I am certainly not against stretching, and some people do need it. Especially if they’ve been sitting for the majority of their lives at a desk with very little activity. They may indeed need to stretch a bit more.
But, there are also really bendy people who have loads of range of motion and nearly have their leg behind the head and report feeling ‘tight’ and ‘stiff’. Whilst many can’t even get their leg close to 90 degrees in the air when lying on their back.
Others say they used to be so limber and flexible, and now they are stiff as boots.
So what gives?
They could all probably do with a lot more strength!
As we age, muscles get tighter, tendons and ligaments become less flexible, and our bodies take longer to heal from injury.
At the end of the day, we just want to be pain-free and able to do the things in life we want to do. Whether it is going for a run, picking up your child, or carrying the groceries.
Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) has been an incredibly popular concept in the fitness world in recent years. It has great insights and applicable uses. The focus is on improving mobility, which is defined as strength and control to expand upon the range of motion and overall joint health.
Range of motion is a different conversation that has many factors, most of which are not tissue related and more joint specific. But to move a muscle through its range of motion with control (mobility), you need strength.
Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs) are one of the basic principles of the FRC system. Adding this into your routine can be a great assessment tool and game changer to how you think about warming up your joints.
Walk into most yoga classes and you will see really ‘bendy’ people. I’m going to generalize here, but it’s often the bendy ones that need more strength in their life and the powerlifting ones that need a bit more stretching. Yin and yang I say!
I am a product of this more inherently ‘bendy’ population, and after years of yoga and lots of forward bending and stretching, I injured myself from over-stretching and too little strength! It was only after incorporating more specific strengthening of my hamstrings that I was able to finally get rid of this nagging pain in my lower butt cheek. I know I am not alone on this. Stretching my way out of it was not helping, and possibly only making the situation a lot worse.
We have something called a ‘stretch reflex’. It is a response to stretching within a muscle and activates to prevent tearing our muscles or tendon or ligaments. However, the more we stretch the more we can build up a tolerance to the sensation of pulling in our muscles and over-ride this.
So, static stretching can ‘feel’ good, it’s an analgesic. And for a few hours after stretching, we can feel like we have more length and freedom of movement. But it is short-term and wears off. Static stretching alone will not help you achieve long-term success.
For long-term gains, you need control over a range of movements and strength for your body and nervous system to ‘trust’ you into that range.
A lot of times, chronically tight muscles are tight because they are weak. By increasing the strength of the muscles you increase the efficiency and reduce unnecessary overloading which will help reduce that ‘tight and stiff’ sensation.
Eccentric strengthening in particular has been proven to increase muscle length. Strong evidence shows that it can increase the length of the muscle fibers, improve joint range of motion, improve muscle strength, and reduce injury risk.
