The video is intentionally silent so that you can put on your music with your laptop open in your stretching area and just follow along visually. 

“THE BIOSTRUCTURE 101”

THE SPHINX – BIOSTRUCTURE FOUNDATIONAL STRETCHING CALISTHENICS ROUTINE

This is a complete follow-along video of my “foundational” stretching/calisthenics routine. The term foundational means it’s a recovery workout to do following a hard training day, or a good starting point to prepare for weight lifting and conditioning/plyometrics for a beginner, or someone who’s coming back from a long break in training.

The video is 38 mins and I’m going through the whole home solo routine I do, filmed on a day that I am actually sore and tired (a light day following a hard day.) 

The Story behind the name

The name “Sphinx Series” is a departure from traditional Yoga terminology – we decided on departing from “Yoga” in favor of “stretching and calisthenics” both for purely simple/functional terminology, and because of the fact that the intention of the program is to progress to incrementally harder calisthenics strength moves and more challenging balance/movement patterns over time while also having a complimentary bodyweight cardio-agility flow to complete the strength and conditioning/recovery program (BioStructure) requirements with a bodyweight-only option.

So we want to build this foundational structure with the idea in mind that there is a movement/S&C objective, and not get too much caught up in the traditional idea of “Yoga” (as interesting as it is in terms of culture and history, it’s subject matter that’s beyond the scope of what we’re concerned with here, which is calisthenics and stretching.) 

Doing this routine in combination with myofascial rolling and jogging/running is the perfect base level foundation practice to build peak performance athletic capacity. Calisthenics, Stretching, MFR (myofascial rolling.)

The riddle of the sphinx is alluding to the aging process, the physical collapse that so many people experience with time. “What creature has first four legs, then two, then three?” the Sphinx asks the traveler. The correct answer is that first a human crawls on all fours(quadrupedal), then stands on two legs (bipedal,) then walks with a cane in old age.

As I developed my thinking on human development, performance, injury, and aging, I came to think of it as “The Sphinx’s Riddle”  – the riddle of preventing sports injury and also physical collapse in aging. Then the classical front spine/abdominal stretch (“cobra pose”) has always reminded me of the great sphinx statue in Egypt, and the mental image around the thought process just stuck with me over the years.  

How to do the routine

The routine starts with the most basic and important elements, so follow along and try to memorize the beginning portions first for habit formation (i.e. you can drop down to the floor and hit a few reps of calisthenics and a stretch at home at any time by just memorizing the beginning.) Try to go through the whole routine once a week at least, and hit individual moves out of the routine any time and anywhere during your week. For foundationals, more is better, under-doing it is more of a problem than over-doing it, so focusing on making the effort to do it more often is the right angle for most people.

The reason why bodyweight/home training is so effective for habit formation in getting a positive momentum with your physical training can be summed up in 2 words “instant gratification.” You literally have your whole gym with you at all times, you can train any time & anywhere. 

Rule #1

So my first important rule with this is DON’T OVER-THINK IT, just do it. Start doing home stretching and calisthenics, with or without the follow along video, whenever you have time, whenever you think of it and get a chance. 

Don’t think that you need to have every detail right to just move your body and do a home workout/stretching session. It’s much more important to just build momentum by doing it, so I just want you to focus on the idea of “doing stretching and calisthenics”. You’ll learn details and problem solve as you go.

We’ll be going through incremental progressions of each of the bodyweight exercises that will dramatically improve your strength and (probably) muscular development over the course of a season. It’s very simple to gradually progress to accomplish things you couldn’t do before. 95% is just getting over the hurdle of building the basic life structure of habits and routines into our lifestyle during the days of our week. If we can get you doing that, the battle is mostly won.

Get on this program and I guarantee to you that when you get to the gym and do your usual training with equipment and training partners, you will see a solid improvement in your performance capacity! You will be surprised how good you feel in the gym from something that is so easy to do at home.

Rule #2

Now, I put this part at the end because some of my students may not have read all the way through and if that’s the case then this part isn’t important for them. But, if you are more the obsessive type who over-does things and wants to be hardcore about everything – then you need to follow this rule closely:

Rule # 2 is don’t try to aggressively open up your flexibility overnight.

It will take about 3 weeks of stretching and myofascial release to get to optimal ROM if you’re tight due to prolonged lack of stretching or prolonged overtraining (chronic soreness.) So if you’re sore and tight from over-doing it in weight training and interval conditioning, for instance, it’s important to just focus on consistency day by day to get the flexibility you want. If you get aggressive about getting flexible you can pull muscles and actually set yourself back. 

This leads us to our next point – if you want to make as rapid progress as you can with flexibility (and get the instant results of getting as flexible as possible during one training session,) the best way to do that is by applying the CR (“contract-relax”) method of applying muscular counter-tension to your stretches in short intervals to dramatically shorten the required stretching time to get to your optimal depth in a given stretch. You cannot see that I’m doing this in the video, but it’s absolutely the key to getting into a good ROM (especially when stretching through muscular soreness.) I’m using isometric tension throughout this routine to apply the CR method.

I can’t overstate how critical learning the CR stretching element is to this routine and your overall success with flexibility.

This is another reason why we are changing the terminology from conventional Yoga Asanas terms – it’s much more important that you learn the CR method of flex-stretching than memorize traditional yoga terms, or any terms for that matter.

Rule #3

The 3rd Rule is that you should remember that, especially if you are rehabbing an over-use type injury, adding more and more stretching time might not be as effective as utilizing MFR (rolling out the muscles to help them be able to stretch) and doing targeted warmups up on the trouble-area muscles regularly.