Philip Ha

Philip Ha Trying to unlock my flexibility 🔓

05/19/2026

I didn’t start Taekwondo until college, so 18 years old.

And before people go on to say “oh well that’s still young, so you don’t need to worry about your body and all”…

I was as stiff as a rock.
VERY inflexible.
Big with useless strength.

Everything worked against me to get better at taekwondo.

Sure I had the techniques down, but my physical base did not match the outputs and requirements of Taekwondo whatsoever.

I could’ve quit and given up saying that my body is just not right for it.

But I also didn’t want to because when my friend first introduced me to the art, and I was brought into a fun open sparring session, I quickly learned that Taekwondo practitioners are some of the most legit and lethal fighters ever.

I wanted that, and I still do.

The mobility & flexibility of the kicks.
The speed & versatility of the kicks.
The strength & power of the kicks.

The ability to truly defend myself and to hold my own against bullies / threats.

I learned that taekwondo when taught accordingly is much more practical than people give credit for.

But the problem for me was that my physical limitations didn’t let me get the full benefit.

And I’ll be honest I’m still not exactly where I want to be in my current position even after 10+ years.

Yet there’s so much that taekwondo has to offer that I’m still training in all these other areas such as powerlifting and flexibility so that I can enjoy Taekwondo even more.

There’s a lot to unpack from this as this isn’t just a physical thing that I desired.

There’s just as much mental & spiritual elements I desire as Taekwondo & lifting helped me a ton when it comes to mental resilience.

But that being said, I would love to see more adults especially doing taekwondo.

Muay Thai, boxing, and other martial arts have their place and benefits, absolutely.

But to me, taekwondo has a lot of cool things that I would love for more people to enjoy.

Whether it’s for being more physically fit, getting better for competition, or to use as a confidence builder…

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts:
•
•
•

05/15/2026

As a kid, improving mobility & flexibility is much easier because your muscles AND nervous system are still developing.

That means that your body is more “pliable” during that time.

But after that growth period stops and your body and nervous system matures, it’s essentially conditioned to use whatever range of motion you’ve used up until that point.

That’s why as adults who try to go into martial arts like taekwondo or BJJ, it’s difficult to improve your stretching because your body and mind isn’t used to extreme ranges.

That’s why using weights help a ton in this regard because we basically teach our muscles and brain to feel safe & strong at end ranges, allowing our body to relax into the stretches and kick higher.

The key here, however, is to not just any heavy weight.

We want to use a weight that is heavy enough that helps us stretch further, but it’s also light enough that it doesn’t restrict us from stretching further.

Generally speaking, weights anywhere between 15 to 35lbs work very well.

So if you’re particularly stiff, use some weights to help.

05/14/2026

I’ll be honest.

Ive made the mistake in thinking that I had to develop ONLY my passive ROM to get higher kicks.

But the reality is that kicking is a skill that requires elements of BOTH passive and active ROM as well as speed.

Although my flexibility improved significantly, I rarely practiced the actual kicking itself.

But the great news is that I don’t have to worry too much because having that passive ROM gives me the ability to improve my active ROM / dynamic flexibility even more.

That being said, kicking drills don’t have to be complicated.

One of the best ways to practice kicking and building that general dynamic / active flexibility for kicking is kicking while seated / lying on the ground.

This takes away a lot of the balance component so we can hyper focus on the actual kicking itself.

Of course, we still want to practice kicking while standing too, but when the main focus is to develop the compression strength to lift our legs higher, these seated / lying variations help a ton.

Whether it’s for taekwondo, kickboxing, or any kicking specific work we want to improve, these seated / lying drills work very well.

05/06/2026

I’ll be honest.

I believe resistance bands and ankle weights to improve overall strength & power for kicking as a complete waste of time.

ESPECIALLY if that’s the only thing you’re doing for strength & power work.

When it comes to speed work, it can work depending on how you use them like overspeed training

For mobility & flexibility, definitely helpful in helping the body engage the agonist muscles better for that compression strength and long term cold flexibility.

For conditioning work, absolutely (this part i forgot to mention).

But for overall power and strength, it doesn’t do as great of a job compared to lifting weights.

Now i understand that if people don’t have access to gym equipment / weights, then resistance bands are definitely helpful in that context.

But to avoid weights completely when you have access to them is the equivalent of trying to drink coffee without using water to brew your coffee.

Lifting isn’t just important for strength & power development.

It’s also NECESSARY for injury prevention & longevity.

I’d rather compete and be healthy for a long time than to destroy my body just for the sake of one win.

Perhaps that’s a difference in mindset / mentality.

But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a difference between reckless training vs hard & smart training.

That being said, resistance bands aren’t entirely useless.

What’s important is we understand the intent and purpose behind why we use certain tools.

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts to following accounts, love especially some of these guys’ use of resistance bands:
•
•
•
•
•

05/05/2026

If I really had to choose specific exercises when it comes to building resilience for the following muscles:

• Hamstrings
• Groin
• Hip Flexors

Then it would be these exercises respectively:

• Nordics
• Copenhagens
• Hip Flexion

Of course there are several exercises such as RDLs, hip addiction machine, and more that help with things like strength, injury prevention, and longevity.

But these 3 exercises in particular helped me a lot when it came to my own rehab process after dealing with nagging pains & injuries from Taekwondo.

Again, disclaimer that these are not the magic cure exercises.

That being said, this doesn’t change the fact that I wished that I knew a system of training that allowed me to improve all of the following:

• Strength & Speed
• Power & Explosiveness
• Mobility & Flexibility
• Resilience & Longevity

But fortunately there is.

And I’m super excited to give this system a shot that I’ve modified over and over and over again over the years.

Once powerlifting meet is over, June will be when I really document this system.

If you guys are interested also, then definitely DM me and I’ll send over details!

