Flexibility Is Like Any Other Discipline - It Takes Discipline

18 Oct 2013

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Adding flexibility takes the same amount of effort and focus as increasing any other facet of your physical abilities.
Let’s flip the situation around and suppose that instead of wishing to increase your flexibility you wanted to get better in your martial art or get stronger. Hopefully you’d go and spend the time to do multiple sessions per week, likely adding up five or more hours of work on that skill or ability. But for some reason when it comes to flexibility we toss that idea out the window and instead hope to see increases from a few minutes tacked onto the end of a workout when you remember.

You know that feeling you get when you stretch a muscle and it feels tight? Do you know that tightness is your own body trying to protect you from damage? What happens is the muscle senses a change in length that the nervous system deems potentially dangerous. To avoid injury the muscle tightens up to prevent any further elongation and potential harm. Basically, the body puts the brakes on for you because it thinks you might hurt yourself

As we get older we actually end up with less and less range of motion because we do less and less. Think about it - if you’re twenty years old, you’ll have spent about fourteen years sitting down (enter school at age six and then spend most of your time at a desk during school hours and then again for homework, plus add in time spent sitting for meals, travel, and activities like video games).

But, if you’re forty, you’ll have accumulated 34 years of spending a majority of your time sitting. All that time spent sitting tells your body that it only needs to work in a limited range, that the hips only ever need to be at roughly at ninety degrees, that it’s normal for the upper body to hunch and the shoulders to round. Just like if you spent 34 years punching a bag and your body got really good at punching the bag, you’re spending lots and lots of time on reps that make your body really good at being in the seated position.

That muscle stiffness you feel when you get to a point the body thinks is dangerous can be overcome. It just takes discipline. Many people make the mistake of cranking on a stretch as hard as they can until they get to the point where the body tightens up maximally for protection. The problem is the body will actually add tension in that position to protect you more. So as you sit in the stretch it will become more uncomfortable.The trick is to go to the edge of that, the point where it’s just starting to become noticeably tight. It needs to be comfortably uncomfortable because you’re going to need to hang out at that point for a while.

As you sit in the stretch you’ll notice the body starts to tighten more and more in its efforts to protect you. Just relax as much as you can and try to breathe deeply. You may have to endure all kinds of weird things like cramps, muscles or limbs shaking, and even a slowly increasing amount of tension that you may think is pain. The body will play all sorts of games to get you to stop what you’re doing and let the muscles return to their normal length.

But if you hang out for long enough this amazing thing will happen - the body will just relax all of a sudden.Once it recognizes that it’s not under any threat or danger of injury, the tightness you feel in your muscles will disappear allowing you to stretch further and repeat the process. The hard part is that the older you are the longer this will likely take.