Does your flexibility improve when you stop training? If yes, then you have the same problem as the martial artist who wrote this:

> As a martial artist I stretch a lot but nothing happens. In fact when
> I don’t train I become a little bit more flexible than when I train.
> It seems like some have this talent and some not.

Well, if you get more flexible when you don’t train, it means that your training is certainly bad for your flexibility and very likely bad for every other ability you want to improve. So, if you want to make progress you need to change your training–duh!

Here are reasons why your current training doesn’t improve your flexibility:

1. You do ineffective exercises, which take a lot of effort to show a small improvement, or even worse, that hurt you.

2. You see that doing those exercises brings very little improvement, so instead of finding better ones, you do those same exercise harder and more often, which makes your muscles chronically fatigued (and thus less flexible), and eventually hurts your joints.

3. You discover that laying off your training improves your flexibility, but instead of admitting to yourself that you chose wrong exercises and/or training plan and changing them, you invent an excuse that, “some have this talent and some not” and go back to doing the old thing or give up.

BTW, that explanation applies to any other ability.

I have written about this problem earlier, in my article “Q&A on Training for Flexibility and Strength–Workout Schedule 1.”