Hyped up and stretched out

Ever since I saw the post by "Scottish" over at www.goaliecrease.net about widening your butterfly flare I've been all pumped up about it. He issued a friendly challenge to do some consistent daily stretching for 6 weeks and see if it makes a difference in the width of your butterfly. Since I've been trying for months (without much success) to make stretching a part of my DAILY routine, I figured this would be just the thing to inspire me to actually do it.

Maria Mountain of Revolution Conditioning (who I totally idolize) loved the idea too and volunteered to put together a video of stretching and exercises to help accomplish the task. (Go to page 5 of the goaliescrease.net thread linked above to find the video). What I love about 90% of her stuff is that it can be done at home. Yes, I have a gym membership, but doing self myofascial release on hip flexors and groins just looks really raunchy and I'm not at all convinced that all the muscle-heads at the gym can be mature about seeing someone essentially humping a medicine ball for 30 seconds. It's really amazing, the program she put together is simple, short (10-15 min) and yet after doing it I am feeling my hips and glutes.

After doing the exercises I actually feel like I want to work on my adductors and hamstrings too. I might look into adding some things for those muscles as well, but I don't want it to become too long of a routine or I might not actually do it every day. I'll have to see how that goes.

So here's to the challenge. On the board we've tossed around the idea of posting pictures of our flare at the beginning, middle and end of the challenge. Here's my "beginning" picture. To my surprise, the distance between my feet is 35". I guess the yoga is helping after all. (Disregard my disgusting enormous feet... future pictures will feature socks).