How to improve flexibility when you hate stretching

For those of us who are guilty of neglecting our flexibility practices, Johnson has a solution: combining it with your strength training to get the most from your sessions. He recommends ‘stretching fillers’, whereby you use your rest periods in your workout to stretch out the muscles. “If you rest for 30 seconds to a minute in between your sets, use that time to work on your mobility.”

Don’t worry, research shows that stretching between lifts won’t leave the muscles too limp to complete the rest of your sets. A Journal Of Strength And Conditioning paper from 2019 found that intra-set stretching in strength training didn’t compromise muscular adaptations. In the study, participants completed strength training programmes either with or without passive stretching between sets, with the poses targeting the same muscle groups worked during the resistance exercises. For example, bench press was followed by a chest stretch and leg extensions were followed by a quad stretch.

This is the best time to stretch to improve flexibility if you always skip the cool down