To Stretch - Part II
This is part two of an educational series about active and passive connective tissues and their ability to move: your flexibility. In Part I we addressed WHY flexibility was important, and the two factors limiting your flexibility. Today we will address one of those limits in depth, how it occurs, why it occurs, and how to deal with it.
Neurological restriction is a term given to the amount of tension in the muscle that can be released reflexively and immediately. The way a muscle creates tension (in essence, shortens) is by a signal from your brain telling it to shorten or lengthen. This can be something controlled by the conscious mind or can be automatic like a reflex. When this tension limits your range of motion, it is termed neurological restriction.
“I’m so stiff from those squats on Friday.” Ever notice that after a good workout you feel stiff and maybe a bit sore? That is neurological tension and it is an example of your nervous system’s limit to your flexibility. In a workout your body creates a small amount of damage to the muscle tissue. In order to deal with this, your nervous system tightens down the surrounding muscles to aid the healing process and prevent further damage. This increase in tension “protects” the muscles, and as suchneurological tension can be termed protective tension.
The stiffness and soreness of your muscles after a workout is termed delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). However, DOMS is only one mechanism of protective tension. There are actually three methods to develop protective tension:
1) Protecting weakened muscles – Not only does the tension that occurs in the days following your workout protect your muscles, it can do so DURING a workout. Ever feel like you’re unable to squat any deeper and the coach is saying “ALL THE WAY DOWN”? That is because your muscles are tiring and neurological tension is stopping your range. At this point, you must rest the tired muscles, if even for a brief moment, and then return to the activity. Continuing exercise through a shorter range will not improve your strength through the full range.
2) Protecting damaged joints – Either when a joint is not sitting properly at the center of its axis of rotation, or part of the joint is injured, your body will tighten the muscles to limit joint range of motion. This is also termed “splinting”. This is less applicable to your daily training, but if you ever notice an injury to a joint, you will also notice the increase in tension of the muscles around the joint. Now you can be aware.
3) Protect nerve tissue – Nerves need to slide between muscles throughout a movement. Sometimes they can become adhered or scarred to the surrounding connective tissue and do not slide. As such, when the movement creates a pull on the nerve your muscles will contract to limit the movement and therefore limit the pull. If you continue to pull on the nerve it can result in neurological symptoms like numbness, tingling, weakness, or sharp/burning pain. This can also be the cause of injuries like sciatica and carpal tunnel syndrome.
These are the ways that protective tension develops. Now you need to know how to deal with it on a daily basis.
1) Warm-ups are a way to reduce some of that neurological tension. Especially with day to day training, a warm-up is imperative to alleviate a lot of tension and soreness. By warming up you increase blood flow and reduce a small amount of the protective tension and your body is able to get into certain positions easier and without compensation. If the warm-up for your workout does NOT alleviate the tension, you either need another day to recover or you have more serious joint/nerve damage and should consult a professional.
2) You should not “get tight” in the middle of a workout. This is a serious warning sign that more serious damage is about to occur. If an area is tight during a workout, be sure to seek help from a professional. If you are a CrossFit Asheville member, this is a definite time to inform the coach of the situation and then set up a CFA Triage appointment with the Stay Active Clinic.
3) Decreases in ANY stress will decrease overall tension. If you’re not eating/sleeping/thinking well you will increase and prolong daily protective tension from training. This means you need to eat/sleep/think better.
4) Hold yourself to functional Range Of Motion standards. We, as coaches at CFA, spend much of our time ensuring you reach full ranges and you must do the same. Muscles only get strong through the range they are used. A more shallow squat does not strengthen that deeper squat.
5) Foam rolling, lacrosse ball work, and mobility drills (as done in many of our warm-ups) are excellent at reducing protective tension on a daily basis. Use these as tools for recovery. Basically, a tangential force (pushing into the muscle from outside) will cause a reflexive relaxation of that muscle… this is the function of the foam rollers and lacrosse balls. A relaxing spa massage will do the same thing, but that is far more expensive and difficult to fit into your schedule.
