Stretching: The Long And Short Of It
This is a guest post from our friend Craig Mallet - who teaches Daoist practices of self cultivation through movement, flexibility and martial arts. Be sure to check him out for some great resources!
If you’re reading this you probably belong to a group of people with one or more of the following goals:
You’re stiff like a board, can’t touch your toes, and you want to be more flexible to help with life. You just want some basic flexibility
You’re into some kind of activity which requires you to be able to do certain positions (splits, lotus, pancake, whatever)
You’ve got some issues with your body that you’re trying to work out
You’re already really flexible but want to be able to access this without a warm up, or you want to do something extreme like these people
So where do we start with this topic? After all, there is currently a host of different opinions ranging from “it’s bad for you and you should never do it” all the way up to “you should be stretching for 8 hours a day if you want to classify yourself as human”. Instead of presenting some kind of binary response here I am, instead, going to break down my current understanding of how this strange body of ours works in relation to being able to move our joints through ranges of motion (ROM). This way you can decide what you want to achieve and choose the best exercises to help achieve said goal. Oddly enough some people are actually unsure on the first part (what they are trying to do) and are saying that they are doing one thing, but actually doing something totally different.
We need to start with a bit of theory first.
The fear response is probably the most important thing to understand here. There is plenty to read about online, but the basics are:
The limbic system cannot tell the difference between a realistic physical threat and an anxiety/fear-producing thought or idea– the physical response will be the same to either.
The body responds to fear in many ways, one of which is patterns of tension in the soft tissues. In the case of the threat to a part of the body being damaged the tissues will tense to create a protective barrier. This protective barrier prevents joints from going into positions that would damage them, or serves as a wall of ‘protective tension’ against perceived external intrusions (both physical and emotional). These protective barriers can become parasitic over time if an injury or experience has not been rehabilitated adequately, so you end up always holding protective tension even when it’s not needed.
This all happens in the autonomic nervous system – which can only be reprogrammed indirectly by giving the system new experiences. In the case of increasing range of motion, the experiences that need to be had are either that of strength (i.e. I am strong enough to protect this joint in an extreme range of motion) or of relaxation (I don’t need to protect this joint in the extreme range of motion because I know it’s safe to go there in a relaxed state).
Your current range of motion is determined by a couple of factors. The primary factor is your current history of strength or relaxation experiences mentioned above – have you spent many years producing strength or relaxing in a joint in a particular ROM – if not, your system may automatically label that area as “unsafe” and protect it with tension as mentioned earlier. Your injury history is also involved, as the body may have been avoiding particular patterns of tension that it has strong negative emotions wired into or that have been chronically damaged. Finally, your history of movement is also involved here. This often relates to the first factor – if you are regularly moving through particular ranges of motion the body understands that these motions are non-threatening. Interestingly, if you load them beyond their normally used capacity the body may suddenly decide (rightfully) that they are no longer safe and will restrict access while loaded. You can see examples of this in many “flexible people” who have lots of unloaded flexibility but who lack transferability of this abilitywhen their body is put under any load during the stretch. This can be a dangerous set up because if you shift your body and accidentally add more load through changing of leverage, then you can injure yourself easily.
The Stretch Reflex is a reflex in the muscles, tendons and associated soft tissues of the body. When tissues go into a lengthened position (i.e. on stretch) the nerves in the tissues send signals to the central nervous system (CNS) telling it that the tissue is on stretch. The CNS then responds by telling the stretched tissue to contract. The response can be overridden as long as there is no perceived threat. It is possible for the tissue to contract too hard and tear itself if it is not adequately prepared. Keep in mind that the stretch reflex acts both as a protective mechanism and also as the mechanism responsible for most human movement. We basically want both the capacity for the reflex to be strong and highly elastic, but also for it to turn off to a degree to allow us to relax while the tissue is lengthened.
Reciprocal Inhibition means that when a muscle is contracting the functionally antagonistic muscle group is automatically relaxed neurologically (unless there is a perceived threat). If you contract the shin muscle, the calf muscle relaxes – and so on and so forth. The stronger you contract the muscle, the more the muscle on the other side of the body relaxes – this is limited by several factors including the stretch reflex of muscle opposing the contraction.
The Golgi Tendon Organ Reflex is a second order protective reflex that relaxes muscles the brain senses are contracting too hard whilst being on stretch (i.e. possessing a stretch reflex active in them).
