Some of you have been meaning to come in for an appointment, get stretched, learn stretches to use with clients, and/or take my online, for-credit posture classes. Here’s some inspiration:
Generally, the world is made up of two kinds of people: people who like to stretch (usually people who are already stretchy) and whose muscles may be weak and
people who don’t (aka the ones that need it, whose muscles tend to be tight).
My mission, should you decide to accept it, is to help you balance your clients and balance yourself between the two. Athletes, for example, tend to be both stretchy and strong (although there are exceptions such as some runners’ hamstrings – but I’m getting ahead of myself).
Maybe you can’t turn yourself or your client into an athlete. But you can at least get more of an athlete’s balance; if you think about it, you are a manual laborer and a kind of virtuosic athlete. There are many ways to lengthen and soften muscles, making them more powerful.
Hey, guess what you need to know and tell your clients? All stretching increases muscle power. You can’t turn a dimmer switch up very much if it’s already at 9; likewise, contracted muscles can’t contract much. But longer ones can. If your clients know this, it will motivate them to come to you.
I want to help you find the method that works best that will balance and empower even if flexibility isn’t your (or their) natural talent.
Also, all these stretch methods and theories have a counterpart in treatments, one of the many reasons that treatment combined with stretching will help improve ease and function and prevent injury – whether there’s pain or not.
Now, there are different schools of thought on what stretching does and how to do it – so drop what you’re doing and go to school for a couple of years. Or, wait, no – how about if I just simplify them for you?
Elasticity Theory and The Quick Stretch
Muscles are elastic, which means that, like rubber bands, they lengthen and then shorten. So when you hold a muscle in its most extended position for less than 30 seconds – a quick form of “static stretching” – that elongated position becomes, well, longer, creating a temporary increase in the range between short and long.
At this point, Dear Reader, if you’re the kind of person who says “duh,” go ahead and say it.
However, there are limitations to this way of stretching/thinking. It explains short-term increases in flexibility, but generally, the “elastic band” goes back to shortness when a shorter stretch is over. Weagh.
And so this theory and practice don’t necessarily lead to long-term effects.
Dynamic Stretching and The Stretch Reflex Theory
The stretch reflex theory emerged to explain this tragic state of affairs. Muscles resist stretch due to a reflex designed to prevent overstretch injuries. (Some of you nerds may remember the stretch reflex.) Some stretching, especially fast stretching, actually causes contraction, canceling out the gains. (Dear Stretchers, I feel your pain.)
But you can work with that reflex with dynamic stretches, which involve moving muscles actively (with contraction of the stretched/other muscles and added balance challenge).
Moving back and forth through the range of motion, from stretched to contracted, the nervous system lights up like a Christmas (or another lit up, non-denominational) tree, or a switchboard… you get the point). Stretch/strength alternation/combination may help your nervous system turn off the resistance.
Another Reflex To The Rescue! And Longer Stretching.
Static stretching held for an extended time, say, a minute or more, “teaches” the muscle (read: the brain) to normalize a longer length by changing how the muscle responds to stretch. A different reflex that softens a muscle under firm pressure on the tendon may lead to greater muscle relaxation and increased flexibility. (If you remember that it’s called the Golgi Tendon Organ reflex, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a dolphin sticker.)
The Viscoelastic Model and Fascial Stretching
This is another theory that validates slow stretching.
Everybody’s talking about fascia these days. I describe it to clients as a pliant, fibrous tissue under the skin and around the muscles. In fact, more or less taut fibers surround and connect every structure in the body, down to all the itty-bittiest organelles inside your cells.
Fascia led a client to ask my mentor, Irene Dowd, “What’s the muscle that goes from your head to your heel? ’cause it’s really tight on me.”
Fascia is viscous: hard when cold and increasingly fluid when warm, permitting the muscle to have a larger range. It’s not elastic; instead, it “creeps” slowly in many directions as its temperature increases.
Fascia can be reoriented over a long period and can also be broken down (e.g., in a scar) with firm pressure, which is why it may be good to integrate fascial techniques into your work. I use several therapies that address it that way. There’s a separate category in many massage places called “myofascial release,” but all bodywork, from craniosacral therapy to Rolfing, addresses the fascia. It’s around the muscle, around the bundles within a muscle, etc., like the membranes of an orange (not the skin, but the edible ones), all the way down to the microscopic individual muscle cells.
Muscle is relatively easy to change, and no bodyworker or stretch practitioner has ever released a muscle – the client does it themself, by stopping the command to the muscle to contract. By far (I’d say 85-90%), the lion’s share of any bodywork is releasing, warming, and moving fascia around. Maybe that’s partly why there’s usually a golden moment in the last period of a massage or stretch session when the client really lets go.
You need to hold a stretch for a long time to reorient your fascia. Gains that you make when the tissue is warm can fly away when you cool down (or haven’t you noticed?)
Continued passive care or prolonged stretching can reorient fascia, which, unlike muscle, is not directly impacted by brain commands but instead speaks rather loudly to the nervous system in the form of resistance and pain. As Irene Dowd used to say, “You can’t talk to fascia, but it sure talks to you.”
Plasticity
The body and brain can remodel, producing a pleasure analogous to your new Ikea kitchen or gold-and-red-velvet-with-a-huge-crystal-chandelier living room. But you need to be crafty and combine these strategies. To learn how to take my posture and bodywork classes online.
The goal is to introduce all kinds of movements that you and your client can integrate into practice. At the least, you’ll stretch, strengthen, and integrate one or two days a week. This class is for seasoned exercise/stretchers, but also for the type of person who’s been intending to stretch – as soon as you/they get around to it – since the early 90s.
Please join me. It’s fun and easy, I promise!
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