Most chronic muscular tension comes from postural reflexes altered by injury, emotional stress, or repetitive use patterns.
You can’t stretch away postural reflexes; you can only retrain them by movement education — and that goes beyond stretching.
From my point of view, few people understand stretching correctly. It’s not a matter of people not understanding stretching techniques (although it is also that); it’s about understanding what happens during stretching and why it’s needed, to begin with. By that, I don’t mean, “why it’s good for you,” but “what occurs in muscles before and after stretching,” and why.
The misunderstanding stems from people’s knowledge that muscles have elasticity; they’re stretchy. That much is correct, and muscles’ elasticity comes from the fact that muscles are made of a fibrous protein, collagen, that has elastic properties. However, muscles contain more than stretchy collagen; they also contain contractile cells. It is the contraction of these cells that gives muscles strength and it is also the contraction of these cells that make muscles shorter and seem to require stretching. Shrinkage of the collagen is a secondary limit on muscular elasticity. The primary limit is muscle tone; the higher the muscle tone, the shorter the muscle.
So people’s approach to stretching is based on one key observation: muscles get short.
The key question is, “Why?”
Muscles, Stretching, and the Brain
The muscular system is controlled by the nervous system. Muscles have no control of their own. The obvious conclusion to draw is that people get tight muscles because their nervous system is stimulating them to contract, generally through learned habit. To be musclebound is to have muscles constantly triggered, by the nervous system, to shorten.
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 — as evident by the frequency of sports injuries involving hamstrings.
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 — and the pun is apt.
In the case of injuries, stretching generally doesn’t work. The reason: muscles that shorten due to injury are kept short by a postural reflex triggered by pain and injury: the trauma reflex, which unlike the momentary stretch reflex, is a long-term reflex evolved to facilitate healing by reducing movement. The brain-stem controls trauma reflex, and brain-stem function can’t be modified by stretching muscles. 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 method for ending residual trauma reflex, until now.
Understanding Stretching Techniques
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.
Happily, a more effective way to manage muscular tension than by stretching has been discovered.
To lay the groundwork for your understanding of this other way of getting muscles to lengthen, it is helpful for me to explain why stretching works to the degree that it does.
Why Stretching Works at All
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.
The thing is, muscles work in coordination with other muscles. “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 tones and length. You return to your familiar “feel.”
No-stretch Stretching — a More Effective, not a Less Effective, Way
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, visualization, or other non-brain based techniques.
At that point, you may assume that those muscles are completely relaxed and need stretching. You may not realize that you 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 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. Better results come by changing your “set-point” — your sense of what “relaxed” is.
The problem is that your resting “tension set point” is too high.
To change the set-point requires more than stretching or massaging; it requires a learning process that affects the brain, which controls the muscular system. Such a learning process is referred to in some circles as “somatic education”. Somatic education enhances sensory awareness of muscle tension and the ability to control muscular tension; the brain “wakes up” and muscular (and brain) functioning is enhanced.
Ideally, a coordinated movement 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 between seven and eight “whole-body images” of your own current action per second — not many, if you are moving quickly.)
Cumulative Improvements of Flexibility
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 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 (myofascial release techniques, e.g., Rolfing, Hellerwork, etc.) to free the adhesion is much more to the point and less likely to induce protective postural reactions than forcible stretching.
SUMMARY
Because conventional stretching techniques have limitations, and because injuries don’t respond well to stretching, the brain-retraining techniques of somatic education are essential in certain situations. Somatic education can free muscles contracted after injury has healed and also improve coordination, which decreases the likelihood of injury.
How to Do No-stretch Stretching The Works Better than Stretching
Try the somatic exercise shown here, Beyond Calf Stretching You’ll hear instructions and see the action in video. You’ve probably done something that looks similar, but you’ve done it differently than is shown, here. Experience the major difference of a no-stretch stretch.
BUY INSTRUCTION BETTER THAN STRETCHING: Somatics on the Web
TO LOOK AT A PREVIEW of “Free Yourself from Back Pain — 9 Movements to a Back You Can Trust All the Time”, send blank email to back2@somatics.com
BRIEF:
Lawrence Gold holds certification in Hanna Somatic Education® and the Dr. Ida P. Rolf Method of Structural Integration. For two years, he served as Associate Instructor with the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training and for two years (1997-1999) he was on staff at the Wellness and Rehabilitation Center of Watsonville Community Hospital, California. As part of the Novato Institute training team, he presented Hanna Somatic Education at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California. He has also been a consultant for physical therapists in the clinical setting.
He has written and published self-help programs for back pain and general movement health for the general public and advanced handbooks of practice for professional practitioners and movement therapists.