The Contract-Relax mechanism is an exploitation of the Golgi Tendon Organ reflex to override the stretch reflex and attain a deeper range of motion across a joint(s).
The capacity for a muscle to express strength is dependent on its position. It is typically strongest in it’s normal position, at medium length. It becomes increasingly difficult to contract properly as it gets longer or shorter.
This is obviously an overly simplified recounting of these things, if you want to go into it more, I highly suggest checking out Kit Laughlin’s book, Stretching and Flexibility.
Ok so that’s all nice and well, but what does all of it mean for our practice? Let’s look now at the different approaches to stretching.
RE-PATTERNING STRETCHING
(A term coined by neo-alchemist Dave Wardman in homage to Kit Laughlin)
The first approach we will look at is stretching for the purpose of deep relaxation and re-patterning of the bodymind. The focus on this type of stretching is to make our tissues supple, highly aware (sensory increase) and deeply relaxed. Typically, the more we can make tissue relax in a lengthened position the more it will relax in the shortened position. This kind of stretching tends to involve the exploration of the character armour and emotions, as well as ways to effectively change and eventually remove habitual/parasitic patterns of tension in the body. If you haven’t heard this term before it refers to the tension we hold in our body that is unnecessary to complete the physical task. This unnecessary tension is also typically linked to the character armour I just mentioned. This dictionary defines character armour as:
The defence an individual exhibits to others and to himself or herself to disguise his or her underlying weaknesses: a term coined by William Reich.
Everyone has this to differing degrees of character armour and parasitic tension. It is important to note that it’s entirely possible (and actually extremely common) to have high levels of practical flexibility and still have rigid parasitic tension and heavy character armour present in the body (See this article by Dave Wardman).
The basic arrangement we are looking at here is:
Lengthened tissues relaxed
Opposing (shortened) tissues also relaxed
To achieve this, our exercises should involve:
Contract/relax cues (nb: this will build *some* of the strength I will talk about in the next segment but in my experiences there are faster and more effective ways to build strength if that is your goal).
Cues that help the whole system to relax (e.g. relax the face, let the body go limp, etc etc).
Set ups that allow the system to relax even more than usual and for you to explore the deeper tissues of the body. This is best achieved through partners and props – build a safe environment so there is no threat to the body, with as many deformable props or partners involved in supporting the system as possible.
Not holding things for pre-set amounts of time, rather staying as long as is needed to do the appropriate exploration.
Exploration of the experience of the position and how the body is responding to that position, physically and emotionally, and how that changes as you get deeper into the stretch.
Advanced practitioners may use extra load either from a partner or bodyweight leverage to aid in this exploration. This extra load will also aid in the strengthening processes below, but its primary purpose is to access the deeper levels of parasitic tension and character armour – again, if you aren’t interested in this exploration and just want gymnastic strength, there are better ways of approaching it.
Being very careful on exit of the exercise to go very slowly so as not damage the exposed areas of the body and also to observe the subtle changes in the body.
People who are teaching methods that address this extremely well:
Lots of meditative practices address these issues to a degree.
Any kind of rolfing, feldenkrais, soft tissue therapy, trigger point therapy, myofascial release etc, will tend to also address these issues to a degree.
So when we see a split like the one below, we see that all of the tissue is very long and very relaxed – it is not having to support anything as the ground is doing all of the supporting work. Hopefully a good practitioner is using positions like this to explore the things I’ve mentioned above, rather than thinking it has much to do with practical mobility. A warning I will make here – it can be very unsafe to have tissue that can easily go long and relaxed but cannot support any decent load. If you are in the lengthened position and your body has a fear response and contracts strongly, it is likely that you will break things. I highly recommend doing loaded stretching of some variety along side this kind of stretching to avoid this risk.
LOADED STRETCHING
The second approach we will look at is increasing the strength of lengthened tissue. This means that we have put ourselves on to stretch and then we’ve added weight to ourselves that forces the tissue under stretch to contract and support the weight. This kind of stretching can be approached in almost the exact same way as normal strength training, after all, tissue is still tissue.
