It turns out that the ability to touch your toes has to do with factors you actually don't have much control over.
As a middle schooler, one of my life goals was the Presidential Fitness Award—an accolade given to those who passed a series of gym-class tests that included doing a number of pull ups, running a mile, and, among other things, the sit and reach: A flexibility test in which one sits with their legs outstretched in a V position and reaches their fingertips as far past their ankles as they can manage. That’s where things went sour for me.
“The two biggest factors are the flexibility of your hamstrings and and the range of motion of your hip joints,” says Jeffrey Jenkins, a physiologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. “But the other big factor is the relative length of your arms and your torso to your legs.” The other major physiological attribute that can’t be changed is the span of your arms and length of your torso compared to the height of your legs. Someone like Michael Phelps, who is famous for his long torso, long arms, and relatively short legs, would likely have no problem touching their toes without doing a single hamstring stretch.
Your muscle groups contain cells called muscle spindles. Whenever you stretch a muscle, these sensory receptors tell neurons within the muscle to fire a signal back to the central nervous system through the spinal column. This causes your muscles to contract, tighten, and resist the force to be stretched, resulting in that annoyingly painful feeling that most of us get when we first reach down to touch our toes or attempt to stretch other muscles.
But for some people, the pain that accompanies those six seconds is just too severe. Certain folk’s central nervous systems interpret stretching as a more noxious stimulus than others. If you can get past that pain, then you can probably improve your flexibility. However, Jenkins cautions against enduring too much pain: If you’re in agony, you could be tearing a muscle. That’s not a good thing.
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