You will battle the first type of protective tension on a daily basis when training. This is simply a physiological fact and must be obeyed to achieve optimal success. Doing so will limit your acquisition of certain mechanical tensions (adhesions, scarring). A more in depth look at mechanical tensions and the relationship to protective tensions is to come.
To Stretch - Part 1
In addition to running the Stay Active Clinic, I am the beginner program director of CrossFit Asheville. The following post and the follow-ups to come were originally written for CrossFit Asheville. Follow the link to see questions/answers/comments related to the article:
This is the first part to a series on stretching, or more specifically, on making parts of your body move easier in order to improve fitness.
First we have to understand WHY we stretch. Simply put, it makes us better and safer athletes.
Stretching makes you better - Certain positions give us a better opportunity to gain a mechanical advantage. When push pressing, if you push the bar away from your face it is further from the center of gravity and the leverage required to move the bar upward increases, making the lift harder. We are consistently correcting the positions of your feet, ankles, knees, hips, spine, shoulders, elbows, and wrists in order for you to maximize the mechanical advantage on a movement. Having your knees in line with your feet allow proper length of the hip musculature to keep your torso upright. Having your shoulder girdle in the proper position allows you to impart the most force on the bar in a push press. This makes you a better athlete.
Stretching makes you safer - The body is injured when certain tissues become overloaded. If tight areas of your body cause your movements to miss a good position, you can overload another area. This is referred to as restriction and compensation. A restriction is an area of decreased load because of abnormal tension and a compensation is the resulting area of excessive load and can lead to injury. By being in an optimal position you can balance much of the force over multiple tissues and joints, thus making you a safer athlete.
In order to know what “stretching” is we have to understand some basic function of muscle shortening/lengthening and the role of other connective tissues.
Your muscles are wrapped and threaded with tissue called fascia. As the muscle reaches the end of it’s length, this fascia becomes a tendon that then connects to the bone. But part of the tendon then becomes the periosteum, a covering over the bone. This periosteum continues and eventually becomes the tendon of another muscle. When a muscle shortens, it pulls on the bone and the joint is capable of moving.
As a joint moves the fascia of surrounding muscles is meant to slide past other muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. When this occurs, healthy control of the joint is possible.
There are two limitations to flexibility that must be accounted for. One is neurological limitation, the other is mechanical limitation.
1) Neurological limitation – Your brain sends motor (movement) nerves down your spinal cord out to multiple parts of each muscle. On these nerves travel signals telling that section of muscle whether to shorten or lengthen. If enough sections of muscle are told to shorten that muscle will pull on the two ends of bone it attaches to. If I hold my arm out straight ahead of me and then bend my elbow by shortening my elbow flexors and someone then pulls in the other direction, it can appear that I have “tight” elbow flexors. Really, this is just neurological tension. We can reduce this tension in some cases, and it can happen pretty quickly.
2) Mechanical limitation – This refers to the mechanical length/shape of all the connective tissues in the body. Joints are a certain shape, muscles are a certain length, and the lack of slide of muscles/nerves/blood vessels are all mechanical issues that can limit flexibility. However, these are LIVING tissues and as such, will respond accordingly to forces placed on them. We can change this, but it takes a little more time.
Each method of stretching for tissues attempts to account for one or both of these limitations. I will get into further discussion of how these limitations develop, what the limitations do to our training, and what to do when limited by one or both of these.
What is Movement Health?
I am often asked, “What should I do for workouts?” My basic answer is “something that achieves your goals”.
I write workouts for specialized athletes as well as general fitness athletes. For specialized athletes my objective is based on what movements they need for their competition and other movements they need for health is supplemental. For a White-water kayaker he needs explosive pulling with the arms and shoulders with a well timed propulsion of the hips. Dynamic pullups are a fantastic way to achieve this. Though a kayaker does not push I program some pushing activities to avoid overuse injury.
