This post gives you my best stretching technique to increase strength, movement efficiency, and to avoid injury. It’s vital that you read it if you do any exercise at all.
My biggest fitness mistake for years was my failure to stretch. Then once I began stretching, I made the mistake of only stretching the muscles I intended on using during that workout.
No matter how much I stretched these muscles however, I found that my movement patterns were still just as limited and I was still dealing with a constant flow of nags and injuries. On top of that, my strength actually seemed to be decreasing!
It wasn't until I discovered this tip below that everything changed. Within weeks I’d begun lifting heavier weights, my form and overall posture improved, and the nagging pains and injuries began to decrease dramatically.
Many of you probably aren’t doing this simple thing so listen up.
Every major muscle in your body has a group of muscles that work with it known as synergists and muscles that works directly against it called antagonists. When a muscle is tight, your nervous system avoids injury by not fully engaging that muscles antagonist (poor neuromuscular efficiency).
So what happens you need to use one of those weakened muscles caused by a tight antagonist muscle? Because it is weakened, your body makes adjustments. Imagine the intended use muscle as being the star of a sports team. If that star player becomes sick or injured, he is pulled out and replaced by a second string player. This player can still perform the action but probably won’t perform as well or in the same way as the star player. This means a lack of overall efficiency. The body however is not a team of separate players. It's a network of nerves and joints and muscles that are all attached and have to find a way to move in sync.
A sweet picture of Animal
Your bones are designed to be moved by your muscles. Different muscles move joints in different ways and your joints are designed to efficiently move in these ways. When the wrong muscle is firing, it moves your joint but not in the way it’s designed to move. Not only is this bad for that joint but since each joint is connected to another joint and each joint has other muscles attached to them, it causes you to make further compensations in your body. If you now add weight to this equation, you have a recipe for joint/connective tissue disaster.
That’s not all though. This then causes further muscle imbalances by allowing the muscle that is supposed to be firing to get weaker while causing the compensating muscles to become over strengthened and tight.
To make matters worse, your body has movement memory that it uses for efficiency and after a bit of time it will begin to naturally bypass its prime movers (your star player) and go for the secondary muscles even if the prime mover is available. You may have to relearn how to activate the proper muscles if you ever hope to fix the imbalances at a later date.
So what does all this lead to? Usually it leads to highly predictable non contact injuries that to you may seem completely out of the blue. Things like ACL tears in the knees due to tight hips.
So how do you fix all this?
The good news is, it’s actually quite simple.
Before a workout, stretch the muscles that are ANTAGONISTIC to the ones you're going to work with static (classic 30 second hold) stretching. If they are really tight first use a foam roller and then move to static stretching. So if you're working your quads, stretch your hamstrings.
Once you do that, then use foam roller on the agonist muscles for your workout and follow it up with some dynamic (full range of motion movements) stretching. Take a few minutes to do this before each workout and you will see huge improvements in your body's movement efficiency, posture, strength, and arthrokinematics (joint motion).
If you've been training with tight muscles for any period of time, there is a chance that you will need to retrain certain muscles to fire properly. This is a whole other topic to itself and one that I will hopefully be able to get to at a time in the near future. For now just make sure you are fully aware of what should be firing and make sure you can that muscle working throughout the entire range of motion. If you can't, have someone place their hand on that area for awareness and concentrate on squeezing it throughout the movement.
Here’s to your good health,
Kris
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What a great article. You have explained very well what happens and I know I think this way, but I haven't read too many articles of people who think like me! I haven't tried what you have given before with the foam roller, but I will take your word for it and give it a try! I do Yoga 2 or more times a week and have found on top of the stretching I do that has helped. Now I can take it to the next level...Thanks!
Posted by: Holly | 18 March 2011 at 02:03 PM