Splits timelinehow long to do the splits, honestly
Measure your gap to the floor, say which split and how often you train, and this gives you a range of six-week training blocks. Not a date. There has never been a trial that followed adults to a split, so a date would be an invention with a calendar drawn round it.
This is the only page on the site that estimates rather than measures, and it prints its arithmetic underneath so you can see exactly where the evidence stops and the assumption starts.
Measure the gap first
The number that matters is how far you are from the floor today, taken warm, in the position itself, without pushing into pain. Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain. Five minutes of walking or twenty easy sit-to-stands first, then:
Front split. Sink into a lunge-split as far as you comfortably can, back knee down, hips square to the front. Measure from the front hip crease straight down to the floor.
Side split. Slide the feet apart as wide as they comfortably go, feet and knees pointing the same way. Measure from the lowest point of the groin straight down to the floor.
Write the number down with today’s date before you go any further. In six weeks, measure it the same way again. Your own two readings are worth more than any estimate on this page, including the one it is about to give you — because they are a measurement of you, and the estimate is arithmetic done on a literature that never studied this goal.
No estimate yet. The split, the gap and the frequency are all needed — three quarters of an answer is not three quarters of a timeline, and this page will not fill in the quarter you did not give it.
Why there is no date on this page
Because the evidence runs out two steps before a date, and every splits programme that sells you one has walked those two steps in the dark.
Step one, which the evidence covers. Static stretching, done on most days, produces a measurable increase in a joint’s range over three to six weeks. Bandy and Irion established the shape of it in Physical Therapy in 1994 with thirty seconds a day for six weeks; Medeiros and colleagues pooled the hamstring trials in 2016 and Thomas and colleagues examined duration in 2018, and the gains land in the region of a few degrees to about ten. Warneke and colleagues went to an hour a day for six weeks in 2022, which is the top of the dose range anybody has actually tested.
Step two, which it does not. None of that measures a whole position, and none of it follows anybody to a split. There is also a serious argument that what the trials move is your tolerance of the stretch rather than the length of the tissue — Weppler and Magnusson made it in Physical Therapy in 2010 and it has not been settled since. Harvey and colleagues, reviewing whether stretch produces lasting range at all, found the effects small and short-lived.
Step three, which nobody has taken. No randomised trial of a splits programme exists. Not for adults, not for beginners, not by sex, not by age. Every timeline you have read was somebody’s guess, and the confident ones were the least honest.
So this page gives you a span in training blocks and tells you where it came from. It is a worse answer than a date. It is the one the evidence supports.
The ceiling nobody trains through
For the side split especially, the limit is often bone. The depth and orientation of the hip socket and the angle of the femoral neck decide how far the thigh can abduct and turn out before bone meets bone, and none of that is trainable. Frank and colleagues reported in Arthroscopy in 2015 that cam morphology — extra bone where the femoral head meets the neck — appears on imaging in around a third of people with no symptoms at all.
What that ceiling feels like is worth naming, because it is mistaken for a plateau every day. Tissue at its limit feels like a long pull along a muscle. Bone at its limit feels like a hard, blocking pinch deep in the front of the hip crease, and it does not soften with another thirty seconds. The first is a training problem; the second is your anatomy, and pushing it is not brave.
There is direct evidence about the cost of pushing it. Charbonnier and colleagues motion-captured eleven pairs of professional dancers’ hips through six dance movements, including both splits, and published it in the American Journal of Sports Medicine in 2011. They found impingement and subluxation during those positions — in hips that were all morphologically normal — and recommended limiting the movements in frequency. Those were dancers with a lifetime of preparation. It is not an argument against training the splits; it is an argument against grinding into the end of the range every day.
What this estimate is not
It is not a reading. Every other instrument in this case measures something and scores it on an anchor set that already existed. This one takes four answers and does arithmetic on them. It is the only page here that extrapolates, and it is labelled as such at the top, in the result and here.
It is not part of the Range Score. Nothing you answer above feeds an area, a score group or the composite. If you have taken any of the five tests, those readings travel through this page untouched and arrive at the composite exactly as they left.
