There is nothing quite as uncomfortable as stiff, tight and sore muscles. I’ve dealt with tight muscles and muscle soreness for years. My quality of health has been saved by the fact that I've been able to develop a stretching routine to control the problem of tightness.

I feel it would be valuable for people to hear how I’ve incorporated flexibility training into my daily routine. I’m a naturally stiff person, so I need to consistently stretch in order to maintain any sort of flexibility. It seems to be a common story that I’ve heard from a wide range of people, all of us have had to make adjustments to our lifestyles due to low levels of mobility and flexibility.

Flexibility exercises and daily stretching has since become a part of my life to keep a pain-free healthy body. There is a huge percentage of the population would benefit from incorporating stretching, yoga, and flexibility exercises into our daily routine in order to to maintain a pain-free lifestyle.

I have an active surfer and also played every other sport I could find time for. This has been the dominant interest of mine for as long as I can remember.

We should learn to look after our bodies from a young age

Stretching exercises while playing soccer and rugby when I was a child involved a few leg stretches, often touching our toes and a basic warm up before games and training. Unless they’re stretching daily most young people are going to stiffen up as they age. Because of all the sports, and the lack of stretching over the years, my muscles became overly tight and stiff. By the time I turned fourteen, I was incredibly stiff and developing lower back pains. Each time I came in from a surfing session I would be experiencing pain and soreness.

How could it be that a healthy fourteen-year-old boy was developing lower back pain? That’s supposed to problems for the elderly isn’t it? It appeared not. Muscle pain and back problems can affect anyone at any age, and I found this out at a young age.

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A Painfully Stiff Back Can Affect Anyone at Any Age

I was lucky enough to know an excellent physiotherapist who was able to point me in the right direction. We were able to develop a stretching routine to help improve my flexibility and eliminate the back pain I was experiencing. Within a few months, I had improved my flexibility a huge amount by performing stretching exercises daily combined with visiting a yoga school.

Yoga classes were a huge factor in improving my flexibility. I began attending yoga classes twice weekly where my mother was teaching Hatha Yoga. The first classes I attended were very difficult as I couldn’t manage to sit with my legs stretched straight out in front of me. My hamstrings had almost no flexibility. These first few months of stretching and yoga were extremely uncomfortable and painful, due to my leg muscles having almost no flexibility.

With the twice daily stretching and flexibility exercise, combined with the two weekly yoga classes, I was able to totally eliminate all my back pain and stiffness. I actually became flexible. I didn’t think that would be possible for an ultra-stiff guy like me. When I first started, my hamstrings were so stiff I could barely touch my knees. I went from the stiffest kid in my school to the most flexible in under a year of disciplined training involving my stretching routine and Yoga.

As I started to enjoy this new found flexibility, I attended the Swami Sarivarti Yoga Teacher Training programs to continue learning and to continue progressing in my flexibility and Yoga training. This was a great learning experience, I started to really understand stretching, flexibility and the 8 limbs of yoga.

When I was eighteen, I noticed that muscle stiffness was a common problem among young people. I realized that I wasn’t the only one dealing with these issues. There was a group of friends from the local gym that were fit, strong, and healthy, but they all had difficulties maintaining any type of flexibility.

I knew how much your life could improve once you developed flexibility and were able to shake off aches and pains so I started a stretching, flexibility, and yoga class at a local gym to help my friends improve flexibility. It can greatly improve your quality of life when you increase your flexibility, and it can allow you to live free from stiffness and pain.

It wasn’t until l was in my early twenties that I began to take my flexibility for granted. I started to stretch less and sometimes not at all. I stopped doing my yoga classes and got sucked into the trap of working too much, traveling constantly, and not listening to my body’s signals that it needed stretching and flexibility exercises to keep it healthy and subtle.

When flexibility goes from bad to worse

In 2009, I had returned to Australia from Brazil and was working in construction, trying to get back on my feet in Sydney. I had totally stopped stretching and was in a routine of working, sports, surfing, and going out with friends. I was living a great lifestyle but I had totally ignored all the warning signs my body was giving me. These signs were pointing out that I was getting to a stage where I was at an increased risk of injury.

I began feeling my lower back and hamstrings stiffening over the months. I knew that I had been neglecting my flexibility, but I was living a fast-paced lifestyle where I had put my body’s health and flexibility on the back burner. It felt like my hamstrings were stopping my lower back from being as mobile as it should be.

My friend and I had been surfing all morning and were relaxing on the beach with a group of friends, kicking a football around and checking the waves. I bent over and twisted to pick up the football and I felt a pop and felt a seizing sensation in my lower back. I knew immediately that I was in trouble.

My hips and lower back were totally seized up, leaving me with a sharp shooting pain down my right. I was barely able to work, surfing was out of the question, and even driving a car seemed to cause immense pain.

I started to get back a few of the aches and pains that I had managed to sort out with some basic yoga and stretching techniques. Unfortunately, I still ignored all of the warning signs that I was putting my body under too much pressure. I was working long hours in construction, surfing, playing soccer, practicing jiu-jitsu and traveling. I had not been listening to any of the signals that had begun to develop.

I knew that I was becoming really inflexible again, but as my life had become busy and my priorities changed. Unfortunately, it seems to become very common to put our health and fitness low on our list of priorities while we are working hard, and doing things for other people seems to end up on top of the list.

After weeks of speaking with and getting treatment from doctors, osteopaths, yoga teachers and physiotherapists I learned that I had pinched a nerve. This was the result of too much physical strain and not continuing to stretch, engage in yoga practice, or really any kind of training to maintain flexibility. All of the muscles in my hips and legs were incredibly stiff.

