Is it shorter muscles? Can most people get as flexible as a yoga master if they just stretch more?
In: 8
There are a couple of things.
You’re right that the ability of your muscles to extend is an important factor, and can be trained pretty significantly in general (ignoring joint problems like rheumatism / arthritis or whatever) So yeah, most people would be able to get a *lot* more flexible with the right exercise and stretching, though there would certainly be those whose maximum flexibility is more / less than others.
There’s also how stretchy your ligaments are. This isn’t a good way to be flexible, though, as it comes with a consummate lack of stability that can lead to all sorts of “fun” problems. I have [EDS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehlers%E2%80%93Danlos_syndromes) and have had endless difficulty keeping certain of my joints from a variety of problems (chronic pain, alarming ease dislocating, poor capacity to cope with unaccustomed exercise…)
It turns out that keeping my level of exercise near how much my knees / hips / whatever can cope with at a given time is the way to go. The gap between “enough exercise to be beneficial” and “enough exercise to mess me up for a week” is razor thin, but can be managed with effort…
Part of the reason stretching and other exercises work is that they’re also training your brain to be comfortable in the new positions.
Watch any young children and they have the flexibility of yoga masters. But after a lifetime of sitting at school, sitting while at work, sitting while riding in a car, etc, their brains signal any kind of stretching as something that’s not supposed to be happening. That’s the initial discomfort people feel when stretching.
Through different exercises, it’s possible to retrain your brain to understand that being stretched out is ok, and through that, we can unlock the natural flexibility that we have.
So, like everything, it’s a bit of one’s nature, and a bit of one’s habits.
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