Hamstring Flexibility Challenge: Palms to Floor Pike

I am a stiff and achey old man. I work at a desk hunched over the computer nearly all day. I spend most of my leisure time sitting or lying down on the couch. I get aches in my back and neck all the time. I want to become more flexible, feel more light and youthful, and ease the tension of tight muscles.

A lot of people like me get stuck in a fixed mindset where they tell themselves that they are inherently inflexible. They think flexibility is only for gifted people who trained as gymnasts, ballerinas, or Shaolin kung fu practitioners as children. They might think it is genetically determined that they are tight and stiff instead of related to lifestyle practices.

Flexibility and mobility are like any other skill however. Flexibility goals like the Palms to floor pike or the splits can be progressively worked towards day by day. With good guidance and a disciplined plan, almost anyone can significantly improve their range of motion through mobility and flexibility training or practices like yoga.

For my own guidance on this topic, I enjoy the content of Youtubers like Tom Merrick. Tom has a really cool video called the Bendy Big 5. The video outlines what he believes to be the five most important milestones in mobility and flexibility training to reach for:

• Palms to floor pike
• Front splits
• Middle splits
• Pancake
• Back bend

The video is intended to cut out a lot of the noise and to give people the most essential goals to work towards in the world of flexibility in a sequential manner. The video suggests that accomplishing these goals will make your whole body flexible and mobile, ready for any other flexibility standard out there. I want to achieve exceptional flexibility goals like that. I love that he has provided a clear guide for anyone to follow to acquire freaky flexibility and I intend to check each of these off my fitness goals bucket list.

The first goal he mentions is the palms to floor pike, what he calls the foundation of advanced flexibility skills. The palms to floor pike is primarily a test of hamstring flexibility. To do it, you fold your body forwards over your completely straightened legs and touch the floor with your palms flat on the ground. The width between your feet changes the difficulty of the exercise, with feet farther apart being easier and feet close together being harder. Tom recommends completing the challenge with roughly a fist's width between your two feet. Here is Tom's follow along workout video on improving hamstring flexibility:

Tom made a follow-along video for each of the "Bendy Big 5". These videos use the concept of "strengthen and lengthen", where you strengthen the opposing muscle group and then lengthen the muscle group you are trying to stretch. For the pike, this means strengthening the hip flexors on the front of your legs and then stretching the hamstrings on the back of your legs. His videos also emphasize proper warmups, which loosen the body up for deeper stretching. All of the follow alongs give you rest between sets to allow your nervous system to relax and to psychologically prepare yourself for more hard efforts.

Tom recommends always measuring your progress to keep you motivated even when your efforts are seemingly fruitless. For the palms to floor pike for example, you can progress in milestones from getting your fingers to your toes, to getting your fists to the ground, then finally getting your palms to the floor. You can even move beyond that to where you stand on something like a yoga block and get your palms to the floor. Tom says that the palms to floor standard is good enough to get you into more advanced flexibility skills like the front splits though, so I'll leave the super advanced pike for another day.

After doing Tom's follow along for the pike consistently I achieved the palms to floor pike within a few weeks. In the video you do a test after the warmup and then at the end of the video. When I first started this routine I would struggle to even get my fists to the ground after the warmup, especially if I had gone running earlier in the day, slept poorly the night before, had a long tiresome day, etc. Almost from the first time I followed along with his routine by the end test I could nearly complete the palms to floor pike with a screamingly tight sensation in my calves and hamstrings. The more I did the routine, the easier and more comfortable I got in the pike. The sciatic nerve stretch in the video didn't make my legs quiver and shake as much, the hip flexor lifts didn't make my muscles cramp as much, and the pike felt more and more natural, like my body had learned to relax into that position. Soon enough, I could get my hands flat on the floor every single time, eventually doing it after the warmup before the main routine even started.

Tom's video got me to the palms to floor pike, but there are certainly other ways to get there. The kneesovertoesguy, a fitness influencer focused on injury prevention and athleticism, recommends working on an exercise called elephant walks. He also recommends training weighted Jefferson curls and Romanian deadlifts with full range of motion to simultaneously strengthen and lengthen the hamstrings. There are endless other options available on youtube, whether they are yoga for hamstrings routines or hardcore olympic gymnast weighted stretching routines. I just like the simplicity of just following Tom's video, and it worked for me.

This was an exciting journey. I was surprised how quickly following Tom's video day after day got me to an advanced level of hamstring flexibility. I don't consider myself done with hamstring training though because my flexibility seems to fade quite quickly. I tighten up if I don't keep stretching. I have to keep at it, day after day, to make meaningful long lasting changes to my range of motion. The consensus online seems to be that building a skill takes significantly more time and effort than maintaining it however. So I will probably throw in some hamstring stretches like the elephant walks mentioned above every once in a while to maintain this skill.

This is a cool skill. I recommend training flexibility and mobility to everyone. I feel much more youthful and healthy when I’m limber like this. Having more range of motion makes me feel safer for injury prevention purposes too. I am nowhere near achieving any of the other skills he outlined in the "Bendy Big 5", so I'm curious how long they will take comparatively. The pancake stretch in particular doesn't even make sense to me. My body doesn't even know what is going on in that one, so my hip mobility journey might take a bit more effort. I am incredibly excited to train more flexibility and mobility goals.