It is not a promise that the position arrives. For the front split most people who train it consistently get closer, and many get there. For the side split, a real share of people will not, for reasons that were decided before they were born.
It is not a training plan. It says how long, roughly, at a stated dose. It does not say what to do, and this site does not publish a splits track because we have not built one.
0 of 5 tests taken. Every link here carries what you have already measured, so the readings travel with you from one instrument to the next.
Nothing on this site is stored and nothing is sent. Your readings live in the address bar and nowhere else, so a link is a survey and closing the tab loses it. Copy the address if you want to keep it, or take the same tests in Limber, where a reading is kept on the phone and measured against the one before it.
Stop at a stretch, never at sharp pain. Mild stretch — four to six out of ten — is the target when you measure the gap and when you train it. A hard pinch deep in the front of the hip is not a stretch and another thirty seconds is not the answer to it.
See a clinician rather than a web page if pain catches or clicks in the groin, if the hip gives way, if there is numbness, pins and needles or weakness down the leg, or if the pain followed a fall or an injury. This page does not diagnose anything and Limber does not treat anything.
How long does it take to do the splits as a beginner?
Nobody knows, and the confident numbers you have read were made up. What the research supports is a measurable change in a single joint's range over three to six weeks of near-daily stretching, in the region of a few degrees to about ten. It supports nothing at all about a whole shape, because no trial has ever followed adults to a split. This page turns your gap into a count of six-week blocks and then doubles the span, which is honest about the size of the uncertainty rather than hiding it behind a number. If you are starting from a large gap, the answer is in years for most people, and for some it never arrives.
How long does it take a man to do the splits?
The same answer, with one caveat and no evidence for the rest. Population measurements do find women a little more mobile at most joints — Soucie and colleagues reported reference values by age and sex in Haemophilia in 2011 — but the differences are modest and they sit inside a huge spread between individuals of either sex. No study has compared how long men and women take to reach a split, so anybody telling you a men's timeline is quoting a number nobody measured. Your starting gap, how often you train and the shape of your hip sockets will decide far more than your sex does.
Are the front splits and the side splits the same job?
No, and it is the most useful thing on this page. A front split is two different demands on two legs: hip extension with a square pelvis on the back leg, hip flexion with a long hamstring on the front. Most of what limits it is tissue, and tissue responds to work. A side split is hip abduction with the thighs turned out, and what limits it is much more often bone — the depth and angle of the socket and the shape of the femoral neck. That is a ceiling and not a plateau. This estimator gives the side split a wider range for that reason, and it will not tell you the ceiling is not yours, because it cannot see your hips.
Can I get the splits from scratch as an adult?
Often yes for the front split, less often for the side. Measured joint range falls by only a handful of degrees across five decades of adult life, so age is a much smaller factor than the question assumes; the real variables are your starting gap, how consistently you train and what your hip sockets allow. What changes with age is recovery rather than potential. Start by measuring the gap, write it down with the date, and re-measure after one block — your own two readings are worth more than any estimate on this page, including the one it gives you.
Why does this refuse to give me a date?
Because a date would be a lie with a calendar attached. The evidence runs out two steps before a date: the trials measure degrees at one joint over weeks, they do not measure whole positions, and they do not follow anybody to a split. Everything past that is assumption, and this page prints its assumptions instead of dressing them up as arithmetic. A range wide enough to be honest is not a satisfying answer, but it is the one the evidence supports, and a plan built on a real range survives contact with reality better than a plan built on a promised date.
Is forcing the splits bad for my hips?
Forcing anything is, and this position has evidence behind the worry. Charbonnier and colleagues motion-captured eleven pairs of professional dancers' hips through six dance movements, including both splits, and found impingement and subluxation in joints that were all morphologically normal — their recommendation was to limit those movements in frequency. That is not an argument against training the splits. It is an argument against grinding into the end of the range daily, and against treating pain in the groin as something to push through. A hard pinch at the front of the hip is a signal to stop, and pain that catches, clicks or gives way is a question for a clinician.