05/04/2026

When you treat mobility & flexibility training like strength training, programming becomes much simpler.

And as much as there’s many different tutorials and follow along videos around flows and such, nothing has helped me more than following this guideline to helping me in Taekwondo…

When it comes to programming, you’ll want to do the following:

1) Pick a skill / goal (ie front splits, front kick, etc…)

2) Select 4-6 exercises that achieve the following:

• Single muscle stretch (ie butterfly)
• Single muscle compression strength (ie pike lifts)
• Compound stretch (ie seated good morning)
• Skill-specific (ie side kick holds)

3) Organize from accessory / single muscle focused to compound / skill-specific

4) Except for the skill-specific movement, do about 2-4 sets of 5-8 controlled reps, focusing on the stretch or compression.

5) For skill-specific, focus on 1-2 sets of holding the stretch for 30-60s.

So a sample template for middle splits programming would like the following:

A1) Horse Stance Squat, 2 Sets x 5 Controlled Reps
B1) Weighted Butterfly, 3 Sets x 10 Controlled Reps
C1) Side Lunge, 2-3 Sets x 5 Controlled Reps
C2) Fire Hydrants, 2-3 Sets x 10 Controlled Reps
D1) Middle Split ISOs, 1-2 Sets x 30s

THIS IS JUST A GENERAL GUIDELINE. There are nuances to all this.

And if youre looking for better assistance with all this, then join my Skool community (link in bio) for coaching!

05/01/2026

I remember the most annoying thing coaches & friends would tell me is to relax my shoulders during taekwondo sparring.

No matter how much I simply put them down, they were still stiff and rigid according to my peers.

Working on that stiffness and rigidity takes time and experience.

But there are at least cues we can use to help with that process.

One of those cues of pulling the shoulders back.

It made such a huge difference learning this from boxing.

Something I realized and learned and am fascinated by is how there’s always something new to learn, especially from other arts / styles.

This whole argument about “oh well taekwondo sucks” or “BJJ is better than x” is shallow and unintelligent.

Of course just sticking to one art is going to put you in a dead end.

That’s why we expand and learn as much as possible, but having a base.

There’s always something to gain from others.

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts:
•
• .taekwondo
•
•
•

04/30/2026

This is something I still struggle with a lot.

I think we can all agree that building compression strength is quite tiresome.

But it’s a necessary and essential part of building that high kick mobility & flexibility for taekwondo.

One thing that I recently learned, however, is the power of resistance band with this.

Compression strength deals with more coordination than the actual strength aspect (ie handling heavier weights). That may be part of it, but the larger part of it is coordination.

This means that drills and exercises like banded kicks & holds in these specific positions of kicking help make the bulk, if not all, of the training our body needs to build that awareness & coordination to compress at these end ranges.

The best part of this all is that this compression strength is also necessary and helpful in developing the flexibility side of things for our kicks especially for cold flexibility.

Resistance bands are excellent in this regard.

But I still stand on my argument that resistance bands and ankle weights are not the way to go when it comes to developing actual power, speed, & strength of the kicks themselves…

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts:
•
•
•

04/29/2026

When you break things down into smaller components, it becomes much easier to address whatever tasks / goals you’re trying to complete.

The side kick has 2 basic components:

• Hamstring Flexibility
• Abductor Compression Strength

We should address these areas separately with targeted exercises of course!

Towards the end of a workout when you’re getting into passive stretching, we can then look at the contract-relax technique.

For example:

• Contract hamstrings 5s
• Relax 10s
• Contract glutes 5s
• Relax 10s
• Rest or Repeat 2-3x
• 1-3 sets

This is just a sample of what could be done.

Contract-relax (or PNF) stretching is a powerful tool to trick the brain into stretching deeper.

Very effective tool.

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts:
•
•
• .suhyuk

🧩🧩🧩🧩

If you’re looking for in-person coaching, DM me
If you’re looking for online coaching, check bio

04/22/2026

BEFORE READING FURTHER, I MUST CLARIFY SOMETHING…

When I say “high roundhouse kick drills” for the last exercise of the workout, I don’t mean at the end you should be doing high speed kicking work…

It should be more of a static & passive work that we do at the end as at that point, our body is already fatigued so we don’t want to potentially injure ourselves…

With that being said…

The roundhouse kick requires few things:

• Anterior Pelvic Tilt
• Hip Internal Rotation
• Groin Flexibility
• Hamstring Flexibility
• Glute Flexibility & Strength

Pretty much the exact same as the middle splits.

So when designing a mobility & flexibility workout for roundhouse kicks, we find 3-5 exercises that target those areas.

Below is a sample workout one may do (always warm up first):

A1) Horse Stance Squat - 2 sets x 5 reps (hold 5s each rep)
A2) Half W-Sit - 2 sets x 5 controlled reps
B1) Weighted Butterfly - 2-3 sets x 8-10 reps (hold 3s)
C1) Kneeling Half Middle Splits - 2-3 sets x 5 reps (hold 5s)
D1) Middle Splits Stretch - 2-3 sets x 30s

This is just one possible way of going about it.

It’s important you understand what areas you’re most weak in, and focus on those areas first.

And as mentioned, there’s no such thing as a “beginner friendly exercise” especially in the world of mobility & flexibility.

Something may look advanced only because of one’s actual flexibility level.

But it doesn’t mean that we can’t and shouldn’t do it (of course with the caveat of if we’re injured and whatnot, that’s a different topic).

To improve mobility & flexibility, it really is about finding few simple exercises and obtaining ROM over time with those movements.

Just like in strength training.

And this is something I wish I understood when I first started my taekwondo / martial arts journey.

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Shoutouts:
•
•
•
•

Address

Kenilworth, NJ
07033

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Philip Ha posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category