Sydney Therapies
AAAARGH! - A Guide To Stretching – Mar 5th 2009
If you were wondering, that’s the sound going through most people’s heads when they start doing some stretching for the first time in years. It hurts, doesn’t it?
Stretching certainly can hurt, but it really shouldn’t. It should feel more or less nice, even though it’s often a strong or confronting sensation.
There are many different ways to stretch and many different reasons to do so, the difficulty is trying to work out what’s the safest, most effective method to use. Some stretching techniques are good for the body, others are harmful. This guide aims to clarify the issue.
Firstly, why stretch? When exercising, you can do it as a warm up to prevent injuries or as a warm down to prevent soreness and muscle fatigue. It can be used to increase flexibility and improve posture, and it can also be used to improve the condition of tight and injured muscles. For people who spend all day in an office or at a computer, it should be considered an essential part of your daily routine. Headaches, pain, tightness and poor posture come as a result of deskwork and stretching can help these things.
How then should we stretch? You’ve probably been told to do it many different ways: hold for ten seconds and release, force it as much as possible, hold for thirty seconds and release, bounce, don’t bounce, hold for three seconds and release, ease into it slowly, swing your leg in a wide arc. Which is right?
There are dozens of different ideas on how stretching should be done, but I strongly believe in one particular approach. It’s essential to understand some very basic facts about muscles (which are what you’re stretching, after all) before you can appreciate why I think this approach is so good.
Muscles do only two things: they contract and relax. Contraction is an active process that requires energy, whereas relaxing is a passive process that requires only concentration. When you increase a joint’s range of motion, ie by stretching, you will force the muscle fibres to elongate. They’re elastic, so they can handle this, but if they don’t have the flexibility to get to where you’re taking them, they can tear.
The best way to stretch, therefore, is to keep the muscles as relaxed as possible. When you’re stretching, your muscles are lengthened. If you tense up, you’re contracting a muscle that’s being lengthened. What do you think is going to happen? It’s going to tear, that’s what. You need to keep that muscle as relaxed as possible, because stretching a muscle is lengthening a muscle and it can’t lengthen if you’re trying to shorten it at the same time. Confused? Just relax!
I used to stretch for about an hour every single day and felt absolutely fantastic. I had no pain anywhere, I was limber, and I could do the splits without even warming up. I treated my stretching sessions like a meditation, where I focussed on relaxing as much as possible. This was a very effective technique. Rather than staying in a position for ten or twenty seconds as many physios advise, I eased my way gradually into a stretch and stayed there for up to five minutes. So long as this was done slowly and carefully, it never caused me any problems.
Using bouncing movements during stretching has long since been discredited as it has been found to cause microtears (microscopic tears in the muscle fibre). Holding a stretch for less than thirty seconds, in my opinion, is much more effective in reducing lactic acid build-up than reducing pain or increasing flexibility. Forcing a stretch can cause damage to muscle fibres, even though it may still increase range of motion. These techniques probably aren’t the best ones you could use.
The important thing to be aware of when stretching is what’s going on mentally. You can’t expect to pull your head over to the side for twenty seconds and fix your headache. You need to take a break, relax, close your eyes, take a deep breath, stretch, enjoy, relax. Combine stretching with meditation, and don’t think it has to be anything airy-fairy if you’re a hardcore man-of-science who refuses to do something namby-pamby like meditation. Meditation is good for you physiologically, from a spiritual or scientific perspective.
I’ve described the mental aspect of stretching, but there’s also the equally-important physical aspect. Every muscle needs to be stretched in a different way, and it’s very hard to describe the simplest of stretches without diagrams (solution - see the photos on this website!). Personally, I believe that so long as the position you are in is not compromising your joints, it’s what’s going on in your head that’s most important. You can be in a fantastic position, but if you are unable to relax, stretching is unlikely to prove effective.
The main thing to remember is that joints shouldn’t be crunched, they should be opened up. Stretching the neck, for example, isn’t about getting the neck as far to one side as possible, it’s about reaching up with an erect posture and leaning over gradually. You should find that you don’t need to move very far to start feeling a stretch if your technique is good.
There are other, more advanced stretching techniques that I won’t go into here. PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) is probably the most effective stretching technique out there, and ironically enough it requires one to contract the muscles that are being stretched for several seconds then relax them to override the body’s stretch reflex. It’s complicated, and requires a partner, but if you’re super keen on increasing your flexibility, you should research it.
Your frame of mind is what’s most important when stretching. If you want to find pictures or diagrams of actual stretches, there are plenty on this website and elsewhere on the internet. You should be able to find out how to stretch most major areas, and if you use the correct, meditative technique, you should get good results.
In conclusion, stretching is a fantastic way to alleviate the aches and pains and headaches of computer use (among other things), but it is not a ‘quick fix.’ It needs to be done regularly (daily is good) and for more than two minutes at a time. Ideally we would be spending half an hour stretching at the end of a long day of computing. If that’s not realistic for you, see if you can integrate it into TV time or train travel or something.
