After six years of traditional stretching with minimal results, flexibility expert Matt discovered a revolutionary approach that transformed not only his own mobility but also that of Olympic gold medalists and everyday people alike.
His breakthrough system has helped students from their teens all the way up to 65 years old achieve splits they never thought possible.
The secret? Most people are stretching completely wrong, targeting muscles that aren’t actually limiting their progress.
What follows is the complete blueprint for getting flexible once and maintaining it forever—without spending hours stretching every single day.
Jump to:
- Understanding Your Personal Flexibility Ladder
- Two Paths: Amateur vs. Professional Stretching
- Focus on Movement Skills, Not Vague “Mobility”
- The Power of Stretch Stacking
- The Assisted-Resisted Spectrum
- Why Focused Training Beats Full-Body Routines
- Optimal Training Frequency and Timing
- The Complete Blueprint
Understanding Your Personal Flexibility Ladder
The flexibility ladder represents all the factors restricting your range of motion and the level at which they’re limiting you. These restrictions can include different muscles, nerve tensions, technique issues, and strength deficits.
The critical insight: To achieve your flexibility goal, you need to bring everything up to at least that level. Anything below your goal level becomes your bottleneck.
Most people make a fatal mistake—they stretch commonly tight areas like hamstrings or lats, or simply stretch wherever they feel sensation. But that’s probably not their personal limitation.
After 6 years of normal stretching, my flexibility looked like this. I was super tight, genetically not flexible, and holding basic stretches did not work for me.
The breakthrough came when Matt identified his own flexibility ladder. He then applied this methodology to help others achieve remarkable transformations—from coaching Cam Makavoy from 29th place at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics to becoming the fastest swimmer in the world and winning Olympic gold in Paris 2024.
Two Paths: Amateur vs. Professional Stretching
Path one resembles chopping down trees with a dull axe. You choose stretches based on what flows well or where you feel them most, hoping they hit the right areas. Without measuring progress or testing problems, you’re essentially blind to whether your training works.
Path two is like sharpening your axe first. You measure starting levels, test which muscles are tight, and determine whether you need increased range of motion or strength development within existing range.
The result? Deliberate selection of three to five stretches that target your specific needs, optimized with one or two flexibility sessions weekly that work alongside other training and daily life.
Assessment Reveals Your Limiting Factor
Consider shoulder mobility. To assess overhead range, you’d test multiple muscles individually—pec major, subscapularis, teres major, and lats. Each can be isolated through specific movements to identify which truly limits your overhead position.
For touching toes, most assume it’s purely hamstring flexibility. Actually, you’re also stretching adductor magnus and gastrocnemius. Hip and spine flexors must contract strongly to pull you into position. The sciatic nerve gets tensioned as well.
Even within the same skill, different people have different limitations. Two athletes working toward side splits might show vastly different passive flexibility versus active strength ratios—requiring completely different training approaches.
Focus on Movement Skills, Not Vague “Mobility”
Just as strength training targets specific movements like squats and deadlifts rather than generic “hip strength,” flexibility training should focus on actual skills.
The core flexibility skills include:
- Pike (touching toes)
- Pancake
- Side split
- Front split
- Bridge
- Shoulder flexion and extension
- Deep squat
These skills encompass multiple joint ranges working together—just like compound movements in strength training transfer better than isolation exercises.
I realized that flexibility matters a lot especially for the athlete and also just for the normal person to be able to perform skill on the high level. You need to work on your flexibility.
That perspective comes from Andre Strong, one of the world’s strongest calisthenics athletes, who worked with Matt on pancake and splits development.
Real-World Application: Olympic Swimming
Olympic swimmer Cam Makavoy needed streamlined positioning for dives, fluid underwater kicks, and powerful freestyle strokes. This required flexible yet strong shoulders, hips, and spine—essentially the components of a bridge.
Yet how many swimmers train bridges? Almost none.
By using bridge as the metric of mobility success, Matt programmed shoulder, spine, and hip mobility that integrated into bridging, then peaked into swimming performance. The principles that help someone win Olympic gold work remarkably well for people simply wanting to move freely again after decades of neglect.
The Power of Stretch Stacking
Traditional strength training starts with big compound movements when fresh, then follows with accessory work. Flexibility training does the opposite.
Start with smaller isolated stretches like hamstrings and hip flexors. This opens range for bigger compound movements like front splits.
This creates a multiplying effect called stretch stacking. When you perform two stretches for different areas—shoulders and hips—you make one unit of progress each, totaling two units.
But when both stretches target the same area, the first opens range that allows the second to go further. One plus one equals three.
By intelligently selecting three to five aligned stretches, you benefit from this stacking effect, making bigger jumps than attempting to improve everywhere simultaneously.
The Assisted-Resisted Spectrum
Different problems require different tools. The assisted-resisted spectrum provides a framework for choosing appropriate exercises.
