Transcript
I’m here today to talk about how to maximize your straddle through a few different stretches. So we’re going to start with a deep squat. Here you want to make sure that your knees are over your toes and that you’re opening your hips. Pressing your knees towards the back and your hips forward. You can grab your ankles and press your elbows into your knees to help open up your hips. Not the most attractive pose, but it definitely helps your straddle. So you can start to feel that stretch on your inner thighs.
Next you can it into a more isolated inner thigh stretch for each leg. You can place one hand down and extend one leg to the side. Again, keep pressing your elbow into your knee pit, still trying to open up that hip. You’ll start to feel it on your inner thigh on this side, also here. Again, make sure that your knee doesn’t extend beyond your toes or that you’re too far shifted this way. You want it to be comfortable, so you can kind of sink into it.
After that, you can take it into your full straddle. From here, some things to think about are keeping your legs engaged to really activate your muscles while you’re stretching. You can also start to bend forward, feeling more of a stretch on your inner thighs. You want to think about bending forward from your stomach, not from your head. So again, almost like arching you’re back to bring your stomach to the floor instead of just your forehead, which would be rounding.
You can also interior-ally rotate on your legs, so you can feel more a stretch on the inner thighs as well.
You want to think about bringing the arches of your feet to the ground. If you have very tight hips, something that can help with that, you can grab a towel and have a smooth surface, and bend your knees. Bring one knee to the towel and the other to the side. Again, not the cutest pose. From here you want to think about keeping your core engaged, so that you’re not arching you back and sticking out your butt, but trying to tuck your pelvis. Make sure that your heels are in line with your knees and that you’re trying to sink your hips lower to the ground. So those are some things you can do to maximize your straddle.
