dilletante

I'm not the most flexible I've ever been in my life. However, I'm tantalizingly close to getting back there.

Over the years I've gradually accreted a stretching routine that takes about 40 minutes and leaves me sweating and buzzy with endorphins. It started with a series of stretches intended to work on straddle splits, and I've slowly added other stuff whenever I wanted to work on something else also. I find it helpful to have a routine because it's easier the less I have to think about it: if I have to consider what to do next, I might wimp out, but if I'm already moving into the next stretch by habit anyway I can just go with the flow.

Consistency and regular practice seems to matter a lot for stretching, at least for me, so the fact that I've ever had a regular stretching routine in the past isn't nearly as important as the fact that I've been doing it semi-regularly for about a year now, or that I've been more consistent about it over the past couple months. So now, in this most recent streak of paying attention to stretching, I've gotten to the point where I have enough functional flexibility that I generally don't find stuff they ask us to do in circus classes completely crazy, which is honestly quite exciting. I can even now, from a standing position, bend forward and put my hands flat on the floor and put weight on them, a little, which I expect might someday be helpful for learning press-to-handstand, which I might be able to tackle in about a hundred years.

I'm enjoying celebrating a number of very minor "this doesn't feel like much, but it feels like something at all, which never used to be the case" things like that, in addition to the more showy split stretches, which have the advantage that they get dramatically more exciting as you get incrementally closer to the ground. But I'm also starting to reach those exciting points: as of last week or so, in my left front split, after I've been sinking into it for about a minute, my calf just touches the floor. Of course my calves are probably bigger than they've ever been before in my life, but still, I'll take it.

And center split is... well, again after I've been sinking into it for a minute or so, my butt is starting to get pretty close to the ground, and my calves actually touch the ground. Somewhere I read recently that "center split" and "straddle split" are not actually the same thing, which I had always somehow assumed they were-- that "center split" is what you get when you sink straight down from horse stance, and straddle split is what you get when you sit with your legs straight out in front of you and then spread them. Which makes some sense, since my legs go much wider apart in that first one than in the second, though both are improving. So maybe in a few months I'll reach a point where I get all the way to the ground in center split but it's still not quite 180 degrees and my straddle split isn't even close to that and I'll be like "now what?" But for now I'm enjoying the excitement of what looks like some sort of looming milestone.