On one end sits heavily assisted—full body weight and gravity pushing you deeper into stretches. Moving toward neutral reduces assistance. Crossing into resisted territory means using strength to pull yourself into position, eventually adding weight for heavily resisted strength training through existing range.
Assisted training lets you stretch deeper, building total flexibility ceiling. Resisted training strengthens range and makes it more usable. Middle ground develops both.
By alternating between assisted and resisted exercises, you create another synergistic effect. The first creates more range for the second to strengthen, while the second contracts antagonist muscles, causing further relaxation in stretched muscles.
Ten Essential Training Methods
Beyond basic static stretching, multiple methods target different limitations:
- Post-Isometric Relaxation (PIR) – Contract-relax cycles that allow deeper relaxation
- Isometric Stretching – Contracting stretched muscles to build end-range strength
- Isometric Holds for Reps – Short holds with rest between, allowing deeper training than continuous holds
- Active Lifts – Contracting opposite muscles to pull into position
- Dynamic Stretching – High-speed movements that transfer to kicks and acrobatics
- Rapid Contract-Relax – Controlled pulsing into deepest stretch with muscle control
- Joint Capsule Releases – Targeting joint restrictions rather than muscle
- Nerve Work – Flosses, glides, and tensioners for nerve entrapments
- Soft Tissue Treatment – Manual techniques for chronically tight muscles and scar tissue
- Technique Drills – Learning proper positioning and muscle activation patterns
Technique changes can be transformative. For side splits, most people simply open legs to the side—but the hip jams, creating bone-on-bone contact that stops progress entirely.
The solution? Anteriorly tilt hips forward or externally rotate legs by pointing feet up. Both create proper hip alignment, allowing actual progress.
For me, it was like a mental barrier and the advice and the tips and tricks that Matt had were really profound and helped me to overcome my mental barrier and I reached a position that I was never ever imagining to be able to enter.
Why Focused Training Beats Full-Body Routines
Imagine a circle divided into sections representing different flexibility skills. It’s significantly faster to complete each section one by one than gradually expanding everything together.
Focused sessions with three to five stretches toward one specific skill take each session further than attempting simultaneous improvement everywhere, because each exercise prepares the body for the next.
But won’t you lose flexibility in unstretched areas? Not if you train correctly.
Two Categories of Flexibility Adaptations
First: Brain and nervous system changes. When folding forward, signals travel along your spinal cord to your brain. Once reaching maximum tolerable stretch perception, you cannot go further. Training improves stretch tolerance at the supraspinal CNS level—a fancy term for your brain.
Second: Physical body changes. Training alters tendon stiffness and muscle length through sarcomerogenesis—adding sarcomeres (muscle building blocks) in series at muscle fiber ends.
Brain adaptations prove most powerful because they stay long-term. Physical changes like sarcomerogenesis reverse after roughly six weeks without use.
Most programs fail to optimize for lasting brain changes. Even worse, many people essentially just warm up—temporarily increasing flexibility through viscoelastic changes that disappear within hours.
Matt can still drop into side splits despite not training them properly for over three years. By creating permanent brain changes, you can focus on one or two skills without losing progress elsewhere. Skills also overlap—touching toes transfers to front split front legs, while back legs transfer to bridges.
Optimal Training Frequency and Timing
Both flexibility and strength training cause similar fatigue through slightly different mechanisms. Both lead to calcium ion accumulation in sarcomeres, activating calpains—protein-eating enzymes that cause muscle fiber damage, inflammation, and brain-detected fatigue signals.
This fatigue develops hours after training, which creates optimal timing windows:
Best option: Train flexibility two or more days after sport or strength training that affects it.
Second best: Train on the same day—sport or strength in morning, flexibility in evening. Brain fatigue hasn’t fully developed yet, allowing brain adaptations.
Third best: Flexibility after sport or strength training in the same session, slightly reducing volume of each.
The common mistake? Stretching the day after strength training or adding it on off days as “active recovery.” It’s not recovery—flexibility and strength are remarkably similar, sometimes identical.
The Complete Blueprint
Set your goal by focusing on one or two flexibility skills that improve movement and performance.
Assess to find problems at the bottom of your flexibility ladder and determine which exercises fix them.
Stretch-stack exercises so they multiply together, performing each session one to two times weekly.
Organize training to optimize adaptations that last long-term.
When flexibility is built properly, it’s surprisingly easy to maintain. This creates unique freedom from developing a flexible, strong, capable body where you actually enjoy your flexibility.
The mantra: “Stretch right, stretch once.”
Matt and many athletes he works with no longer need regular stretching. They achieved necessary range and now use remaining time maximizing their sports and practices. You need a focused season of transforming mobility to reach required levels—then maintaining becomes remarkably simple.
