time. There absolutely IS a component of tissue restructuring, but a quick search on PUBMED will leave you with page after page of documented physical changes in muscle length due to sarcomere repositioning and/or splitting. As we know, it takes around 6 weeks for muscle tissue to be fully synthesized in humans so don't expect this kind of thing to start happening your first month of stretching. That will still primarily be you teaching your body how to move.

ALL three methods can be done on the ground or standing, alone or with partners, and weighted or unweighted. Don't even think about weighting them until you can do them without curling your back. You will feel the difference between curling your back to try and go deeper and NOT curlig your back as you go deeper. It's pretty easy to tell the difference, because when you curl your back you will start feeling tightness adn stretching in the lumbar area. When you are doing the stretch correctly and using the hip flexors to increase the stretch you will just feel you hamstrings and perhaps your glutes and even lower legs tighten up as you get to their current flexibility limits.

You have no idea how happy I am after reading that. My hamstrings are sooooo tight. They've been sooooo tight for soooo long. I remember people giving me back walks when I used to do Systema and they would comment on how ridiculously tight I was. Stretching my hamstrings is absolutely the worst feeling in the world for me. I would just start a little bit and lose all willpower due to that terrible feeling. (Note that I am not even stretching beyond my limits, it's just a terrible sensation, like energy being sapped from me consciously).

Now that I better understand these methods and especially being reminded about the neurological aspect of stretching, I really think I can make a difference in it's length. For real this time!!

I love this forum

[Joshua Naterman]

You totally can. I used to only be able to touch about two inches past my knees, and it totally felt like crap at first but now I can touch my palms to the floor with straight legs in my deepest stretch, but I can pretty much always touch all fignertips and thumb tip whenever I want. I don't know how long that took me, it was a while, but the stretches feel really good now and I am better in the pike than I ever have been. I'm big, so I am curious to see just how far I can go with the flexibility as well, at least for the basics like pike and bridge.

[Cole Dano]

I guess I didn't make my point well.

What I was trying to say is that you can't necessarily say, "x body part can do y, therefore we should do y" because evolution does not "mean", as you stated, to do anything.

The design of the human mind is such that we commit systemic errors on a variety of subjects. So I could say, "Obviously we are meant to commit these errors, or else our minds would be different," and furthermore insist that trying to correct for these errors is not beneficial.

Would you agree that we should not try to correct our cognitive biases since we are made that way?

You are certainly right, you guys on this forum are so sharp, to say the lumbar it meant to do something is a statement of faith not science. A more objective statement is it does move like that, and the question i think you are posing is - with the understanding of our bodies being somewhat flawed in design should we foster a full range of lumbar movement or try to move in the direction our current engineering viewpoint suggests as best.

Unfortunately there is not clear cut answer, as demonstrated by all the controversy around the subject including some very smart people. I see the same in my industry, yoga, where there are varying viewpoints on the same movement.

As a teacher, i try to err on the safe side, but still to get people moving and doing.

As a student of yoga, where the pike stretch is one of the first things i learned almost 30 years ago, i love the pike stretch. If i don't feel quite right, its a go to posture for me, home base, ground.

I personally experimented with every possible variation that has blown through the scene over that time. In these experiments i found that yes the back can very safely flex, and once there is sufficient hip mobility it will actually like to flex and at least in my body, the lower back feels it as therapy, prehab if you will.

At that point, IMVHO experience trumps science. Now even looking at McGill, his approach is actually the same, he's not just giving a blanket assessment, but testing his patients to see what works for them and what doesn't. He''s found some are flexion tolerant some intolerant. If your intolerant and in back pain you might need to make some changes, based on that condition.

The issue seems to always boil down to that which is part of what makes these conversations, especially on line, so difficult. I wouldn't waste my time elsewhere, but there are allot of smart cookies here, who hopefully can also read around the words and begin to find there own, comfortable, interpretation of how to work, with stretching, WODs etc.

It can't all be spelled out on line. God knows Slizz is trying his best, i wish i had his ability to cram so much into a post. I've done workshops on the pike stretch and felt like i'd only managed to scratch the surface.

Any triangle, i hope my posts don't read as a direct response to your previous posts, really i'm trying to flesh them out and provoke some thought in myself as much as others who might be reading.

[Cole Dano]

@Slizz's post-

Great post, thanks for fleshing out some more of the practical ways to work on hamstring flexibility. There are many and i hope folks can take from the various suggestions given.

One important thing to note, is the bent knee approach works best with the pike stretch, with a one legged stretch its a bit more risky.

