Increasing Flexibility With Home Gym Equipment: A New Year's Resolution
Why Flexibility Matters for Your New Year's Resolution
The New Year brings new goals and a ton of motivation to complete these goals. Improving your flexibility may not be at the top of your list, but some aspect of exercise, for example, to increase strength, may be your 2026 New Year's resolution. Flexibility training plays an important role in achieving your New Year's Resolution. Flexibility is integral within all populations, from the general population to athletes. It supports everyday movements, improves posture and importantly, it aids in preventing injuries. Essentially, some form of flexibility underpins all training modes; therefore, being able to complete flexibility/mobility training in your own home is essential. However, more is not always better, which is why this blog post will cover the benefits of flexibility training, the equipment you need, and recent data that goes against the grain, providing you with the most up-to-date information about flexibility training.
Why Flexibility Matters for Everyday Health and Fitness
Every movement is governed by at least two muscles, where in simple joint movements, one muscle contracts and shortens as the other relaxes and stretches. Thus, if the relaxing muscle is tight and inflexible, your range of motion will be significantly reduced. Flexibility training aims to improve your range of motion in the major muscle tendon groups that support daily movements and exercise. As such, inflexibility can increase the risk of injury (Source).
Especially if your inflexibility is asymmetrical, this could pose an even greater risk. What we mean by this is that if you have greater flexibility in one hamstring/leg compared to the opposite leg, you will likely experience an altered biomechanical gait (i.e., walk/jog/sprint). This would mean your stronger, more flexible leg would be compensating for the stiff, inflexible leg, which can cause injuries to that specific limb or work up the postural chain to induce injuries to your hips or back. Thus, including some aspect of flexibility within your training programme is crucial to help you achieve your New Year's resolution.
Why More Isn’t Always Better
Stretching as a means to prevent injury, reduce muscle soreness and aid performance is widely accepted; however, there is little data to support these beliefs. It appears that an adequate level of flexibility provides a protective effect to aid injury prevention (Source). This makes sense, given that most daily movements or exercises involve the stretch-shortening cycle. The stretch-shortening cycle refers to the muscle action during dynamic movements, whereby a muscle or muscles will lengthen (stretch) followed by a shortening action (i.e., the muscle contracts concentrically, thus the muscle becomes less stretched and shorter). Therefore, adequate flexibility will protect the muscle, especially during the shortening phase. However, overstretching can lead to overflexibility, which can lead to an increase in laxity (looseness) around the joint and increase instability and injury risk. Therefore, you should tailor flexibility training to your specific demands.
How to Train Flexibility Safely with Home Gym Equipment
First things first, to complete flexibility training, you need the right equipment. Luckily, flexibility training requires minimal equipment. Our suggestions are:
The complexity of flexibility training has now been highlighted within this blog post. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand when they should include stretching movements in their programme. It is common practice to include stretching as part of your warm-up. However, static stretching prior to exercise is actually reported to reduce muscle strength (Source), thus reducing the mechanical stimuli you can place on the muscle and subsequent adaptations. Therefore, if your New Year's resolution is to increase strength and/or hypertrophy, stretching before working out may not be optimal. Thus, we advise that you complete flexibility training following training or on separate days as an active rest day.
By including exercise mats and resistance bands in your home gym, you can complete stretching comfortably and optimise your training. The exercise mat reduces the pressure on joints and allows you to move more freely without discomfort from hard floors. By adding a resistance band, you are able to perform assisted stretching. This means you can complete more controlled movements whilst progressively increasing the tension during deeper stretches.
You may think that including kettlebells in your flexibility routine is a bit rogue. However, active mobility significantly improves flexibility and functional ability (Source). By incorporating kettlebells into your mobility programme, for example, completing swings and turkish get ups, you not only increase the flexibility of the targeted muscle groups, but also increase strength around the tendons (e.g., rotator cuffs).
Conclusion
Flexibility supports daily tasks and fitness goals, so you should include it in your training programme. However, it is important to individualise the degree of flexibility training to meet your own demands. If you struggle with flexibility, consider scheduling more frequent sessions. If you have a good range of motion and flexibility, maintaining it should be your goal here. By implementing exercise mats, resistance bands and kettlebells to this style of training, you will be able to optimise your flexibility training and gain active strength in stretched postures that will aid performance and provide a protective barrier to injuries.
Achieve your New Year's resolution and focus on flexibility that supports strength movement and lifestyle, not flexibility for flexibility's sake.
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