Seen me on YouTube?

Apparently my face is all over YouTube.

My ad blockers have protected me from this revelation. Others whom the YouTube algorithms have figured out are interested in flexibility training haven't been so lucky.

The programme is Matthew Smith's Mobility & Flexibility Toolkit. I filmed a testimonial after going from stiff ex-rugby player to chair splits in eighteen months. They've turned it into an ad.

But that's not what this is about.

This is about what nobody in the fitness world wants to admit: the gym bros grinding themselves into dust are only half-disciplined.

They've mastered yang discipline — the external, additive, heroic side. But they've never touched yin discipline. The internal, subtractive, silent side.

And yin discipline is harder.

Let me show you what I mean.

Master Yuan gathered 150 Chinese kids to tell them about my story

The most famous Wudang kung fu master in the world wanted to demonstrate what his traditional stretching methods could achieve.

He lectured them about how I’d managed to touch my chin to my toe.

Master Yuan took the credit. It was all his training methods, he said.

Not quite.

Here's what he didn't know: I wasn't using his methods at all.

I'd tried his approach for months. Force yourself into splits multiple times daily. Mind over matter. The way they train the Chinese kids at the kung fu school.

I injured myself. My flexibility went nowhere.

From my mountain hermitage, I ditched the traditional methods for a spreadsheet-driven programme designed by a fellow British nerd. I employed progressive overload — the same principles I'd used to get freaky strong back in my powerlifting days.

Front splits in three months. Side splits soon after. Chair splits within eighteen months.

I could've told Master Yuan the truth. That I'd abandoned his heroic methods for a systematic approach involving Excel spreadsheets and planned rest periods.

I didn't.

Because systematic beats heroic. And that's not a lesson martial arts schools are built to hear.

Yang discipline is what everyone trains

The gym bros think they're the disciplined ones.

Lift more. Run faster. Push harder. Add weight. Add reps. Stack more on top of yourself.

Sure. That's discipline. I call it yang discipline.

External. Additive. Heroic. Impressive to watch.

This is what the fitness world sells you:

• Grind harder

• No days off

• Beast mode

• More is more

It works. You get stronger. Faster. Bigger. The numbers go up.

Your ego loves it. You're conquering. You're dominating. You're a warrior.

But it's only half the picture.

Yin discipline is the side most people never touch

Try sitting in meditation for two hours without moving.

Try not using your phone for a day. Just sitting in nature doing nothing.

Try dropping the ego act. Deflating the pretence. Stop being what you're not.

Try sliding into side splits and breathing through thirty years of accumulated tension while every fibre of your body tells you to contract.

That's yin discipline.

Internal. Subtractive. Silent.

Let go instead of adding on. Surrender instead of conquering. Be still instead of grinding.

Most gym rats would break in five minutes. Not because they're weak — because they've never trained the other side.

The irony: yang discipline is easier.

Adding weight to a bar gives you something to fight against. Your ego can attach to it. You're achieving. You're progressing. You can post about it.

Yin discipline offers nothing to conquer. No enemy. No weight. No achievement worth bragging about.

Just you and thirty years of tension you've been avoiding.

I've done ridiculous feats of yang discipline and yin is still harder

I've done some fairly absurd Shaolin endurance training. Iron brush conditioning. Dark room retreats. Training I'd rather not describe in polite company.

Of the many disorders for which I’m confident I could earn a certificate, masochism is one.

But by far — by far — the most psychologically challenging training I've ever done is flexibility.

Not because my body couldn't do it. Because of what it required internally.

Strength training is external pain. You build, stack, accumulate. There's a certain heroism to it. You're adding layers on top of yourself.

Flexibility is internal pain. You break down, reverse, strip away. There's no glory in it. You're going into the dirty areas. The sludge. The rigidity you've been carrying for decades.

It gets into places you'd rather not visit.

Just you and thirty years of tension having a quiet conversation.

Flexibility is recovery, not acquisition

Here's what most people miss about flexibility: it's the only physical quality we're born with.

Babies can do splits. Toddlers sit in full lotus without batting an eyelid. Every "flexible" adult is just recovering something they always had.

Strength, endurance, speed — these are acquisitions. You're building something that wasn't there before.

Flexibility is recovery. You're peeling back the accumulated rubbish to find what was always underneath.

If I were briefly emperor of the universe, I would decree that all parents put their babies into splits every day throughout childhood. Prevention is infinitely easier than cure.

But most of us weren't so lucky. So we have the longer road: systematic, patient, gradual. No forcing. No heroics. Just showing up and releasing a little more each time.

Which is exactly what the spreadsheet-driven programme taught me to do.

The inside mirrors the outside

It's no coincidence that the clients in my Deep Writing programme — a container designed to help people unblock themselves creatively — all expressed interest in flexibility training.

I've been coaching several of them for a long time. They'd mastered the basic discipline I teach in my mastery coaching. They wanted the next frontier: authentic expression.

And every single one of them had been teetering on flexibility for years. Wanting to go deep. Never quite making headway.

Blocked body, blocked expression.

The inside mirrors the outside. A stiff body reflects a muffled voice. Rigid hips, rigid thinking. Open body, open expression.

If you can't express physically, you can't express creatively. The tension you're holding in your hips is the same tension preventing you from writing what you actually think.

Writer's block needn't be a thing if you're situated in a flowing body.

Which is why I'm teaching flexibility alongside writing for this cohort. And why I'm building flexibility modules for my Gulun Kung Fu Online community — it pairs beautifully with the internal kung fu training we do there.

Writing is a process of breaking out of your shell, letting go of resistance, expressing what's been trapped inside.

Flexibility is the same process, written in the body.

Both are yin disciplines disguised as skills.

The two sides of discipline

Yang discipline is what everyone trains:

• Add more

• Push harder

• Overcome obstacles

• Conquer challenges

• Build on top

Yin discipline is what almost no one trains:

• Let go

• Be still

• Surrender

• Release

• Strip back

You need both.

The gym bro who can't sit still for five minutes is incomplete. The meditation zealot who can't lift heavy things is also incomplete.

True discipline trains both sides.

Most people will never try yin discipline. It doesn't give you bragging rights. There's no leaderboard. No one's impressed when you tell them you sat still for two hours.

But that's what makes it harder.

Systematic beats heroic.

Yang discipline is half the picture.

Yin discipline is harder, quieter, and less Instagrammable.

Most people will never try it.

Ben

P.S. The testimonial video that's apparently stalking the internet is here. If my face keeps haunting your YouTube feed, blame the algorithm.