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Highland View Middle School Sit-and-Reach Champion

Jason's self-proclaimed flexibility record, established at a school that no longer exists and therefore cannot be verified.

Jason Young holds, by his own account, the Highland View Middle School sit-and-reach record. The Highland View Middle School no longer exists. He has noted, without apparent embarrassment, that this makes the record impossible to dispute.

The sit-and-reach test — one of the seven original exercises in Royal H. Burpee’s PhD dissertation — involves sitting on the floor and reaching toward your toes. It measures hamstring and lower back flexibility. Jason claims the top mark was 8 inches and that he beat it by an inch and a half without warming up, confirmed by his wife acting as “fair impartial judge” with a tape measure in the clinic.

Kathy brings this up whenever Jason discusses flexibility, hamstrings, or athletic achievement. The counter-argument — that Jason also claims to have tight hamstrings — has not been satisfactorily resolved. In the stretching episode, Jason explained this as correlation between sprinting ability and hamstring stiffness. Kathy was not convinced.

There really is a “Sit and Reach Champion” shirt on the PTCH swag store.

First seen in Do Burpees Actually Work? The Evidence Behind the Hated Exercise.

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