What do you Need to Improve your Flexibility?

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As she did a pirouette, she was center stage. All eyes on her and she did a pirouette and landed in fifth position. She prepared for this day making sure her muscles were strong and she was more flexible than she was just a month ago. How is she able to improve her flexibility in just a short amount of time? Well, flexibility has to do with our joints, our muscles, and even our diet.

Joints are an important part to our flexibility. There are two different main kinds of joints, immovable and moveable. Immoveable joints are joints that cannot be moved. These joints have little or no movement at all, there is not a joint cavity present in these joints. Immovable joints can be broken down into two types of joints, which are fibrous joints and cartilaginous joints. When you break down fibrous joints there are two types of joints. There is a suture joint and a gomphoses joint. Suture joints are joints in the skull. They are found between the skull bones, and they are held together by special fibers called sharpey's fibers. This only allows little to no movement. Then there is a gomphoses joint, this is also an immovable joint. This type of joint is found in our teeth. Yes this type of joint is found in our mouths. This joint has very little movement. The only way that they can be moved is over time and that is why we use braces to move our teeth around.

Moveable joints are what we think of when we hear joints. There are four main types of moveable joints which are Pivot, Ball and Socket, Hinge, and Gliding. How do these joints work? Well a joint is where a bone moves on another one. These to bones are held together by ligaments and ligaments are pretty much elastic bands that keep the bones in place. Then muscles lengthen and shorten...

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In this project I wanted to find a way to improve my flexibility and I came up with a plan to help increase it. My plan was to do some sort of cardio on the days that I didn’t have dance beforehand. Then my goal was to improve both my splits so I ended up focusing on stretching my leg muscles. Considering I stretched my muscles really hard over summer and improved a ton I didn’t see much of improvement. I would like to continue to stretch outside of dance at least five days a week to continue to keep my muscles loose.

You can do anything if you set your mind to it. So if you come up with a plan like wanting to get your right splits and plan out a time to work on your goal you will most likely see improvement. Also it is very important to not only look into the future but look at the steps and what it takes to get there.

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