The hips, in three positions: a squat hold and a hip flexor check scored on the app's own anchors, and a rotation compare that is read left against right rather than scored.
Toe Touch TestPosterior chain — hamstrings, glutes and lower back. Five bands, one 0–100 reading.
Hip Flexor TestHip flexor length on each side, read against the bench line — the Thomas test, simplified so you can take it alone.
Range ScoreThe composite. Whatever you have measured, rolled into one 0–100 reading and drawn as an elevation profile — with the ground you skipped left dashed.
- Bandy WD, Irion JM. The effect of time on static stretch on the flexibility of the hamstring muscles. Physical Therapy 1994;74(9):845–50; discussion 850–2. doi:10.1093/ptj/74.9.845
- Medeiros DM, Cini A, Sbruzzi G, Lima CS. Influence of static stretching on hamstring flexibility in healthy young adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice 2016;32(6):438–445. doi:10.1080/09593985.2016.1204401
- Thomas E, Bianco A, Paoli A, Palma A. The Relation Between Stretching Typology and Stretching Duration: The Effects on Range of Motion. International Journal of Sports Medicine 2018;39(4):243–254. doi:10.1055/s-0044-101146
- Warneke K, Brinkmann A, Hillebrecht M, Schiemann S. Influence of Long-Lasting Static Stretching on Maximal Strength, Muscle Thickness and Flexibility. Frontiers in Physiology 2022;13:878955. doi:10.3389/fphys.2022.878955
- Harvey L, Herbert R, Crosbie J. Does stretching induce lasting increases in joint ROM? A systematic review. Physiotherapy Research International 2002;7(1):1–13. doi:10.1002/pri.236
- Nuzzo JL. The Case for Retiring Flexibility as a Major Component of Physical Fitness. Sports Medicine 2020;50(5):853–870. doi:10.1007/s40279-019-01248-w
- Soucie JM, Wang C, Forsyth A, Funk S, Denny M, Roach KE et al. Range of motion measurements: reference values and a database for comparison studies. Haemophilia 2011;17(3):500–7. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2516.2010.02399.x
- Frank JM, Harris JD, Erickson BJ, Slikker W 3rd, Bush-Joseph CA, Salata MJ et al. Prevalence of Femoroacetabular Impingement Imaging Findings in Asymptomatic Volunteers: A Systematic Review. Arthroscopy 2015;31(6):1199–204. doi:10.1016/j.arthro.2014.11.042
- Charbonnier C, Kolo FC, Duthon VB, Magnenat-Thalmann N, Becker CD, Hoffmeyer P, Menetrey J. Assessment of congruence and impingement of the hip joint in professional ballet dancers: a motion capture study. American Journal of Sports Medicine 2011;39(3):557–66. doi:10.1177/0363546510386002
Each address was followed to the record it names before it was written down. Where a paper could not be resolved that way, the page names it in the prose and leaves it unlinked rather than guessing at an address.
One reading is a point. Two are a line.
This page scores one test. Limber runs five — toe touch, knee-to-wall, shoulder reach, hip flexor and deep squat — rolls them into a single 0–100 Range Score, cuts that first score as your datum, and measures every later reading from it. The two wall tests are read in centimetres, the per-side tests keep left and right apart, and areas you never tested stay drawn as untested rather than filled in with a guess.
It works offline and needs no account: your readings stay on the phone.
Limber is in build. There is no store listing yet, so there is no download button here — when there is one it will be a link, not a promise.
Everything else in this case measures you. This page does arithmetic on what you tell it, and the arithmetic is printed under the answer so you can check it rather than trust it.
It gives a span of six-week blocks and never a date, because the step from what the trials measured to the position you want is an assumption, and an assumption with a calendar drawn round it is a lie.
Where the numbers come from.
Six weeks is the trials’ own interval. The rate per landmark is ours, stated as ours, and it is why the high end of every answer is three to five times the low end. No trial has followed adults to a split, and nothing on this page pretends one has.
The papers behind all of that are listed at the foot of this page, with an address for each one.
The rest of the case