How To Not Get Stuck In Your Middle Splits!
During my time in Bali, I had the pleasure of getting to know Matthew Smith, a flexibility expert. After seeing him guide our mutual friend Theo into performing the side split in just a single session, I knew I had to invite him to my channel to share his knowledge with you guys, so this tutorial is all about getting down into the side split.
Full youtube video here.
Let’s jump into it :)
The side split is a super technical position, in that, if we just go straight down, the hip will likely jam for most people.
So we need to change the position we go into, in order to optimize our alignment and successfully get down into the splits.
There are two ways of doing this:
The first is to roll our hips forward
2. The second is to externally rotate our feet out
Let’s talk about the first way.
So, to get down into the side splits, you’re going to get into a position where your feet and your hands are roughly in the same line, and from there you’ll slide down while rolling your hips really really far forward.
You don’t want to have your hips in posterior tilt, because your hips will jam.
As you go down, you want to roll your hips forward in order to create the space and go down further. And, already, by changing your hip position, many people will be able to go deeper.
Learning how to roll your hips forward to allow your hips not to jam will be a key aspect to progressing in your side split training.
The next part of the equation is for the hips to sit ever so slightly behind the line of the ankles.
Hips should sit slightly behind the line of the ankles.
Assessments:
To test to see whether or not we can get into the side split position, you can go through a few different assessments to see what is holding you back and then focus more on that area. These three assessments are:
1. Pancake position.
What is the pancake position? Basically, it’s where we’ve got our legs apart and we’re rolling the hips forward to bring our upper body down, as parallel with the floor/ground as we can. In this position, our ability to roll our hips forward will reflect how well we will be able to avoid “jamming” in the side split position. If the forehead can touch, we then go nose, chin, chest, abdomen.
Matthew Smith has passed the final boss for the pancake position.
If it feels almost impossible to roll the hips forward, don’t worry! Matthew himself has said that was the case for him when he started out too. One way that might help you progress in this position is to think of the position in terms of leverages. If you’re more upright, gravity can’t really help you in the pancake position. So, let’s change that!
Progressing in your pancake can be broken down into increasingly difficult positions, just like any other movement. How? Rather than doing the pancake sitting down on the ground, do it standing!
To progress in your pancake, you can train it from the standing position.
So, what you want to do is, get a couple of boxes, chairs, benches - something to stand on - place your feet wider than shoulder width, like when you are sitting in the pancake, and try to lean down towards the ground to make your upper body parallel to your legs.
It is helpful to hold a weight, say 8-10 kg, to aid how far down you can lean. You can place blocks or other stackable objects below you, to try and lean down and reach for. What you want to try to do is to remove those objects one by one, i.e. lean further and further down, until eventually you are able to lean down and touch the floor from the elevated standing position.
Grab a weight to help you go down further.
From there, you will go to an intermediate position - one that is more similar to the pancake - where you are sitting on a block and doing the same thing: leaning forward as in the pancake. For this position, you can hold a dumbbell above your neck to help gravity do its thing, and get you leaning further forward.
Going from standing to sitting but with our hips elevated, bringing the position closer and closer to the full pancake position.
The next step is to try this on the ground, in the actual pancake. The progression you will aim for is to try to touch your forehead, then nose, then chin, then chest, then, if you’re a pancake superstar, your abdomen(!) down to the ground.
As mentioned above, there will be a relationship between how low you are able to go in the pancake, and how much you are able to roll your hips forward in the side splits. The lower you are able to go in the pancake, the more you are able to roll your hips forward, and the lower you will be able to go in your side splits. If you can’t get your head down to the floor in the pancake, you likely won’t be able to get fully down in the side splits.
2. Tailor’s pose Assessment
Tailor’s pose is kind of an easy version of the side split, because it takes the gracilis, one of our adductors, out of the equation. When the knees are bent, the gracilis is not being stretched as it is in the side split. But the gracilis is not the only adductor, and in the Tailor’s pose we will be working on the others.
Final boss, tailor’s pose edition.
