Why Stretching Won't Fix Your Joint Pain...
Why Stretching Won't Fix Your Joint Pain...
How do you handle nagging aches and pains in your muscles and joints?... Do you stretch?
Here's why you may want to consider a replacement for your stretching routine...
When we stretch to relieve pain we get some relief, but it's short lived. Typically you have to stretch again by the next day. One stretch leads to another stretch to get the same level of relief. Before you know it you have to take stretch breaks multiple times a day just to stay on top of your pains.
See if something works, it means that with time you should technically have to do LESS of it, NOT MORE. With stretching you always end up doing more just to feel normal... and all this frequent stretching comes with a heavy consequence....it promotes flaccid tissues over time!
We live in a time, where the rehab and fitness industry, has sensationalized hyper-mobility, BUT "more" is not always better, and when it comes to flaccid tissue in your body, more is definitely NOT BETTER.
Here's an analogy, do you remember the famous "slinky"...chances are most of us have at least one fond childhood slinky memory...and if you don't check out the opening scene of Jim Carrey's, Ace Ventura for the all time greatest slinky movie scene! The slinky represents your muscle fibers. When you pull on the slinky it is being stretched up to "an appropriate" range of motion. When you let go of the slinky it recoils back to its original form. This mimics the concept of elastic recoil in our body's tissues; the ability for our muscles to return to their resting position after being displaced. This is what a healthy stretch-contraction response would look like.
Now if you've ever shared toys with your little brother who tends to play a bit rough, then you know what happens when he takes your slinky and pulls on both ends until the curled rungs are straight and taught. When he lets go of the slinky does it return back to its original position? NO...the slinky is no longer fun to play with, having been over-stretched, it can no longer return to it's original accordion-like position. Similarly, this analogy of the "over-stretched" slinky can help explain what happens to our muscles, tendons, ligaments when we resort to regular stretching. Since stretching promotes isolated lengthening that is absent of reciprocal contraction by antagonistic muscles, the stretched muscles are taken beyond their "appropriate" range of motion and over time become increasingly flaccid (unstable). Flaccidness will lead to more aches and pains than it will solve. This is why once you start stretching regularly you have to keep doing more and more stretches just to feel normal.
The rehab and fitness industry give little attention to gait mechanics and treating the body as an integrated system, instead they view the body as a bunch of isolated parts. To keep your pain away for good, stretching will not help; but assessing your postural imbalances, and correcting dysfunctions in your gait cycle (stand, walk, run, throw principles) will help you restore the "appropriate" range of motion back into all connecting muscular chains. At New Vision Health we use Functional Patterns methods to make these assessments and corrections so that you don't have to get "strung out" by the fitness and rehab industry's band-aid approaches to joint pain.
If you'd like to get a better idea of what your exact postural and gait imbalances are so that you can finally get past band-aiding over your joint pain with temporary & short-sighted solutions like stretching; then click here to book you FREE Joint & Posture Assessment. This is NOT a sales call in disguise, this assessment is purely informational and serves to give you better insight into how to overcome your joint pain for good!
As always, Stay Functional!
Angela - Movement Coach at New Vision Health
