This is a five-step circuit and you’re going to go through it three times. It will take 45 minutes at first.

1) Stand in a medium but comfortable straddle, and hold a bar across the back of your shoulders (I’m a
128-lb woman and I use a 35lb bar). With your knees straight but not locked, and keeping your back
flat, do ten Good Mornings. Go deep enough to feel a stretch. Hold at the bottom for 10s on the final
rep.
○ Progression: only do this once, on the first circuit, as a warmup.
2) Sit against a wall in butterfly position. Put a 14kg or 25lb kettlebell on each knee; do 30 little pulses of
stretch/relax, then passively relax for 30s.
○ Progression: put a yoga block between your feet, which forces the thigh bones wider apart.
○ Progression: put yoga blocks, a rolled up mat, etc, under your feet and hips, allowing your
knees to go lower than your hips.
3) Holding a ~12kg kettlebell in front of you with both hands, move side to side from a cossack squat on
one side to a cossack squat on the other side. Stay as low as you can; the extended foot turns to face
upward. Do ten reps, or 20 total shifts from side to side. Stay low. Knees stay turned out.
4) 20-second straddle L-sit. I usually do this on a bigger set of kettlebells, using the handles as bars. But
you can do it on the floor or parallettes. If unable to hold a straddle L-sit, like say your wrist is hurt, sit in
a straddle and put your hands down in front and hold your legs up (but with butt down) for 20 seconds.
Anything active with the hip flexors, really.
○ Alternative: lately I’ve tried turning this around and doing the Diagonal Stretch here instead. I
like this version if I’m planning to work on splits after doing straddles.
○ Alternative #2: sometimes I do a cross-legged forward fold or double pigeon here instead, too.
5) Sit in a straddle, with the same bar across your shoulders from the first exercise. Now you will do
seated Good Mornings, aka pancake stretches, at a medium pace. This time it's okay to round your
back at the bottom. Do ten reps. Pause at the bottom of the last one.
○ Regression: if you can’t sit up straight and bend forward yet, do the standing version described
in 1). It will serve you a lot better, because gravity will help you.
○ Possible progression: if you’re getting as low as you want to get, maybe try using decreasing
weight on this over the course of the circuits in an attempt to move from passive to active
flexibility.
○ Possible progression: when your stomach is getting comfortably to the floor, put yoga blocks
under your feet to enable an over-pancake.

Repeat all of this twice more. By the end of the third circuit, you will probably be very happy with how deep
you're going. :-) The next day, expect the back of your upper thighs to be pretty sore; probably adductors too.

Video references:
In case the verbal descriptions are unclear, you can see me do some of these exercises right at the beginning
of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic3ZWGnCo2s

And two of them appear in this before-and-after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjPeT8XqSx4

Attributions:
I got a variant on this circuit from Ido Portal in 2011. I have swapped the order of exercises, played with
alternatives, and dropped some things entirely since then.