One other important general thing to note is to try and stretch the muscle and not the tendon, esp. the origin. In other words allot of times with hamstring work one will feel more at the sit bones than the middle of the leg. Try and get the stretch into the belly of the muscle. One of the most common injuries in yoga is to tear the connection at the sit bone, and this is always due to letting too much of the stress of the stretch go into the tendons there.

Use of reciprocal inhibition is also good, in other words tighten the quads strongly and press the bones of the leg into the hamstring.

And again, even using Slizz's technique, the addition of a strap around the feet to pull on can really help when working actively.

[Kyle Courville]

One other important general thing to note is to try and stretch the muscle and not the tendon, esp. the origin. In other words allot of times with hamstring work one will feel more at the sit bones than the middle of the leg. Try and get the stretch into the belly of the muscle. One of the most common injuries in yoga is to tear the connection at the sit bone, and this is always due to letting too much of the stress of the stretch go into the tendons there.

I often feel the stretches closer to the tendons and not the belly of the muscle(mostly closer to the knee). I have pretty much stopped all hamstring stretches because of this. I was wondering if you have any advice on relieving this. Thanks in advance.

[Tarun Suri]

Kyle, I would experiment with variations of those positions and see what works best. In fact, that is what I had to do when trying to do what Slizzardsman suggested.

I couldn't actually press my belly into my quads, while sitting in a very bent position. It would hurt my back and when I looked in the mirror my lower back was very rounded. Odd... or maybe it's normal. I don't know, but all to say that I couldn't get a benchmark for where my bellybutton should position itself. So here is what I did, and I think I will stick with that for a long time:

In a strongly bent, sitting position, I would straighten my back until I got a neutral lumbar curve. I used my hands behind me on the ground for assistance. From there, I would focus on maintaining this position and slowly unbend my legs. When they completely open and are straight, that's exactly when I feel a stretch in my hamstrings. I personally hold for 60s, and I start flexing most of my leg muscles starting at the 30s mark. You can use a variety of methods such as contract/relax, etc. I did 3 sets of these before bed last night.

My hypothesis is that as I get better at this, when I lengthen my back to get a neutral spine, with time this position should slowly become more vertical until finally, it will be perpendicular to the ground. I'll do these dedicatedly each night from now on and I'll share my progress on this thread if anyone is interested. (I still feel so excited that I found a viable method for my to lengthen my hamstrings.)

[Kyle Courville]

I played with some hamstring stretches today. I noticed the only time I get stress towards the tendons are in straight leg stretches. For now, I'll only use stretches when my legs are bent a little. My hamstrings are moderately flexible. When I was playing around with different variations this morning I found a pretty decent one for me. I stood with my legs bent a little(15-20 degrees?) about shoulder length apart. Then I would bend down at the hips while maintaining a straight back as if I were trying to pick something off the floor. While I perform the stretch I picture jamming the head of the femur into the hip. This helps me achieve a deeper stretch. This is a great thread; I had just recently learned I have been using improper movement patterns. A big one sor me is constantly stressing my lower back due to lack of hamstring flexibility.

[Joshua Naterman]

When you feel the stretch at the tendon, that usually means that the muscle you are trying to stretch is contracting(voluntarily or not). That is usually due to a lack of muscle control, and is fairly common at first. When you are first stretching your body is like " Whoa whoa whoa... what the heck is going on here?! You're not supposed to do that! I don't remember this... I'm not letting it happen, I might get hurt." Something of an automatic response, very similar to muscle cramps and seizures around the spine(as one example). That's the body's automatic response when it feels like something is about to move the wrong way... seize up the muscles to prevent the movement. It will take a little time to teach the body that it is ok for the hamstrings to lengthen, and it will also take a little bit of time to gain control of your back position as you perform the stretch. As this happens you will find that it becomes easier and easier to stretch the actual muscle. You never want to stretch tendons, which is why you should never try and stretch a contracted muscle. You always make sure the muscle is released first.

A lot of times it's easier to learn the muscle control with the bent knee methods. As Mr. Brady said, you may not want to try that standing on one leg. I HAVE found that this is effective one leg at a time when I use my other leg to support a bit of my weight as well, and sometimes this is a great tool. It is very rare for just one hamstring to be able to resist the upper body weight, and this lack of ability usually results in (I am pretty sure about this)partial shutdown of the muscle innervation due to neuromuscular inhibition. That makes the muscle a little easier to stretch, but also a little easier to injure. Take it easy with this if you decide to try it. I use it occasionally, but it is not a huge part of my stretching routine. Single leg pike stretches seem to get more useful as your flexibility improves, but that is going a bit beyond my experience at the moment.