I’m a fortysomething runner. Can I become a flexible person in a month?
“Woo, we tight!”
Wade Bryant is holding back a whistle. It’s clear he’s having a hard time concealing his opinion of my body’s bendiness – or lack thereof. When I first called Bryant, a former ballet dancer and flexibility coach to Lizzo and Cardi B, I had seen the pictures on his Instagram grid of clients with one leg pointed skyward or both legs wrenched apart in the splits.
As a fortysomething woman who has inflicted untold damage to her hips and hamstrings as a result of a sporadic running habit, not to mention ruined her back, hips and shoulders thanks to an all-hours writing habit, I fostered no illusion of turning into a human Gumby. But I was sick of feeling like a creaky loser every time I went to yoga class and watched in dismay as my fellow students’ palms melted into the floor during forward fold time. There had to be some room for improvement.
Bryant’s methodology sounded too reasonable to be true. He didn’t want me strapping myself to any medieval torture device. “You’ll do five minutes a day, and then week by week you’ll add on another minute a day until you’re up to 10 minutes,” he told me when I called him. “We were taught to stretch before we play sports, but I say stretch while you’re putting on lotion, while you’re putting on your shirt, while you’re riding the subway and holding the pole.”
We worked out a plan: a month of daily stretching at home – or at a yoga studio, or his group classes – bookended by two private sessions with the man himself. So long as I put in the work, there’d be a before and after. Or so I hoped.
Consistency is king when it comes to flexibility training. Research shows that long-term change only comes about with constant care and feeding. One study showed that a full 30 seconds of a static stretch (no swinging or swaying, just staying in place), performed regularly, is needed to see changes in flexibility, and another study revealed that a five times a week commitment is what it takes to bring on long-term results.
The gains are not just about photogenic bragging rights. Flexibility can help prevent pain and injuries, reduce inflammation and improve one’s balance and posture. The findings of a recent study on mice even imply that stretching might even reduce the risk of cancer.
I don’t try anything at home until my first in-person session with Bryant. To give him a sense of what he’s working with, I demonstrate my version of a forward fold. The shape my body reaches is more of a right angle, my fingers grazing my middle shins, my back parallel to the floor. “My hamstrings hate me,” I grumble. Bryant has another diagnosis, and tells me that my troubles originate in my tight back and shoulders, both of which I have my laptop to blame for. I spend the next 40 minutes performing back stretches, executing cat-cows and pancaking my torso against the wall.
It isn’t until the end of the hour, when my back and shoulders are warmed up, that he suggests I retry the cursed forward fold. I am sceptical. We’ve done very little hamstring work. I have never been able to touch my toes. “Shift your weight into the ball of your feet,” he coaxes me. Miraculously, my hands find their way to the floor.
He sends me off with homework: five minutes a day of playing around with shoulder stretches, hip openers and a seated move that I label “the manspread”. So begins my month-long experiment in attaining the modicum of flexibility that has eluded me for most of my life.
Unfortunately, my hunch proves true: some of us really are luckier than others. “A lot of it is hereditary,” Ayla Donlin, a lecturer in the department of kinesiology at California State University, Long Beach, tells me. “Joint structure figures into it, and that often is hereditary. And age definitely plays a role. We are less flexible as we get older.”
Donlin is a 40-year-old former gymnast and dedicated exerciser, working out four to five times a week. She makes a point to “sprinkle in” rounds of static and dynamic stretches before and after her cardio and weight-training sessions. “Flexibility tends to get nudged to the back burner,” she says. “If we can sustain flexibility and mobility as we age, we’re going to be able to perform everyday movements more fluidly, and live more pain-free.”
Stretching feels good, having stretched feels better, and it’s cool to be able to organize your body into a funny pasta shape, but she says she does it mostly for mobility, flexibility’s superstar sibling. Donlin tells me to think of a dancer doing the splits. “That’s flexibility. Now think of a dancer doing a full kick or a leap in the air. That’s mobility!”
“I don’t even like the term flexibility – I prefer to think about mobility,” the Brooklyn yoga teacher Liz Migliaccio, who leads Taylor Swift-themed classes, tells me. “Flexibility is the ability of muscles to lengthen, but mobility comes from a more active point of view.”
