A Healthy Addiction: 2015 Fitness Goal - Touching My Toes Update

My fitness goal for 2015 was touching my toes. Its been 3 months since my failed attempt to touch my toes at the end of 2015. However that does not mean I've given up on the goal. In the last 3 months I've added a number of things to try and facilitate my goal. I mentioned to my chiropractor my goal of touching my toes and he said I could try to work on the brain neural piece. Part of my pitiful flexibility could be my brain just not allowing me to stretch further.

So I did some work with them on this contraption.

They had me do a number of exercises, some with my eyes closed, eyes open, squeezing my legs together, a number of different things. We would then retest my toe touch to see if anything had an affect on the distance.

Eventually we found something that showed a marked improvement in my toe touch. Based on that I was given this exercise to do at home. You basically squeeze as hard as you can with your legs and pull with your arms for 10 seconds then release. Do this for 3 sets.

The first night I went a little ballistic with this exercise and did it on and off for an hour. Surprisingly I was able to touch my toes after all that. However 10 mins later the effects had worn off but there was definitely something going on.

Also based on the following article. I added a "banded pigeon" to the rotation of stretches I was doing. Well that's what I'm calling it, I know the pigeon from yoga and well this has a band involved. Check out the article it has some good suggestions in there. My hips have long been a serious area of tightness so it can't hurt either way.

The band I use is a Rogue fitness band, the green one obviously.

So after another 3 months (15 total) of work here are the results.

Now Compare that to my previous results over 15 months.

Graphically here is my progress

So there you go, I think based on this I should in theory be able to touch my toes in about 3 months. If I do a ton of stretching and exercises I can now touch my toes so I guess you could say I reached my goal finally. Hopefully soon I will be able to touch with minimal warm up. Next up Van Damme chair splits.