The general fitness individual however is looking to improve their lives… make their everyday activity easier. For this I typically do not need to focus on certain movements, but instead need to take a broad scope understanding of what their daily activities are. This equates to a few necessary ideals that each individual should take into account for their movement health.
1) You must lift, squat, push, pull, run and jump. These are the basics of human movement and you MUST engage all of these to be healthy. No amount of “machine” workouts will give you the health incurred by these movements. Has someone told you not to squat or jump because they are bad for you? Not true… you just need to do them correctly.
2) Move slowly for long periods of time. This is something I cannot help you with and is just something you need to do. Whether swimming, biking, or hiking it needs to be slow, easy, and of significant distance. Notice I did not say “jog”. In another post I will discuss why jogging is terrible for you.
2) Move heavy things. You MUST move heavy things. When something is heavy, we use a greater percentage of muscle tissue. This is NOT possible lifting something light a lot of times. ONLY lifting heavy will allow you access that portion of muscle.
3) Move fast for short periods. This goes along with lifting heavy things. By moving fast we access more muscle tissue which is not the same as moving slowly for long periods.
4) Do the above through your fully accessible joint ranges along multiple planes. This is VERY important. By avoiding your normally available ranges you tighten joints and muscles. Now, when your life NEEDS that further range your body has to find a compensatory way to move which leads to injury.
5) Do this correctly. Old injuries, sustained postures, and repetitive movements will lead to restictions and compensations in movement. Any of the above causing you discomfort is NOT reason to stop them, but instead reason to do them BETTER.
To summarize: Lift, squat, push, pull, jump and run; move slowly for long periods; move heavy things; move fast for short periods; do this through full ranges along multiple planes. If you are not doing all of this, or any of it causes you pain, your movement is not healthy.
Arch Support - It’s NOT About Your Shoes
I was inspired for this blog post because I bought a pair of socks. Why would my new Fruit of the Loom Sport Crew socks inspire a post about arch support? I was disgusted to see a new feature of the socks: Arch support. What about socks could possibly lead to support of the entire weight and control of your body? Nothing. However the marketing department at Fruit of the Loom has decided to jump on the band wagon of products that propose to aid your arches.
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Sigh...
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A commonly diagnosed problem is “low arches” “flat arches” or “pes planus”. This is the assumed cause of foot pain, back pain, knee pain, and other conditions in many individuals. The solution? Push it up with a piece of fabric, foam or plastic called an orthotic. The question is never asked “why has that arch fallen?”
Your foot is a series of arches (not just the one on the inside of your foot) that work as shock absorbers. This is done with the help of your lower leg, thigh, and hip muscles. The arches are supported like a marionette by muscles around the calf with tendons that run down under each arch like a sling to control it. Being small muscles they can only work well when put in the proper position. Muscles of the hip control the rotation and placement of the foot which allow proper contraction of the arch supporting muscles. Weakness, poor control, and tight areas can influence the middle arch to fall and the outside arch to tighten up. As a result, when the leg moves with walking, running, or jumping the middle arch drops more than necessary and changes the mechanics of the entire foot, knee, and hip.
Why has that arch fallen? It is NOT the lack of an orthotic. It is poor movement control of the hip, knee, ankle and foot. When people tell me they have poor arches they don’t need better shoes.
They need better arches. How do you achieve this?
- You need myofascial release methods to loosen the areas of muscle and ligament that have become restricted.
- You then need to re-examine the way you move (lift, run, jump) to re-establish your natural arch support.
When you attempt to mask the muscle tensions and poor movement patterns with an orthotic or different shoe you simply mask the problem and set up an environment to further weaken the situation. In my opinion, effective strength/conditioning programs with myofascial release methods are your most effective way to regain control of your arches.
IT Band Syndrome in Distance Runners
A description of how movement abnormality leads to IT band pain and how our clinic identifies and removes it.
