Hunter Cook is a friend of mine from Long Beach, California. We’ve been friends on Facebook for a while, and he initially caught my eye when he and Dave Dellanave, Jessi Kneeland and a bunch of other fitness folks started a daily throwdown on Instagram, appropriately named “Instabattle.” The gist was one of one-upsmanship on fitness feats, acrobatics, and other fun things you could do in a gym, with the entire purpose being to expose yourself to something different that you may not have ever tried, and in some ways seeing new things you probably didn’t think you could do. It was all fun and games until Mark Fisher of Mark Fisher Fitness showed up and tried to break the internet.

I was able to finally put a handshake to the Facebook account this past May in Kansas City at the Fitness Summit. We were chatting and a small group of people were around prior to heading out for a group dinner one evening, and he mentioned how he had a lot of mobility (he was essentially lax in all of his joints, which explains some of the yoga positions he can get into), but he said he had never been able to do the splits and it was a goal of his.

Challenge accepted.

 

With nothing better to do, I asked if he wanted to try to get into the splits now, like, now. No warning, just to show he could do them and it was a simple matter of figuring out how. He was game, and about 30 seconds he was in the bottom of multiple direction splits.

It wasn’t really difficult, as I already mentioned he was incredibly mobile in all directions, and as a result he had the hip structure, fascia tone, and muscle length to get there any time he wanted. It was just a matter of figuring out the alignment, some core reactive tricks (tongue in the bottom of his mouth instead of pressing into the roof, and doing a sort of double tap breathing when he hit the end of the muscle stretch available without feeling resistance. In the end, with a small group of people around, he hit front splits bilaterally and then went into straddle splits, no problemo.

 

 

Since then, he’s been posting yoga pose pics and I’ve been living vicariously through his Instagram account.

 

So how is it he was able to do all this funky stuff but hand’t managed to do the splits as of yet? It’s actually pretty simple, and just merely an illusion that he couldn’t do them before.

Many times when people try to do the splits, they wind up going through a purely saggital plane movement, where their forward foot wind up coming up in line with their same side collarbone, and the back leg goes, well…. back. This can produce some restriction to movement as the ridge of the pelvis and acetabulum wind up getting in the way of the movement. Instead, going out at a slight angle with the forward foot can have a massive impact on the flexion range of motion as it clears the bone to bone contact with the acetabulum, and also avoids compressing any of the anterior soft tissue between the lip of the pelvis and the femur.

This is one reason why standing with your feet shoulder width apart and toes pointing forward while doing a squat is infinitely more challenging and usually more painful than standing slightly wider and with your feet turned slightly out. It’s also a big reason why my seated toe touch looks like a train wreck:

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….but I can hit the splits relatively closely by simply taking an altered angle of approach.

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Admit it, you thought my butt looked adorable in that video, didn’t you?

This is a common technique used by a lot of people who do get into the splits on a regular basis. Many top gymnasts will turn the hips to essentially put the forward leg into slight external rotation and abduction in order to hit the position easily and with less tissue compression. Some can still go straight into them through pure planar rigidity without going off axis, but they usually wind up with some sort of hip issue like tendinitis, bursitis or femoroacetabular impingement as a result.

In many cases, the simple act of altering alignment is all it takes to see massive changes in how a person can move and what positions they can get into and out of effectively.

I outline many of these concepts of alignment, as well as the effects of things like breathing, tongue position, and a couple other tricks of the trade that I used with Hunter to help him achieve his goal of hitting the splits in multiple directions all within record time in my video workshop Ruthless Mobility. since Hunter started with sick mobility, it was a simple manner of getting him to know it and how to use it, and I can help you do the same.

This video series now has DVDs and continuing education credits available, so trainers who need to keep their certifications and are under the gun to get their credits in on time should definitely look into this (HINT HINT!!!). Additional to not losing certification, you could learn some real cool mobility tricks, like how to get tight hips to loosen immediately with a side plank, changing tongue position to alter tone along the posterior chain, and varying breathing to either increase force generation or decrease neural resistance to mobility.

But it’s only on sale for as low as $40 until Friday at midnight, so get on it quick so you can Instabattle with Hunter and see if you can manage some of those cool yoga poses.

===>  Get Ruthless Mobility Now!! <===