How To Use Stretch Blocks Video

Stretch blocks, or stretching slant boards are used to restore normal flexibility. Learn how to use stretch blocks in this health video.

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Keep knee straight
Hold stretches for thirty seconds
Do five stretches for each muscle

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: What we would like to do now is discuss stretching, particularly stretching with a slant board. Stretching is very important obviously for your hamstrings, your quads, your calf muscle to restore normal flexibility. Obviously, a muscle that's this length is going to fatigue a lot quicker than a muscle that's this length and has the same excursion. So restoring flexibility is important for a number of reasons and we'll talk about that now. This is a slant board. You can make one of this yourself or you can buy one of this. We start the stretching. Well, you got two muscles in your calf, the gastroc and the soleus. So initially we stretch with the knee straight, heel on the ground, foot on the board and lean forward. We're going to hold these stretches for 30 seconds and do five repetitions. So 30 seconds is a long time, you might want to use a little timer, a little digital timer to time yourself with the stretching, because a lot of people cheat. Their counters in their brain don't work the same as the counters on the digital timer. So what we're going to do is stretch, five stretches with the knee straight, and then we'll do it--we're going to start over slightly bend and then move forward. And you feel a different stretch with this because this stretches the soleus muscle, because it puts the gastrocnemius muscle on a slack because it crosses the knee joint. So again five stretches, 30 seconds each, knee straight and knee bent. A slant board is the best thing to use for stretching of the calf muscle.

How to Use Stretch Blocks Video

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