PBS Star Miranda Esmonde-White Explains Why Flexibility Should Be Your Workout Priority - Exclusive

Mention the word "workout" to most people, and one of two things likely comes to mind: weight or resistance training for muscle strength or endurance training for cardiovascular strength. If flexibility comes into play at all, it's often only in passing — a few quick stretches before a morning run or a few stretches after a round of weight training.

Miranda Esmonde-White, fitness trainer and star of the long-running PBS show "Classical Stretch," says these priorities are backwards. Instead of being an afterthought, flexibility should be the top priority. 

"We're looking at the body all wrong in the fitness industry," Esmonde-White said. "As fitness people, we should be looking at the body as a whole, not as pieces." 

Seeking a pain-free, whole-body workout for her clients who'd aged out of conventional workouts, Esmonde-White developed Essentrics — a program designed to cultivate a full range of motion for all joints, healthy body alignment, and balanced strength. Her new book, "The Miracle of Flexibility," is a comprehensive guide to Essentrics with 62 workouts. In an exclusive interview with Health Digest, Esmonde-White shared why promoting flexibility has become her life's mission.

While Miranda Esmonde-White originally developed Essentrics for her middle-aged clients, she saw it as useful for younger athletes as well. 

"Young people should actually take a look down the road at the people in their 50s and 60s and see what they look like," Esmonde-White said. "Will you still look and feel great as you get older? As you get into your 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s? Or are you going to be on painkillers — which so many people are — chronically in pain, from needing knee replacements, hip replacements?"

Cultivating flexibility, she said, can help prevent many of these problems, along with the problems that plague younger athletes. For instance, flexibility training helps maintain the health of connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments. 

"Connective tissue has a lot to do with aging and immobility of young people, like athletes who can't move," Esmonde-White said. "They're pushing their muscles, but it's actually their connective tissue that's the issue."

While Miranda Esmonde-White trained millions of ordinary people in Essentrics through her classes and TV show, elite athletes have sought out and benefitted from her trainings too. 

"I worked with — for about 10 [to] 12 years — the world squash champion," Esmonde-White said. "He still does our program. He's now 48." 

She approached his main problem, a chronically inflamed ligament, by targeting the stiffness in his feet, which impacted how his legs and the rest of this body moved and were aligned. She's also proud of the testimonials she's received from students and viewers who suffered from debilitating pain before starting Essentrics. 

"There was one girl [who] was 32 or something. She came to one of these retreats of ours. Her mother brought her. She was the mother of three young girls, and she was on every drug you could name, and she really thought she was going to die," Esmonde-White said. "At the end of a week of doing two classes a day, she was already off some major drugs, and her whole life had changed."

"The Miracle of Flexibility" by Miranda Esmonde-White is out February 28 from S&S/Simon Element. You can pre-order a copy here, and tune into Miranda's new special, "Aging Backwards 4: The Miracle of Flexibility," on PBS between February 25 and March 12.