There are, however, different ways we can load our tissues up. Depending on the strength of the tissue and the leverage advantage, or disadvantage, you can use body weight and increase the load by changing the leverage by making a longer lever arm or by increasing the angle. This tends to work quite well with loaded stretching as we are pretty much always looking at increasing the angle so we will always be increasing the load as we get deeper by default. Parts of the body will be too strong for just body weight and leverage to be effective. In these cases, we can load the body up with external weights (or a partner). The Jefferson curl shown below is a great example, and I have heard of people doing these with extra load equal to their own body weight (so for me, that would be a 75kg barbell or something similar):
We also have the option of isometric vs dynamic exercises here, just as we have in normal strength training. An isometric loaded stretch would mean putting the lengthened tissue under load and holding it for time – as Thomas Kurz is nicely demonstrating below. A dynamic exercise would mean putting the lengthened tissue under load, and then contracting strongly enough to pull it back into the shortened position while still under load. You can click here to see an (awesome!) example of dynamic loaded stretching.
This kind of flexibility is what will give you most of your practical mobility and will also allow you to access it without a warm up. If you can express strength all the way out to the longest position you need, you will have no trouble getting into these positions even if you’ve only just woken up after sleeping in a freezer all night (thanks Ido for that expression!). If you are exploring it side by side with the re-patterning stretching mentioned above, it can deliver a lot of interesting insights, though as mentioned it is also very possible to build up this practical capacity without addressing the character armour or parasitic tension issues at all.
The basic arrangement we’re look at here is:
Lengthened tissues contracting strongly.
Opposing (shortened) tissues relaxed and getting out of the way.
To achieve this, our exercises should involve:
Programming that is similar or the same as we have for any other strength work.
Starting with what is manageable, and gradually increasing the load and the tissue length over time.
Set ups that allow you to go deeper into the stretch with the same or increasing load. For example, you could do your side splits with socks on with a floor that is extremely slippery. Having a grippy floor would mean that it is very difficult to go deeper into the stretch mid-attempt. A second example would be in the Jefferson curl video, they have raised the students feet so that they don’t run out of space by running into the floor when their hands get low enough.
If possible, balance in the stretched and loaded position. The micro adjustments involved in balance help to further increase strength of the surrounding tissues.
Over time getting better at exiting the position easily as your strength improves.
People who are teaching methods that address this extremely well:
When we see a split like this we see that the inner leg muscles have to contract strongly to hold up both Thomas Kurz’ body and his assistant, as there is no support points except for way out at the feet – which is at a massive leverage disadvantage (and as a result requires enormous strength).
ACTIVE STRETCHING
When people talk about active flexibility they are typically talking about the body’s capacity to pull itself into a particular position. This means that the focus is now shifting to the muscle that is in the extremely short position and looking at improving its ability to contract strongly in the short position. The first thing you find out about this kind of stretching is it is cramp city. Welcome to cramp town, population: you. You’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that things are going to cramp a lot and that you are going to have to make friends with your cramps if you want to progress in this category. If you do get a cramp; stretch out the cramping muscle – this will be unpleasant but will mitigate the cramp quickly. Some hardcore people like to work through cramps, I am not one of them but I may explore it in the future.
The second thing you will find is that the opposing tissues can severely restrict your capacity to do this. The stretch reflex in the opposing lengthened tissue will easily override the reciprocal inhibition reflex being initiated by the contraction of the short muscle, especially if you cannot contract the shortened muscle very strongly. To overcome this you will need to address the opposing tissues capacity to lengthen with loaded stretching and/or re-patterning stretching. Whether you want to build the loaded/re-patterned lengthened tissues first, and then afterwards work on the active stretching or work them both at the same time is up to you. I have not done enough exploration of this to know if one way produces better results than the other.
The basic arrangement we are looking at here is:
Shortened tissues contracting strongly.
Opposing (lengthened) tissues relaxed and not inhibiting the movement.
To achieve this, our exercises should involve:
Programming similar to strength work, as above.
Can begin to increase loads using leverage disadvantage, or things like ankle and wrist weights.
Due to the cramp, the contractions may have to be short, so you may have to work with lots of small contractions initially.
Set ups that make you use the shortened muscle to contract, rather than using gravity or other parts of your body to pull yourself into position. Ideally, you are lifting your body part directly against gravity.
To exit, getting better at slowly releasing the contraction and controlling yourself out of the position, rather than just letting yourself fall out with gravity.
People who are teaching methods that address this extremely well:
The people who are focusing on loaded stretching (above) also tend to do well in this field.
Any classical/contemporary/modern dance classes usually spend lots of time on this practice also.
Gymnasts & circus people.