The goal for the Tailor’s pose is to see how wide you can get your knees/how far down towards the ground you can get them. And in terms of how far down you want to get them, the goal is to bring your knees basically parallel to the floor, with your calves completely touching the floor.
If you’re like me, and this is a position where you are not able to bring your calves close to the ground, it means that the tailor’s pose would need to be an area of focus for your side split training. You’ll want to focus on isolating the adductors being worked on in this position.
Once you determine where you’re at in the Tailor’s pose, it’s time to switch from the assessment pose to the training pose.
In the training pose, you’ll use a load to help you get deeper, but you won’t go so heavy that you’ll tense up and can’t go further. In the case of the Tailor’s pose, it’s a pretty strong position meaning you can go relatively heavy.
In our session with Matthew, my girlfriend and I started by placing two 10kg dumbbells on each knee, and he said this would be the lower end of the weight we could use.
The training position for Tailor’s pose is not a static position. What you’ll want to do is allow the weight to press your knees/calves down for three seconds, then lift up - using your adductor/inner leg muscles, not your arms - and then drop back down, allowing the weight to press your knees/calves down again and trying to let them go further.
As mentioned above, the goal with the Tailor’s pose is to bring your calves all the way down so that they are completely touching the floor. When you’ve reached this point, that’s likely a far enough progression in terms of your side split training for this movement. However if you want to go further, you can elevate your hips, for example by sitting on blocks, so that you can give your adductors even more of a stretch.
3.Active vs. Passive Assessment
The third assessment for your side split training is to look at your strength vs. your total range of motion.
Can you tell which one hurts more?
If it’s your total range that needs to be increased, you’ll do a more passive style of stretching.
If it’s your strength that needs to be increased, you’ll do more of an active style of stretching.
How we test this is by looking at:
1. Our hand-assisted side split(which indicates our range)
2. Our non-hand-assisted side split(which indicates our strength as well as range)
3. Finally, we look at how far we can lift our legs up to the side from a hand-and-knees position, which indicates our strength.
seeing how much we can lift our leg to the side is a pure-strength indicator for our side split.
The difference between how we perform these exercises will tell us where we are on the passive/active spectrum and thus tell us where we need to focus our efforts.
To give you an example of how this works in practice, let’s look at how my girlfriend and I performed in these tests.
With the hand-assisted/passive side split my girlfriend had 143 degrees range of motion. With the non-hand-assisted/more active side split, her ROM was 122 degrees, so significantly less.
My results were the opposite: I had 123 degrees ROM in the hand-assisted side split, but in the more strength-intensive non-hand-assisted side split, my ROM was 132 degrees.
My girlfriend and I are basically on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to how we need to approach our side-split training.
In other words, I need to work on my passive range/flexibility, and my girlfriend needs to work on her strength.
Need to focus on your strength? Do the straddle up
The straddle up is where, from a side split position(or, as low as you can go in a hand assisted side split), you’ll bring your hips up, and hold for 3 seconds. This is a straddle up.
Straddle ups
Need to focus your passive range/flexibility? Focus more on stretching
For this, you can use blocks or objects to support your calves, and your hands to take the bodyweight away, so that you can now relax more into the side split.
Let’s summarize!
How to do the side splits:
Train your hips to roll forward by practicing the pancake position.
Train your adductors with Tailor’s pose.
Assess your active(non hand-assisted) versus passive strength(hand-assisted) in the side split and train accordingly.
Doing the above 3 assessments will give you the big picture regarding your side splits and give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Of the three people who did these assessments with Matthew - myself included - we all got different results, and so our side-split training moving forward would be different for each of us. This is the strength of doing these assessments: it lets you know what you need to work on, so that the time you put towards achieving the side split is used most effectively.
At first, the side splits may seem impossible. But I hope after reading this article, you can see that by targeting your side split training for your own needs, you can one day achieve them too.
Hope this article helps, and let me know how it goes with the side split training!
Leave a comment if you like, or any questions, and I’ll do my best to get back to them!
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