Some quick legs stretches by BuffMother!
Category:
Tags:
Outline:
Touch your Toes Stretch
Lunge Stretch
Quad Stretch
Shins & Ankle Stretch
Transcription:
Afterwards (your workout), it’s great to stretch out. So let me just show you some very quick, easy leg stretches to do.
Ok, the old standby, touching your toes. Make sure you practice keeping your lower lumbar curve in there. Go down, touch your toes like this, keep your head up. You can pretend like you’re almost doing a deadlift, but you’re just stretching. You’ll stretch those same muscles you worked during that exercise. Then come back up, give yourself a break for about 10 seconds, then you can just do a traditional touching your toes exercise. You’ll feel this really nicely in your lower back. And in your hamstrings also. Try to get to the point to where you can touch your toes, grab your toes and pull yourself down, that’s a great hamstring stretch.
And then of course the lunge stretch. It’s basically how we were doing our lunges, but now we’re just exaggerating the motion a little bit. Really stretch those muscles that we used. I don’t ever stretch before I lift, really not an extended amount. I don’t spend a lot of time on it prior to my workout. I typically do my stretching post workout. My tendons and ligaments are already loosened up and injuries are prevented. Switch your leg, come back down, stretch. On this one you can keep your leg straight out, you can bend your knee, and stretch that way. You want to sit up and use that stretch to your hip flexor. It’s a very versatile stretch. The key here is still to try to keep your knee over your ankle so that you don’t hurt your knees. Knees are very sensitive joints for a lot of people because they get abused. So we need to prevent any abuse in our workouts so we can strengthen them and make them stronger, more durable than they’ve ever been before.
Ok, so now quickly I want to show you how to do a quad stretch. A lot of people have a hard time stretching their quads because of the typical ‘pick your leg up like this’. But it is hard to do, hard to balance. A really nice easy way to stretch the quads is to get down like you’re going to do the crab walk, tuck your heels under your butt, and just lean forward onto your legs. Now this could possibly be said to be hard on your knees, but if you don’t push too hard you don’t have to kill yourself over this stretch, just let it feel the stretch a little bit in your quads. You can angle over and push more weight on your right leg, feel it in your right leg a little bit more. Come down feel it in a little different area, like this. Same thing with your left leg. It feels so good after doing those squats and those lunges.
And then, if you come back up, like a little frog, this is a great exercise for stretching your ankles and your shin. You lean your weight on your right foot, stretch around, and rotate it around. You can feel it so nicely in your shins and also in your lower knees. That’s a very important area that gets neglected some times. So just rotate around on your heel a little bit. It feels so good after that workout. Then come back up, nice and slowly. Good job.