Most people assume that their muscles feel tight because they are short. In reality, muscles often feel tight because they’re working too hard, trying to compensate for poor movement mechanics, or trying to stabilize the body in moments of instability. It’s for this reason that people remain feeling tight despite hours of stretching, even if they are showing signs of increased flexibility. In this blog we are going to dig into why that is, and give some better alternatives to traditional style stretching.
Is More Flexibility Always Good?
People assume that more flexibility is always better, with practices like yoga aiming to “open up” the body and create more length in certain muscles. However, this length is not always useful to us if the muscles cannot produce enough force in these ranges of motion to provide stability for the body.
Imagine the muscles like guitar strings. Too loose and the strings don’t make the correct notes, too tight and they risk snapping. Just like a guitar player would not try to endlessly loosen his strings, we should not always aim for “loose” muscles. When it comes to the strings there is an optimal tuning, one that places the strings under the correct amount of tension to provide the stability while playing.
Our muscles operate similarly as a system. They need the correct amount of tension to support the joints. If they don’t, what results is joint instability when we move. In reaction to this, the body will try to manufacture some stability for itself by creating what we could call “bad tension”. This type of tension comes in the place of the “good tension” that we should naturally have.
The issue is that people will mistake these sensations as a signal that the body is too tight, rather than too unstable. When you look at the body in motion it becomes clear that the problems we are dealing with are related to stability and not flexibility. If you go by feelings alone, it can be easy to misunderstand this signaling from the body and head down the wrong path when trying to find the remedy.
Why Does Stretching Sometimes Feel Good?
When people first stretch it can feel good initially, but it’s important to understand why this can be misleading. To explain why let me give you an example. What is the first reaction someone normally has when they stub their toe off the door or bang their funny bone on something? They instinctively rub whatever they have hit to help ease the pain. This tricks the nervous system away from focusing on the pain neurons, but instead on the sensory neurons, momentarily taking some of the pain away.
When it comes to stretching, our body is receiving signals that something is not right in a particular area. That a muscle is working too hard, or not under the right tension to support our joints. This “bad tension” can be momentarily numbed by stretching and stimulating the nervous system in a different way. That’s why many people report feeling good for a few minutes after stretching but ultimately feel no different overall. In fact the more you stretch, the less effective the numbing becomes and the more unstable you can make yourself ultimately feeding the cycle even further.
Stretching Through Movement
Our bodies are of course designed to stretch. The issue is that the muscles in the body are supposed to stretch withing the movements we have naturally evolved to do day to day like walking and running. Muscles contract in one area of the body, and force muscles to lengthen or “stretch” in other parts of the body. This active component is often missing when people attempt to stretch themselves and this is why the body never takes it on with any real meaning.
Without this active integration, the muscles become hyperflexible over time leading to more instability. The stretching should actually create more stability in the body when done correctly. Unfortunately this approach takes more precision, and a better understanding in terms of how to position and sequence the body during movement. Not only should the stretch happen actively, but within the context of the movements like walking and running themselves.
By using the Functional Patterns system, we can create the appropriate stretch on the body all whilst improving strength and creating more stability. When this happens, the need to stretch traditionally disappears and clients report feeling less stiff and more mobile without ever working directly on these issues at all.
A Better Alternative
If you want to start feeling less stiff in the short term, a great alternative to stretching is myofascial release. It can take time to reprogram how the body moves so this is a great starting point. Myofascial release focuses on breaking up adhesions in the musculature that come as a result of that “bad tension”. By doing this we can focus on the areas of the muscles that are causing the tight sensation and hydrate them directly.
We do these techniques using things like foam rollers and an assortment of different hard balls, and doing this often results in feelings of lightness and looseness without needing to do any stretching at all. It’s important to understand that the mechanism is hydration, not loosening. This also primes our muscles to receive active stretching with well executed movement when it comes time for us to train. You can find more information about myofascial release in other blogs on this site, as well as in our initial in person assessment.