It’s not the exact same position as the two photos above, but in this picture you get the idea – the outside hip has to lift the leg high into the air, the adductors on the inside of the leg have to relax to allow this to happen. The load will increase until the leg is parallel to the ground, then as it gets higher, it will decrease in load as gravity begins to help again. If his torso was upright, it would mean the hip would have to contract and shorten even further to lift the leg to the side (as the images in this google search will show).
NOT-STRETCHING STRETCHING
So the final category, and the one to avoid if you’re looking at actually changing your body, is this kind of faux-stretching you see people doing at gyms and as a “cool down” for various things. This is where someone puts their body in a position they can already achieve, and stays there for some reason. Now, there may be good reasons for doing this, such as seeing where you’re at for this particular day, you’re just having a rest there, or doing it because it feels nice. These are great reasons to do things, but in terms of increasing range of motion, aren’t actually going to change much – the small change they do invoke will take years and at the end you’re still going to need to do the stuff above anyways so there isn’t much point.
Take the image below for example. It’s possible that he’s secretly doing the cues related to re-patterning or to active stretching, but more than likely he’s just sitting there going “man this feels tight” and holds that for some time, hoping one day his extremely tight posterior chain loosens off (it’s not going to). The leg isn’t supporting any weight so it isn’t getting stronger in this position, and more than likely he’s actually reinforcing his character armour and building new pathways of parasitic tension by repetitively doing this.
Obviously this is a very simplified version of things, and not all exercises are going to fit neatly into one of the above categories. As mentioned, a lot of the re-patterning stuff will also build strength, but that’s not the direct purpose of that practice. Not-stretching stretching exercises may accidentally build strength in either the shortened or lengthened position, but often these people don’t understand why one exercise is working and another is not. How you approach things should be entirely dependent on your goals. Maybe you’re already as practically flexible as you need and just want work on re-patterning stretching to improve the experience of the body. Maybe you’re nice and supple and have good relaxed states but can’t hold any load so need to work exclusively on loaded stretching, or maybe you’re very supple, and can handle big loads but want to kick someone in the face but you can’t because every time you try it’s a visit to cramp city.
Whatever your situation, all you need to do is know what you’re working on. That way you can pick the appropriate exercises for your goals. I’ve heard many people (mostly modern yoga practitioners) talk about how they work on their flexibility but have almost zero capacity to handle loads and as a result near to no practical movement capacity, and they have lots of character armour also. It ends up in a situation where they have lots of passive flexibility and not much else. This is fine, if this is what you were aiming for. I’ve also heard many flexible people claim they don’t need to do relaxation style stretching because they are already flexible enough – meanwhile they are actually still stiff as a board (and have the strongest character armour) despite their impressive range of motion. Again, if they don’t care for character armour explorations, this is totally fine – they are achieving exactly what they set out to do.
My goal is to address all three categories somewhat evenly, and some practices will actually address everything at once – I’m talking here of ballistic stretching. If you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, and doing it well, you will see that ballistic stretching is actually an oscillation between active stretching and loaded stretching, and the re-patterning is happening in the background. You pull yourself deeper into the stretch using the short contracted muscle, then the stretch reflex kicks in and pulls you out of the stretch, due to the lengthened muscle contracting quickly under a load caused by body weight and momentum. As you come out of this the whole system relaxes momentarily due to the contract-relax reflex (as both sides have had a strong contraction). All of this happens in the space of a second or so – depending on the speed of your pulses – so you’ve really got to be paying close attention to whats going on otherwise you’ll miss it. I’ll re-emphasize here that it’s possible to do the exact same exercise and not pay attention, you may get more flexible but your character armour will actually retreat further into the body. This is a topic that I hope both Kit Laughlin and Dave Wardman write more on in the future, as it’s of particular interest to me.
As a result of all of this my current practice looks something like:
3 – 4 days of ballistic stretching per week
3 days of loaded strething per week
1 day per week or fortnight of re-patterning stretching
Only 1 day of rest per week
The eventual idea is that my practical flexibility will be where I need it to be for my movement practices and I can focus exclusively on the re-patterning stretching to continue exploring my own character armour (which is strong, in this one). This moment seems to be approaching rapidly, especially now that I actually know what I am doing and can do it with the appropriate exercises.
So, try and work out which elements your particular practice is focusing on and see if you can adjust it to better address your needs/wants.
Thanks for reading!
