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Outside of having a cool party trick in your repertoire, finding the strength and flexibility to perform full splits (Hanumanasana) can help you reach your potential in unexpected ways. The pose improves your balance of strength and flexibility, enhances your overall mobility, and reduces your risk of injury by increasing range of motion in key muscle groups like the hamstrings and hip flexors. It can also help improve your posture, boost your athletic performance, and foster mental discipline through consistent training, regardless of whether you actually come into a full splits or not.
I’m always working to improve and build upon my approach to splits, and as I’ve evolved my practice throughout the years, I’ve simultaneously enjoyed sharing tips and tricks with my students. Following are the hip-opening stretches for splits that I find work best. As you attempt these postures, be gentle and avoid forcing yourself into them.
Hip Opening Stretches for Splits
Utilize your breath to move deeper into each pose and attempt to remain in each pose for three to five breaths or 30 to 60 seconds.
1. Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend (Prasarita Padottanasana)
This posture helps deepen splits by improving flexibility in key muscles such as the hips, hamstrings, and inner thighs while enhancing core stability and spinal alignment.
How to: Start with your feet wider than hip distance. Pivot your toes in and your heels out, hinge from your hips, and fold toward your legs in Standing Forward Bend. Place your hands to the outside of your feet, calves, or thighs. Breathe here.
2. Side Lunge (Skandasana)
This posture helps deepen your splits by increasing hip and hamstring flexibility, stretching the groin, and strengthening the quads and glutes, all of which support accessibility to the splits.
How to: Start in a wide-leg forward fold. Pivot your right foot toward the top left corner of your mat. Bend your left knee to a 90-degree angle or deeper if that’s accessible to you. Shift your hips toward the back of your mat and down in a Side Lunge. Lift your right toes so they stack over your right ankle and point upward. Place your hands at heart-center for a balance challenge or rest them on the ground in front of you to maintain stability. Stay here and breathe.
3. Kneeling Crescent
This posture helps deepen your Splits by stretching the hip flexors, quadriceps, and hamstrings while improving hip mobility and core stability.
How to: From Side Lunge, turn to face the back of the mat with your left foot forward. Bend your left knee to a 90-degree angle, and lower your right knee to the mat. Reach both hands over your head. Push into your front heel and press down through your back hip. Stay here and breathe.
4. Half Splits
Practicing this variation deepens your full Splits by stretching key muscles, including the hip flexors, hamstrings, and adductors, while improving flexibility, control, and joint mobility.
How to: From Kneeling Crescent, keep your left hip lifted above your left knee as you straighten your left leg and flex your toes towards your knee in Half Splits. Hinge at your hips to fold your chest forward over your left leg. Stay here and breathe.
5. Runner’s Lunge or Lizard Pose
Lizard Pose, a more challenging variation of Runner’s Lunge, helps deepen your Splits by stretching the hip flexors, hamstrings, and adductor muscles while promoting the same pelvic alignment you want to practice in Splits.
How to: From Half Splits, bend your left knee and move it toward the long edge of your mat. Bring both hands to the inside of your left leg. Stay here in a Runner’s Lunge or come down onto your forearms in Lizard if that’s accessible. Stay here and breathe.
Come back through to a wide-legged forward bend and repeat on the other side, beginning with Side Lunge and moving to face the front of the mat.
Continue to explore the Splits in Christa Janine’s Strengthen Your Splits series on Alo Moves.