I knew that I had made a huge mistake as by ignoring my stiff body. It had been trying to let me know that I needed to maintain my flexibility. It became too easy to just ignore all the signs while I was caught up in my busy life.

I was frustrated with myself. I already knew how to maintain a healthy back and body. I had been working on my flexibility since I was a teenager after all. I had totally ignored all the signs that I was becoming too stiff and in danger of an injury and because of it I was back to square one again.

Luckily for me, I had the help of my physiotherapist. We were able to come up with a stretching program designed to loosen all the required muscles in my body. It especially targeted my back and legs in order to loosen the muscles surrounding the sciatic nerve. I was able to develop a great stretching program that relieved the pain I was feeling. When you are afflicted with nerve pain it can be difficult to imagine ever being pain-free again, but as soon as I began the twice daily flexibility training I began to feel the pain begin to slowly subside.

Keeping a busy schedule requires a flexibility program in order to maintain a healthy body

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Why is flexibility so important?

Flexibility is all too often the most undervalued aspect of a healthy lifestyle. Everyone’s lifestyle can benefit from flexibility training.

Flexibility can help maintain good posture, minimize muscle soreness, enhance joint mobility, and prevent injuries. As you work on progressing with a stretching routine you will develop a greater range or motion in the joint and surrounding muscles.

Anyone who is active in sports should be aware of the benefits surrounding flexibility training. There are a lot of case studies that prove that the chance of injury will decrease when people incorporate flexibility training into their fitness routines. This is due to the greater range of motion that is developed in their muscle and joints.

When flexibility is incorporated into a well-designed training program, you will become more in-tune with your mental and physical state. This allows you to know their limits and to know how far you can push yourself safely. It is also a great way to achieve an active relaxation that will help with your physical and mental recovery.

What if you are not a top level athlete, is flexibility really so important?

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Of course. It is probably even more important than to the everyday person. If you are an athlete performing regularly there is a good chance you are already involved in some sort of stretching routine into your training to avoid injury.

For the everyday person with a busy life schedule of work and families, it is easy to let your flexibility deteriorate. I definitely know how easy it was, my flexibility had taken a back seat and fallen back on my priority list. This common story never has a good outcome.

Flexibility is as important to elite athletes as it is for a busy mother or a fifty hour a week office worker. Flexibility is especially important to prevent injury in everyday life. Day to day activities such as getting out of bed, bending over to pick something up, carrying your child, or cleaning the car can all lead to serious injury if you are excessively stiff.

We tend to fall into bad posture habits and our muscles and joints can lose their mobility. Once flexibility and mobility deteriorate to a certain point, all our beloved activities become more and more difficult until you’ll find yourself dealing with muscle soreness, and eventually this can lead to injury and pain.

Once you leave it on the back burner for too long and allow yourself to become injured, the road to recovery is a long and painful. The reward for maintaining flexibility is that you can live a healthy pain-free life up until your twilight years. All it takes is spending that little bit of time on yourself required to keep your body flexible.

It is widely known that maintaining a flexible body will greatly reduce the chance that you develop debilitating chronic back pain. If you ever have the chance to speak to anyone who is suffering from back pain, ask them how the pain affects them. They are willing to do just about anything to solve the problem and live pain-free again.

The problem is that once you have let your mobility deteriorate to a certain point, it will be a strenuous and difficult journey on the path to becoming pain-free again. This often leaves people requiring strong analgesics or possibly going into surgery to try and solve the issue.

Maintain Flexibility to Keep Doing What You Love

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I have just spent the winter in Hawaii, pushing myself into surfing the biggest waves of my life. This was an ‘El Nino’ year, the currents warm up in the northern hemisphere which creates huge swells in the northern hemisphere.

This year led to one of the biggest and best seasons in history, there seemed to be constant, massive swells hitting the Hawaiian Islands and making huge waves that crashed into the Hawaiian shoreline. Especially in a famous place called Waimea Bay.

There are always professional surfers in the water at Waimea Bay, testing themselves against the waters. They all have their own stretching routines to warm up for the huge waves and are in peak fitness, as you would expect.

What I did not expect though was the group of fifty to sixty-year-olds surfing magnificently and even outdoing the professional surfers. There are twenty to thirty-foot waves, the might of the whole Pacific Ocean behind them and they move at incredible speeds. When you fall from these waves you can be thrown around violently. You will be underwater with little control of what happens to your body. Limbs can be pulled in all directions and you will be pushed deep under water.

These guys have managed to stay in peak physical condition well into their sixties, and they continue dominating some of most difficult surfing conditions in the world. They have all lived them through their lives maintaining their flexibility through stretching and yoga training. They are a great example of what is possible if you maintain your flexibility and mobility into the years you previously thought were for complaining about aches and pains from a rocking chair.

When you speak with these guys, you realize that the one thing they all have in common is that they have all continued their regular stretching exercises to maintain mobility and avoid injury. This keeps their body and mind in tune and healthy.

That is why maintaining a healthy flexible body is so important. You can go about your daily habits, routines, sports and hobbies pain-free and feeling great. You’ll be able to make the most out of every single day and continue doing what you love right into your beautiful twilight years.

As they say prevention is always the best cure.

Maintain flexibility and keep charging into your 60s 

Plank

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Lateral plank

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Pillar Plank With Arm Lift

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Alternate hip flexion

Bridge

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Bridge with leg extension

Squat

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Squat Jumps

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Lunge