Why Should You Stretch? (part 1)

I used to be very flexible. These days, it’s a slow grind to get my hands to the floor in a forward bend.

I’ve lost the ability I had as a dancer to bust out a middle split, cold,  anytime or place, provided I’m wearing stretchy pants (and I’m ALWAYS wearing stretchy pants because I made excellent career choices).

I don’t consider myself to be flexible anymore, and you know what? I’ve never felt better.

Ironically, most people think they need to stretch more to get out of pain. Or that being flexible is a universal goal. But the stiffer I get, the less pain I have.

So what’s that about, huh??

Flexibility doesn’t make you a better person

I’ve spent months and years worth of hours of my life stretching to get more flexible, and all I got was injured, tight, and fragile (that should be on a T-shirt.)

But it wouldn’t be completely accurate to blame my problems on stretching. The fact is I made pretty bad life choices. Excessive, mindless stretching just happened to be a symptom of my complete lack of respect for and awareness of my body.

I pushed through pain, performed through injuries, and I lived in fear that if I ever stopped stretching my dance career would end. Which was again ironic, because I wanted to quit dance when I was 15 but just couldn’t seem to let go…

Anyway, flexible as I was, I was trapped in my body. Shackled by the constant tightness you know probably all too well if you are as obsessed with stretching as I was. A tightness that only seems to be relieved by stretching more. A tightness which, ironically, is your body’s way of asking you to stop stretching it.

I’ve learned that my body feels much better when I don’t stretch it when I’m less flexible. So I don’t stretch anymore because I like to think I’m not a complete idiot.

This is part one of a blog series about why stretching and flexibility are not the ultimate pain panacea. Part one is a bit of a rambly, ranty thing about the traditional paradigm: “If it hurts, if it’s tight, stretch it”.

Beyond mobility and stability: Harmony

In 2015, I decided to try elimitating the words “mobility” and “stability” from my vocabulary to see if I could define everything the body did in terms of actual anatomical motion. It was an awkward, challenging year (probably for my clients, too…).

How is that body part moving? In what direction? Is it moving too much? Too little? Too fast? Too slow? I wasn’t focused on muscles, I was looking only at joint motion, which was a big paradigm shift after taking the Anatomy in Motion 6 day immersion course in 2015.

The reason why I started this vocab change was because the words no longer seemed useful to describe an experience the body is having.

Stability implies no motion. Mobility implies movement. But in the body, nothing is ever not moving. Everything is always moving, just in different ratios, relationships, and timings with other body parts.

When something is actually NOT able to move- true stability- there is problem. For example if your knee actually can’t bend and is stuck straight. That’s a stable knee. But that’s a problem.

Knees have to be able bend for us to walk. But we want to get it to bend in a way that is meaningful for the rest of the body. With the right timing, and ratios of motion in relation to the other body parts, not just by doing a mindless leg curl, inconsiderate of what every other joint in the body should be doing when the knee bends.

So is stability a good goal? Not in the true sense of the word. Is mobility a good goal? It depends on how the thing is moving, in relation to the entire system.

To me, a better word is harmony. Or order.

I don’t want my body to be mobile just for the sake of mobility, because Kelly Starrett said you should want to be a supple leopard.

I want my body to move harmoniously, in an orderly way. This goes beyond mobility and stability. Beyond flexibility. This is a unique state for each one of us.

Am I over-thinking? I don’t think I’m thinking enough…

Flexibility is not a universal pain solution

One of my mentors, Chris Sritharan (Anatomy in Motion instructor) once said that there are 4 ways we can use a body part:

• Overuse
• Underuse
• Misuse
• Disuse

Do stretching address any of these? Not really… (but over-stretching a muscle that doesn’t need to be stretched falls into the “misuse” category).

I hear people say stuff like this constantly:

“I should stretch more.”

“I never stretch, that’s probably why my body feels so tight all the time.”

“I do always do hip stretches, by they just keep tightening back up.”

“My neck hurts *goes on Youtube to look for neck stretches*”

Sound familiar?

Back in my pre-thinking days (I consider age 22 to be when I officially started trying to use my frontal cortex for inquisitive thought), my left hamstring felt really “tight”, so I stretched it daily, really hard.

A few months later I strained my left hamstring while I was stretching in jazz class warm-up one day. Injured while warming up… The irony. Well, I was only doing what I thought was right based on the information I had.

I thought stretching would set me free. Make me a better dancer. Make my tightness go away. Make me a better person, even (if only I could do deeper splits, everyone will admire me and I’ll be a big success! Nope…).

Can we stretch my shoulder?

A few years ago, a client came in saying that his shoulder felt “tight”, and, “can we do some stretching for it?”.

I had to take a breath and collect myself. A part of me wanted to say, “No we cannot stretch your GD shoulder because the problem isn’t your shoulder, it’s that ankle sprain you keep denying is a problem!!”.

But I didn’t… Because I like having clients that support my ability to pay my rent.

His shoulder didn’t  actually need to be stretched per se, because the muscles were already in a lengthened state in the area he had discomfort- That spot actually needed to be shortened to take the tension out, not put more tension in by tugging on it more.

But, because I try to be diplomatic, we did a thing that I told him was a “stretch”, and afterwards, when the sore spot felt better, I explained to him how it wasn’t actually a stretch and why it worked (it was a whole body lunge-type-movement to get his foot to pronate, disguised as a shoulder stretch).

How the traditional stretching-makes-everything-better paradigm fails

A client I used to see many years ago would come in every week with low-grade back pain that she describes as tightness. In her words, “it’s fine because I just stretch it out with yoga.”

To which I wanted to ask if yoga “works”, then why do you show up every week with the same old back pain? But I didn’t… Because it was a time in my life that I was financially insecure and was terrified of losing a client by asking potentially provocative questions like this.

My point is that stretching a muscle doesn’t necessarily teach that muscle anything. To again quote Chris Sritharan (aka #sritho):

“We’re not trying to stretch a muscle, we’re trying to give it something to do.”

What do muscles do? Manage joint motion: Joints act, muscles react.

If flexibility and stretching were the solution to the body’s problems, then contortionists, dancers, and circus performers would never have issues. Ever. But they do. Lots of ’em. Explain that for me with stretching logic.

I think a big problem is that most of us look for a solution too quickly when we should take the time to ask better questions.

Asking questions like, “why is it tight?”, instead of “what stretches should I do?”.

In fact, this blog post was born from my feeling completely insufficient at the art and science of asking questions.

Questions help us see facts. “My neck feels tight”, isn’t a fact, it’s a subjective experience.

“Tightness means I should stretch”, isn’t a fact. It’s a belief.

Well, that’s enough of a ranty primer for part one. In part two (and probably three) we’ll go deeper….

What are the questions we need to ask to get the facts we need to go beyond stretching?

What ARE the facts we need?

What do I mean by harmony and order? (hint: gait mechanics)

If not stretching, what SHOULD we do?

How is stretching different than eccentric loading? (hint: center of mass management)

“But Monika, I hear you talking about feeling stretches all the time in your classes… I’m confused.” Me too! It’s a good way to be. It means there’s something to learn 🙂

Stay tuned!

Until then, may you have the courage to stop compulsively stretching your tight spots, and the curiosity to wonder, “why is it tight?” in the first place.