The sit and reach stretch is a great warmup or cooldown exercise that can help you to release tension in your muscles, limber up your arms and legs, and reduce muscle recovery time after a workout.
Doing this exercise properly can offer you great benefits in your flexibility and your ability to do a variety of exercises.
Do you struggle with some exercises that require you to reach far, bend over, or stretch? If you know how to improve sit and reach, then you can stretch farther and do exercises more easily.
The sit and reach test tells you a lot about your flexibility and how easily you may be able to stretch your body.
This isn’t just a warmup exercise. It’s also a way for you to test your limits and find out what you’re capable of. If you haven’t exercised in a while, doing the sit and reach test will help you assess where you are at.
I’ll show you how to improve sit and reach test so that you can stretch farther and so you know for sure that you’re doing the test properly.
This will help you to avoid trying exercises that you aren’t ready for. A lot of people injure themselves when they first get back into exercising and when they haven’t exercised for a while before then. They think that they’re capable of more than they really are, and they end up injuring themselves by stretching too far, bending too much, or just overexerting themselves.
While the sit and reach test will limber you up and stretch out your muscle so that they’re less likely to be injured, it also shows you where your limits are and helps you prepare for the workout ahead.
How to Do the Sit and Reach Test
In order to know how to improve your sit and reach test, you should know how to do the basic test first. This test can help measure your hamstring flexibility, as well as the flexibility of your glutes and lower back.
To do it, sit down on the floor and extend your legs in front of you. You want your feet to rest against the edge of what is called a sit and reach box. This box has measurements marked off on it to show you how far you’re reaching. This box is not absolutely required for the test.
You can test your flexibility without the box, but you won’t know exactly how long your reach is without it.
Your arm should be extended in front of you, and you’ll need to bend forward from the waist and push the tab that’s on the top of the box forward as far as you can.
How to Improve on Your Sit and Reach?
If you want to score better on the sit and reach test, then you should undergo a flexibility program. This should be a workout program that’s not necessarily high intensity but that stretches out and works the glutes, hamstrings, and lower back muscles.
The reason you may not be scoring very well on the test is because these muscles might not be getting worked very much. If they’re not stretching on a regular basis, then they probably won’t be able to stretch far enough for you to get a decent score on the test.
How to improve sit and reach test score? You’ll need to do some flexibility exercises.
Toe Touches
I think toe touches are a good place to start. For this exercise, you need to stand with your feet either directly side by side or with a little space between your feet (not a full shoulder’s length). From that position, bend at the waist with your arms extended and try to reach your toes with your fingertips extended straight out.
You may not be able to reach all the way to your toes at first. Reach as far as you can and try to push yourself just a little further. Don’t push too hard, but rather gently stretch toward your toes.
Then return back to the starting position and repeat the move a few times. After a while, your flexibility should improve and you should be able to reach farther until eventually you reach your toes.
Seated Hamstring Stretches
This is another fairly simple exercise that is a great method for how to improve flexibility for sit and reach test. It targets your glute muscles and hamstrings in particular. You can make this a part of your regular exercise routine to help build up those muscles.
To do this stretching exercise, you want to start by sitting on the floor with your legs extended in front of you fully. Then, pull your toes upwards in the direction of your shins as you flex your ankles. Keep your knees straight and bend forward from the waist, stretching your hands in the direction of your feet.
This works both of your hamstrings at once, but you can target each hamstring on its own. You can do what are called single leg seated hamstring stretches. For this stretch, you’ll keep one leg extended straight and then bend the knee for the other leg.
Your bent foot should be tucked just inside of the thigh of the outstretched leg. As you do this stretch, make sure your shoulders are kept square in relation to the extended leg’s foot as you bend forward. Once you do one side, switch the legs and do the other side.
Banded Hamstring Stretches
Are you looking for how to improve sit and reach in under 24 hours? You may need to increase the intensity of your stretches.
To do that, we want to bring in resistance bands. These make you exert yourself more, and doing hamstring stretches with resistance bands is a great method for how to improve sit and reach fast.
This gives you a pretty intense stretch for your hamstrings and your glutes, and you can use either a rope or resistance band. You’re going for an increase in tension with this exercise.
To do this stretch, you want to start by lying on your back and extend a single leg out across the floor straight forward. Then, place the band in a loop around your other foot and extend that leg upward, pointing it at the ceiling.
With your hands, hold the ends of the band and keep your knee as straight as possible. You also want to lift your leg up as high as you can while you do this. You can pull on the bands with your hands to make them stretch more and to increase resistance.
Keep that tension there for about 30 seconds, and then release it, switching legs and doing the move again with the other leg.
These methods for how to improve on the sit and reach test are some of the most common ways people will boost their flexibility and train their body how to stretch farther.
You can either fit them into your current workout regimen or just do these stretches alone until your flexibility improves.
You may not feel confident doing other exercises when your flexibility is poor. Once you’ve done some of these sit and reach improvement stretches, though, you’ll start to notice a difference. You should be able to work out easier, stretch farther, and feel much more flexible.
My name is Ellis Francis and I have been a personal fitness trainer, sports nutritionalist and health and fitness advisor for over 25 years. I am the lead health and fitness advisor at https://awellnessbody.com.