Bear in mind that you only have one body, so look after it.
If you were wondering, that’s the sound going through most people’s heads when they start doing some stretching for the first time in years. It hurts, doesn’t it?
Stretching certainly can hurt, but it really shouldn’t. It should feel more or less nice, even though it’s often a strong or confronting sensation.
There are many different ways to stretch and many different reasons to do so, the difficulty is trying to work out what’s the safest, most effective method to use. Some stretching techniques are good for the body, others are harmful. This guide aims to clarify the issue.
Firstly, why stretch? When exercising, you can do it as a warm up to prevent injuries or as a warm down to prevent soreness and muscle fatigue. It can be used to increase flexibility and improve posture, and it can also be used to improve the condition of tight and injured muscles. For people who spend all day in an office or at a computer, it should be considered an essential part of your daily routine. Headaches, pain, tightness and poor posture come as a result of deskwork and stretching can help these things.
How then should we stretch? You’ve probably been told to do it many different ways: hold for ten seconds and release, force it as much as possible, hold for thirty seconds and release, bounce, don’t bounce, hold for three seconds and release, ease into it slowly, swing your leg in a wide arc. Which is right?
There are dozens of different ideas on how stretching should be done, but I strongly believe in one particular approach. It’s essential to understand some very basic facts about muscles (which are what you’re stretching, after all) before you can appreciate why I think this approach is so good.
Muscles do only two things: they contract and relax. Contraction is an active process that requires energy, whereas relaxing is a passive process that requires only concentration. When you increase a joint’s range of motion, ie by stretching, you will force the muscle fibres to elongate. They’re elastic, so they can handle this, but if they don’t have the flexibility to get to where you’re taking them, they can tear.
The best way to stretch, therefore, is to keep the muscles as relaxed as possible. When you’re stretching, your muscles are lengthened. If you tense up, you’re contracting a muscle that’s being lengthened. What do you think is going to happen? It’s going to tear, that’s what. You need to keep that muscle as relaxed as possible, because stretching a muscle is lengthening a muscle and it can’t lengthen if you’re trying to shorten it at the same time. Confused? Just relax!
I used to stretch for about an hour every single day and felt absolutely fantastic. I had no pain anywhere, I was limber, and I could do the splits without even warming up. I treated my stretching sessions like a meditation, where I focussed on relaxing as much as possible. This was a very effective technique. Rather than staying in a position for ten or twenty seconds as many physios advise, I eased my way gradually into a stretch and stayed there for up to five minutes. So long as this was done slowly and carefully, it never caused me any problems.
Using bouncing movements during stretching has long since been discredited as it has been found to cause microtears (microscopic tears in the muscle fibre). Holding a stretch for less than thirty seconds, in my opinion, is much more effective in reducing lactic acid build-up than reducing pain or increasing flexibility. Forcing a stretch can cause damage to muscle fibres, even though it may still increase range of motion. These techniques probably aren’t the best ones you could use.
The important thing to be aware of when stretching is what’s going on mentally. You can’t expect to pull your head over to the side for twenty seconds and fix your headache. You need to take a break, relax, close your eyes, take a deep breath, stretch, enjoy, relax. Combine stretching with meditation, and don’t think it has to be anything airy-fairy if you’re a hardcore man-of-science who refuses to do something namby-pamby like meditation. Meditation is good for you physiologically, from a spiritual or scientific perspective.
I’ve described the mental aspect of stretching, but there’s also the equally-important physical aspect. Every muscle needs to be stretched in a different way, and it’s very hard to describe the simplest of stretches without diagrams (solution - see the photos on this website!). Personally, I believe that so long as the position you are in is not compromising your joints, it’s what’s going on in your head that’s most important. You can be in a fantastic position, but if you are unable to relax, stretching is unlikely to prove effective.
The main thing to remember is that joints shouldn’t be crunched, they should be opened up. Stretching the neck, for example, isn’t about getting the neck as far to one side as possible, it’s about reaching up with an erect posture and leaning over gradually. You should find that you don’t need to move very far to start feeling a stretch if your technique is good.
There are other, more advanced stretching techniques that I won’t go into here. PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) is probably the most effective stretching technique out there, and ironically enough it requires one to contract the muscles that are being stretched for several seconds then relax them to override the body’s stretch reflex. It’s complicated, and requires a partner, but if you’re super keen on increasing your flexibility, you should research it.
Your frame of mind is what’s most important when stretching. If you want to find pictures or diagrams of actual stretches, there are plenty on this website and elsewhere on the internet. You should be able to find out how to stretch most major areas, and if you use the correct, meditative technique, you should get good results.
In conclusion, stretching is a fantastic way to alleviate the aches and pains and headaches of computer use (among other things), but it is not a ‘quick fix.’ It needs to be done regularly (daily is good) and for more than two minutes at a time. Ideally we would be spending half an hour stretching at the end of a long day of computing. If that’s not realistic for you, see if you can integrate it into TV time or train travel or something.
Bear in mind that you only have one body, so look after it
