I’ve told you before that in order to benefit from stretching you must hold the stretch for about 30 seconds.

Practically speaking, what is the best way to ensure you’re holding for 30 seconds?

Looking at a clock is an idea, but what about when you aren’t facing directly at it?You could count 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi etc. but that’s not always accurate.Another idea is to set a timer, but then you have to keep resetting it.

I’ll tell you what I do…

I have a metronome app on my phone. I set it to 60 Beats Per Minute (BPM). Then I change the pitch to the first beat from the remaining 3 beats.
When I hear the high pitch beat for the 8th time I finish out the remaining beats.

This puts me at 32 seconds (8 measures x 4 seconds = 32 seconds).

I keep it running and when I’m doing my next stretch I start my “high pitch count” over until I get to 8 again.The above picture is a screenshot from the app I use. You can see it’s set to 60 BPM and the first beat is purple vs. the yellow beats.

If you have an iPhone there unfortunately is no Apple version of this app.

That’s okay though. I found another app that has the same features.

Here are the links to these apps, but any metronome app will do as long as you apply the same instructions I gave:

Click Here For Modern Metronome For Android

Click Here For An Apple Metronome App

Don’t forget to stretch! 😀