Flexibility

One quick bit I will say about flexibility and stretching is that there is a lot more skill involved in stretching than most people assume. I’ve done plenty of attempts at stretching to gain flexibility with little success. I believe wholeheartedly based on recent experience and some progress in that area is that one of the main reasons I could not stretch well was that I had too much tension. Super tense, hyper tonic muscles will not elongate during stretching, mine certainly did not for many years. Until recently some movement based exercises have helped tremendously to LOOSEN up the tight muscles. While a dormant muscle cannot engage, a super tight muscle cannot stretch without loosening up and letting go.

I’m never going to super flexible, but the significant insight I’ve gained is that with looser muscles, as well as greater awareness in some of the muscles in the body that I was not using well before, the whole stretch feels totally different, and requires a lot less effort. Sometimes flexibility limitations are from tight muscles, as well as weak muscles that are supposed to move the body into the stretched position – allowing the muscles being stretched to relax and release. I’ve felt that stretching was a largely futile practice for me until I started to gain some awareness of these factors. Before, when doing a forward bend to stretch the hamstrings, my hamstring muscles were so tight that the only thing stretching accomplished was stretching the connecting tendons and ligaments since the muscles themselves were not elongating much. There can be a lot of danger in attempting goal oriented stretching without understanding/feeling what is actually happening in your body.