Patellar Tendinosis in a Distance Runner
The basic mechanics of tendinosis are applied to all the common areas: Patellar, Achilles, Plantar fascia (bottom of heel), Proximal hamstring (sitting bone), Shoulder, and Elbow. Our analysis, treatment, and rehab can help all of these areas and others.
Chiropractic Wellness — The Modern Paradigm
Chiropractic theory is based around healing the whole body. This article is a brief description of wellness and how our clinic approaches this in a unique manner.
Chiropractic was started over 100 years ago in Iowa by DD Palmer. The original premise was that the human body had the ability for health and could heal itself with the building blocks to do so. Wellness is care that supports the optimal capacity for health; To thrive instead of survive! Toxic environmental factors like processed foods, sedentary lifestyle, and negative thoughts limit the healing capacity. The chiropractor serves as an assistant to optimal health. Reduction of a toxic environment (physical, chemical, and emotional) prevents sickness before it develops and this is Wellness Care. Since that time there have been many diverging beliefs on how a chiropractor can assist a patient.
My definition of health is your ability to do anything life requires, anything you desire, and survive without issue. Ever wonder why some people can go on long hikes with no effects and others get worn down just walking a mile or two? Health. Ever wonder why some individuals can be in a room full of sick people and never get sick? Health. Ever wonder why some people can play with their kids and not have an issue but others wind up injured? Health. In my practice I watch hundreds of people improve their ability to do anything:
- Mother’s with a history of spinal surgery and inability to play with their children improve strength and safety and play with them again!
- 60 yr old men who can’t get both feet off the ground at the same time can now jump on an 8″ box repetitively.
- People get off medications for diabetes, cholesterol, osteoporosis, and auto-immune disorders.
Health, that was once declining, is now rocketing towards their genetic potential!!
At The Stay Active Clinic we believe wellness is simple, just not always convenient. One must follow the three premises below which are basic, but not the easy route in today’s culture.
- You must be active in many different ways. When something is alive we say it is animated, animation is movement, movement is life. You must move slowly for long periods of time, lift heavy things, and move quickly for short periods of time while frequently utilizing a full range of motion.
- Your diet must consist of real, whole foods. Both animal products and plants are necessary for a balanced diet. They will provide you with all the macro nutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates) and vital micro nutrients (vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals) for sufficient energy, a strong immune system, mental peace and happiness.
- Mental balance and stress reduction requires a change in perspective. Mental stress is not what happens to you but your reaction to the event. Short-term stress is not a problem. Sustained “worrying” over things you cannot change creates a chronic, measurable physiological event that depresses the immune system and increases your risk for diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke, Type – II Diabetes, and a litany of auto-immune disorders. The following statement best describes how to control your mental stress: Have the courage to change things you can, the discipline to let alone things you cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The nervous system is a primary component in health. It is the system that has control over other systems. Many chiropractors choose to focus on it and have great success that way. My belief, however, is that we must address the entire movement system, not specifically the spine. I’ve found that spinal health is as much dependent on the strength and range of motion of your arms and legs as it is of your spine itself. Playing with your children, helping a friend move, and getting off the toilet at 80 years of age are closely related to not just spinal strength, but full body functional strength. That is why my program incorporates ALL of the body parts and seems a bit different from other chiropractors.
At The Stay Active Clinic we encourage our patients to follow the three premises above and take an active role in their own health. The original meaning of “doctor” was “teacher”. Our job is to teach you how to care for yourself in the long-term.
Your success is largely dependent on your ability to learn about your own body, and we can teach you that. Our services help to keep you out of pain and moving efficiently so premise #1 is maximally effective, but without utilizing the other two you will not be well. Through the course of care you will develop the knowledge and resources to keep yourself healthy for years to come.
Enhanced Recovery Program
This program is an advanced combination of the services we offer. For those needing to recover in a timely manner due to competitive deadline the Enhanced Recovery Program does just that. Read the article above for a thorough explanation.