Name: Pancake stretch for beginners
Uploaded: 2025-03-08T20:41:58.000Z
Duration: 7 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

If you've got the goal of doing a flat pancake just like that, but you're in a position where you are nowhere near it, these tips are going to be super helpful.

Adverbs of manner

Before we start working on the pancake directly, I've got four different movements that I want you to practice that are going to get you way more comfortable in the pancake position.

The first one here is this weighted butterfly stretch.

It's a lot harder if you're not doing it against the wall because you don't have that leverage to push your back into, so you're just going to relax your back and your head into the wall.

We've got a box here, so Jenny has nothing to put her head on, but I can put my hand here like this to make it more comfortable.

You're going to choose a weight that's appropriate for you.

Jenny's got 10 kilos, but she's done this many, many times, so if you're just starting out with this, you want to try to choose a weight that's going to enable you to breathe, relax, and move deeper into the stretch, but not too heavy that you're going to hold tension.

The idea with this one is we're going to do a few contract and relax to strengthen, but also release and open this position.

What we want to do is spend about a minute here breathing, relaxing, allowing the knees to drop lower and lower.

Jenny's all the way down on the ground, but your knees might be up here at the start, and then over the course of the minute, you might just relax and breathe deeper into it and try to get more range.

We work on a contract and relax, we're going to do three rounds of this, so pressing hard into the weights, isometric contraction, so we're not moving at all, we're just coming up, squeezing, firing up the adductors, lifting for five seconds, relaxing, breathing out, and then allowing the knees to drop deeper into the stretch.

Do this one three times, five second contract and relax after you do that minute hold, nice and passive, trying to relax into it.

Once you finish that contract and relax on that last round, on the third round, you're just going to spend a little bit more time here and see if you can get a little bit more range of motion out of this stretch.

The next exercise we're going to look at is the wide-legged Jefferson curl.

This one is going to be looking at articulating and rolling through the spine, so spinal flexion, also strengthening and lengthening the hamstrings.

Again, we're going to start with a nice, light weight and build this up over time.

This hamstring mobility is going to be very, very important, and one of the limiting factors for most people when they're first starting out their pancake journey.

Jenny's going to stand a little wider than shoulder width on the box.

You only need the box if you've got enough flexibility that the kettlebell would hit your feet if you were just standing on the ground like this, which Jenny, I'm sure, would hit the ground.

So just elevate as much as you need, standing nice and wide with the legs locked out.

To lock the legs out, a cue for this is to flex the quads, so you squeeze the quads.

From here, we're going to drop the head down.

The arms are just heavy and relaxed, and we're going to roll the head down vertebrae by vertebrae all the way down until you get a full stretch all the way down.

Jenny might even need to go a little bit higher than this.

You relax the head as well and try to lengthen through the spine, again, making sure that we have straight legs.

We're working on that hamstring flexibility.

And you can see here, if we were to flip Jenny sideways, this is really simulating that pancake position, so it's a really good fundamental movement to work on to build towards that pancake on the floor.

And then Jenny will just roll back up, starting from the lower back all the way through the spine all the way to the top.

I like to do anywhere from five to ten reps of this one with a long hold on that last rep.

So on the last rep, you can come all the way down, breathe, relax, hold this one for about five breaths or ten to twenty seconds.

You want to do three rounds of this Wide Legged Jefferson Curl, the same as the Weighted Butterfly.

The third exercise to help with your pancake is this Wide Leg Good Morning.

You want to set yourself up in the same stance that you had on the Wide Legged Jefferson Curl.

I will allow a little bit of knee bend if you've got extremely tight hamstrings and you find it really painful to move in a straight leg position.

You can slightly bend them, but over time, you want to work towards a straight leg position.

You can either have your hands on your hips or you can put your arms across your chest.

Once you build this position up, you can actually hold a weight here and you want to hold it nice and high so you get the most amount of leverage from it, but you want to do a body weight first and then slowly but surely, similar to Weighted Pancake, you build up that weight.

From here, we're going to tilt the pelvis.

We're going to do this Anterior Pelvic Tilt, so we're going to tilt the pelvis this way and from here, keeping a nice flat back, just like you would for a deadlift, we're coming all the way down as far as you can.

You're going to reach some sort of limit in this position.

Even if you can get to horizontal to the floor, you're doing a great job and you've got quite strong back, lower back, and also flexible hamstrings here, but you go down as far as you possibly can, making sure that you're keeping that pelvic tilt and then all the way back up.

You want to do nice, slow and controlled reps.

You don't want to move in and out of it really fast.

Really slow and controlled, keeping yourself in check, making sure that you've got those nice straight legs, moving the hips the way they're supposed to move, and keeping that back nice and flat.

Again, you can increase the weight over time as well.

Maybe it's two kilos, building it up to whatever weight you want to do.

The fourth and final exercise are these hip flexor lifts.

The reason this is important, we've spent a lot of time stretching out the back side of the body.

We're learning how to move the hips in our good mornings.

What we want to do is build strength and have this ability to compress and build strength in the front side of the body.

This is going to help you in the pancake because you'll have the ability to pull yourself deeper into the stretch, not just relying on the flexibility of the back side of the body.

Eventually, you're going to have your hands out in front, and we're going to lift the legs up just like this.

If you're starting out and you can't do the pancake, you probably need to have the hands pretty far back, and you can actually lean back into it.

This is going to take some of the pressure and weight off the hip flexors.

Again, we want to have nice straight legs.

Flexing the quads, point the toes with this one, and we're going to move the legs up and down.

If you can't do this at all, even leaning back as far as Jenny right now, you can actually start with one leg, so a single leg at a time, or you can even do it standing as well.

This is another way to work towards it, but you want to start to work towards moving yourself further forward and eventually putting the hands in front, protracting, putting as much weight into the hands, compressing, so bringing the torso into your quads, and we're moving up and down into this position.

I would say 10 reps would be ideal, with a 10 second hold on that last rep.

So that's it, 4 exercises that are going to help you progress your pancake.

If you felt like some of these exercises were a little bit too easy, or you've progressed a little bit further with your pancake, and you're a little bit more intermediate to advanced, we do have a video on how to progress your pancake and get it absolutely flat on the ground, so check that one out.

And if you've got any questions about any of the exercises that we did today, please leave us a comment, and I'll get back to you soon.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Pancake stretch for beginners

articulate

eventually

stretch

progress