Before- Leg Extension

My name is Darcey I'm 14 years old and from the age of 2 I have wanted to be a dancer. This blog is to help me track my progress and keep me motivated to carry on stretching to get to become the best dancer I can possibly be.

The first stretch I will be learning is called the leg extension which looks like this


(it really annoys me that this girl is like 10)


The next pictures are of me doing the beginning stretches towards getting my leg extension looking like this. It is really important that you don't just rush into this stretch as you could end up with an injury. I will be doing these stretches once a day for about 30 minutes and updating you with a blog post every Sunday.

The first stretch I will be doing is called the butterfly stretch which when it is perfected should have both legs pulled in tight with knees flat in the floor. This is what mine looks like so far.

I'm sorry that this isn't the best picture but I can already get my head touching my feet but my legs are still quite far from my body. As you can clearly see my knees are still pretty far from the ground so that is something I really need to work on.

The next stretch I will be doing is the splits, to be able to get a good leg extension splits are a key stretch you should perfect. I used to be able to do the splits pretty easily however now that I don't do stretches as much in my own time I have kind of let them slack a lot so they now look like this,

I'm not proud of how much I have let myself slack with splits but I feel like with doing them everyday it shouldn't really take that long to build them back up again.

Another stretch that you should try to perfect before trying the leg extension is this 

I don't think that this stretch really has a name but the aim is to try and get the leg touching my nose!!!

This will defiantly take the most work but I think it can be doable if I keep working at it.

The final stretch that will really help is your second which looks like this 

It is all about trying to get your legs as wide apart as you can to help with this stretch I like to sit against a wall and every 30 seconds try to push my legs a little bit further apart. My second is awful, it doesn't look to bad from the front but when you look at it from the side

You can see that there is a lot of work to be done. 

(nice foot Darcey)

hopefully I will see you next Sunday for an update on all four of these stretches and if I have stuck to my goal of 30 minutes everyday. 

Darcey xxx