While it’s possible to train your hamstrings to relax and open over the course of a single stretching session, mobility requires a longer-term commitment. “You do a hamstring stretch. Your muscles will be flexible within five minutes, but the next day you might not have that same range of motion,” Migliaccio explains.
The flexibility v mobility dichotomy doesn’t make sense to me until I go to one of Migliaccio’s classes, and complete several rounds of aerobic stretches. Rather than asking us to hinge over and hold still, she has us fluctuate between standing and bent poses, changing our positions every five seconds. Migliaccio makes “swoosh” sounds as we alternate between a standing lunge and raising a knee towards our noses. It all requires balance, focus and exertion. Afterwards, I feel like a well oiled and ecstatic machine.
My at-home practice continues apace. I follow Bryant’s advice and incorporate stretches into my daily routine. I read the final 50 pages of a novel in lotus position, activating my hip flexors while I load up on my book clubordained reading. At a morning meeting at work, I arrange my body into a figure four. A colleague looks very concerned and offers me his chair.
None of it is too arduous. “If you’re gentle, your muscles will respond. It’s better than pushing hard,” Nonna Gleyzer, a pilates teacher to the stars, tells me when we meet on a video call. A former member of the national Ukrainian rhythmic gymnastics team, she has worked with Gisele Bündchen and Natalie Portman and Kelly Rowland (“my masterpiece”). Despite my wonky camera angle, Gleyzer can tell
that my right side is tighter than my left (Bryant had observed the same thing.)
She urges me to prop my seated body up on a pillow, and guides me through a series of gentle stretches, reaching my hands overhead and attempting to fold my torso over my legs. “Your nervous system gets scared. Your body should not be afraid,” she says, then coaches me through some hand-over-head side stretches and catcows.
The research conducted by Matthew Wyon, a professor of exercise physiology at University of Wolverhampton School of Sports, backs up Gleyzer’s claims. He conducted an experiment where he divided dancers into two groups; one performed moderate stretching, which he qualified as a five or six on a one to 10 intensity spectrum, while the other cohort committed to hardcore stretches that he qualified as an eight or nine. Do I need to tell you which group came in with better results?
“We often stretch too hard. And most often that causes our bodies to react, or protect ourselves against a stretch,” Wyon says. “Stretching at a low intensity actually allows our body’s muscles to properly relax. When we start pushing it really hard, the muscles start trembling and contract. That’s the body’s protective mechanism.”
Wyon, who makes a point to stretch throughout the day, and keeps a thick book under his desk for surreptitious calf work during Zoom calls, recommends that I be kind to my body as I go about my daily stretches. “Sometimes you say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t hurt –
I’m not doing something right.’ Actually you are.”
Easy does it is also the prevailing ethos of Bryant’s group stretch class, which meets in a Garment District dance studio three times a week. Since he began devoting his time to flexibility training in 2020, Bryant has cultivated a clientele from a diverse range of zip codes and ages. The woman next to me, a 70-year-old yoga instructor, says that thanks to Bryant’s class, she is now grabbing her feet. The room is packed, but thankfully only a small portion of the students are able to pull off back walkovers and splits. Most of us are … only human. The atmosphere is more like an emotional support group than a 6am Equinox class. We take storytelling breaks, and women share their body-awakening stories and clap for one another. I never arrive at a shockingly bendy position, but when I head out I feel tingly and happy.
Despite my daily stretching sessions, a month into my experiment, I am still unable to fold my body like a piece of origami. At our final one-onone, Bryant rates me a “two to three” on the flexibility spectrum – I haven’t changed much. The only surprising thing about this verdict is how little it bothers me. It’s unlikely I will ever be the sort of person who can fold over and kiss the ground. But at least I’ll be able to tie my shoes.
BOTTOM LINE
How much did it cost? $400
Did it work? It got me … trying. Which is a start?
Would I do it again? Yes. Stretching feels good, and it is good for you, even if you might not end up on Bryant’s Instagram grid.
Did it fix me? My body is still creaky and crunchy. But I now know that running without ever tending to my muscles isn’t the path forward.
Overall rating: Three out of five hands planted on the shellacked yoga studio floor.
My homework: five minutes a day of playing around with shoulder stretches, hip openers, and a seated move that I label ‘the manspread’