The Limitations of Stretching -- and Beyond Them

by Lawrence Gold,

Founder, The Institute for Somatic Study and Development

Certified Practitioner
Hanna Somatic Education^®
Dr. Ida P. Rolf method of Structural Integration

• stretching
• postural reflex
• habitual muscular tension
• active isolated stretching
• tension set-point
• collagen
• somatic exercises
• somatic education
• somatics

When muscle cells contract, their muscle contracts. Their contraction gives muscles their strength; their contraction makes their muscle shorter; and their habitual contraction makes muscles habitually short and seem to need stretching.

The primary limit on muscle length is muscle tone; the higher the muscle tone, the shorter the muscle. Shinkage of the collagen is a secondary limit on muscular elasticity.

So, the price of high muscle tone is shorter, tighter muscles.

People interested in physical conditioning are faced with a peculiar quandary: They want both highly toned muscles (for looks) and long, free muscles (to prevent injury). They want an impossibility. What you can have is healthily toned muscles capable of lengthening freely.

Still, people stretch because that's what they've learned. It's what they were taught by people they trusted.

There is a more effective and more comfortable way to free muscles.

Your nervous system controls your muscular system; your nervous system is the seat of muscle memory, not your muscles, themselves. Your muscles have no control of their own. Obviously, then, people have tight muscles because their nervous system is triggering them to contract -- generally by habitual conditioning, on "autopilot".

Stretching can't affect muscle tone in any lasting way because muscle tone is set by postural reflexes controlled by the brain. Stretch now and the habitual tone of the muscle comes back soon, determined by habitual patterns of posture and movement controlled by the brain. (The same is true of massage.)

Control of the muscular system by the nervous system develops by means of learning -- sensory-motor learning -- either via deliberate action involving repetition or by the intense sensations of pain triggered by injury. The exception, of course, is momentary muscular tension triggered by the stretch reflex.

That being the case, how can stretching produce a lasting change of muscle-tension? The changes that result from stretching are therefore generally temporary -- unpredictable and unstable -- evident in the frequency of sports injuries involving hamstsrings and repetitive motion.

As a result, people return, by tendency, to the level of tension (and shortening) they experience habitually.

Athletes and dancers attempt to stretch their hamstrings to avoid injury. "attempt" is the correct word because stretching produces only limited and temporary (or, at best, very slowly cumulative) effects, which is one reason why so many athletes (and dancers) suffer pulled hamstrings and knee problems.

Clearly, whatever benefits stretching confers, it has some significant limitations. More than that, stretching has drawbacks.

As anyone who has had someone stretch their hamstrings for them knows, forcible stretching is usually a painful ordeal. In addition, stretching the hamstrings disrupts their natural coordination with the quadriceps muscles, which is why ones legs feel shaky after stretching the hamstrings. The same is true of stretching any other muscle. More than that, because habitual muscular tension is maintained as a postural reflex action (which maintains our sense of "normal" tension and posture) that is protected by the stretch (or "myotatic") reflex, forceful stretching provokes a return to the habitual state even more strongly; the increased muscular tension makes repeated stretching necessary. If one stretches themselves by pitting one muscle group against another (which is what people usually do), the tension of both muscle groups may increase -- a condition referred to as co-contraction.

In the case of injuries, the reason stretching generally doesn't work is that muscles that shorten due to injury are kept short by a postural reflex triggered by pain and injury: the trauma reflex. The trauma reflex, which everyone has experienced as the pullingin and tightening up they experience whenevever they have gotten injured, is a long-term reflex evolved to facilitate healing by reducing movement. The brain controls trauma reflex, and brain function can't be modified by stretching muscles; it can be triggered, but not modified. For that reason, once people have sustained injuries, they have commonly (and visibly) suffered the effects of those injuries in their movements even decades later -- long after tissue injury has healed. There has been no efficient, reliable method for ending residual trauma reflex, until fairly recently.

To lay the groundwork to understand this new way of getting muscles to lengthen, I'll explain why ordinary stretching works to the degree that it does -- which is to say, to some degree.

To understand how stretching works, one must first start with the recognition that muscles that need stretching are usually holding tension -- that is, they are actively contracting. The person is holding them tense by habit, unconsciously. They're musclebound.

People control their muscular tension "by feel." People stretch by assuming various positions, placing a "stretch-demand" on muscles. That "stretch demand" creates a sensation that allows the person to feel the muscles enough to "relax into the stretch." It isn't a mechanical stretch; it's a voluntary release of tension.

Sometimes, people actively assist the stretch by tightening opposing muscles. For example, they assist stretching the hamstrings by tightening the quadriceps (front thigh) muscles. This "active assist" technique triggers a momentary brain-level response that relaxes the hamstrings. This brain-level response has a name: "reciprocal inhibition". It's only a momentary response, but because people get more stretch out of the hamstrings, they mistakenly believe that they've gotten a lasting change out of the assisted stretch. Experience proves otherwise.

It's this same response, reciprocal inhibition, that's behind the idea that abdominal strengthening makes a stronger back. The actuality is that, in tightening the abdominal muscles, the brain momentarily relaxes musclebound, sore back muscles, allowing the spinal curve to relax. The straightening of the spine produces a sense of "more support" and the relaxation of the spinal muscles allows them to rest and lose their burn. But tightening abdominal muscles to cause the back muscles to relax works only as long as the abdominals are held tight. The prevalence of back pain shows, once again, that the practice of tightening muscles to stretch out others is impractical.

Muscles work in coordination with other muscles, all of the muscles being controlled and coordinated by the brain. "Active isolated stretching" works directly counter to how muscles work, which is in coordination. That's why, when you actively isolate and stretch a muscle, it soon returns to its habitual tonus and length. You return to your familiar "feel."

If you've worked with a stretching and strengthening regimen or exercise program and haven't gotten lasting benefit, now you know why.

Happily, a more effective way to manage muscular tension than by stretching has been developed by movement educators and trainers.

No-stretch Stretching: "Pandiculation"

Ordinarily, if you try to relax habitually tight muscles by an act of will, you are likely to find that your ability to do so is limited; you cannot relax past a certain point, even with special breathing, prolonged holding of a stretch, visualization, progressive relaxation or other techniques. That's your "set-point" -- or "resting tension set-point."

When you reach the limit of your set-point, you may assume that your muscles are completely relaxed and need stretching. You may not realize that they are contracting "on automatic" due to postural reflexes controlled by your central nervous system. Any attempt to stretch simply re-triggers the postural reflex that keeps you contracted. Hard stretching or "bouncing" stretching (always warned against as "incorrect stretching") is even more counter-productive; it stimulates the stretch reflex to contract the muscles even tighter. That is why hamstrings (and other muscles) tighten up again so soon after stretching or massage.

The problem is that your resting "tension set point" is too high. Better results come by changing your "set-point" -- your limit of relaxation..

To change the set-point requires more than stretching or massaging; it requires a learning process that teaches your brain, which controls the muscular system, a new set-point.

An easy, elegant way exists to teach your brain a new set-point, right out of nature.

In the animal kingdom, we see a universal action pattern by which animals prepare to move from rest into activity. This action pattern, similar in ways to yawning, commonly accompanies yawning. This action pattern refreshes the body-image and prepares the muscular system for action. It's name is "pandiculation." It's the familiar yawning morning stretch of humans, the bowing and arching stretch of cats and dogs, the wing-back/leg-back movement of birds.

It's an action pattern capable of freeing you of the conditioning that makes muscles too short, one capable of replacing conventional stretching.

Pandiculation involves coordinated action patterns. Ideally, a coordinated action pattern involves all the muscles involved in the contraction pattern you seek to free. The action sends a strong sensory signal to your brain, a signal that wakes up (or refreshes) the related nerve pathways in your brain. By releasing the contraction in slow motion, you reawaken or improve your brain's control of the muscles; performance in slow-motion gives the nerve impulses time to travel to-and-from the brain, providing a clearer and more complete body image to oneself. (Nerve impulses travel an average of thirty meters per second. If you are two meters tall, you get roughly between five and eight "body images" of your leg movements per second -- and about six times as many for arm and shoulder actions.)

How to Do No-stretch Stretching

Significant results come relatively quickly from sessions of clinical somatic education or from doing somatic exercises, and when they do, the changes are second nature and require no further efforts to stretch (although refreshment of muscular control by means of somatic exercises is helpful).

To do somatic exercises produces cumulative improvements in muscular control and decreases likelihood of injury. With the looseness that develops, you are likely to develop a preference for somatic exercises over stretching.

Some final observations about the properties of collagen: Collagen behaves something like cloth: it enwraps the contractile cells that give muscle its strength and gives direction to muscles' pull. These collagen fibers have been observed to shorten during sleep (tissue healing/regeneration). Ordinarily, this "microshortening" leads to shrinkage and restriction of muscles and movement, but it gets normalized through somatic exercises or other forms of physical activity. If you don't have some significant movement activity during your days, somatic exercises can help you keep your flexibility. You'll feel better and age better.

A similar shortening occurs after significant injury, as collagen fibers invade neighboring tissue to "bandage" the area (scar tissue). This kind of bandaging prevents free movement of just the type attempted in forcible stretching and in stretch-like myofascial release techniques. In that case, precise manual manipulation (e.g., Rolfing, Hellerwork, etc.) to free the adhesions is much more to the point and less likely to induce protective postural reactions than forcible stretching or myofascial release or massage techniques that involve stretching actions.

SUMMARY

Many people have tight psoas muscles. A pandiculation-based program exists that replaces psoas stretches. To get a free preview of that instructional program, click: Free Your Psoas. Send the email message that opens; you will receive an email message (back to the address from which you send it) with a link to the preview.