Week 6 Lock Down – My views on Stretching
You may have noticed lots of articles about how stretching will cause injury. You may also have noticed lots of articles about how stretching will prevent injury, help recovery, is a must-do part of your training..…Its hard to know what to believe with so much conflicting advice out there!
Gary and I often recommend a book by a chap called Brad Walker “Anatomy of Stretching”, which you can pick up on Amazon and other bookstores for around £10. Its very well illustrated with clear instructions and advice.
Here’s my view on stretching:
A muscle sits between tendons which attach it to a bone, forming a joint (some muscles cross more than one joint). Movement is created, amongst other things by a muscle contracting, take for example, making a fist – your flexor digitorum muscles will contract, causing your fingers to flex inwards towards your palm. Now if you hold that position for a length of time you will find it becomes difficult to extend your fingers away from your palm. The muscles causing you to make a fist may not be so keen to release and as they stay in contraction you may feel pain as well as the frustration of finding it difficult to move your fingers.
Translated into simple terms in order for us to move we need our muscles to both contract and release, or ‘stand down’, relax, chill out.
So, my personal approach to stretching as a tool in my training is to view it as calming my nervous system down, so that my muscles can chill out and allow my limbs to be a length that allows me to move with ease.
I feel a lot of people feel tension in an area and try to pull that area into a position that they feel it should be in. However, our body has a natural self-protection system called stretch-reflex.
Stretch Reflex is a bit like your brain hitting pause on a movement that it feels may damage your body. You may experience this as more rather than less pain/tension in the area you were trying to gain more movement in. You have a choice of ignoring the signals your nervous system is sending you and carry on trying to reach your desired ‘length’ of movement or you can back off, allow your nervous system to settle and try again. Moving a little slower to see how much movement an area is giving you, will generally result in less pain and possibly actually allow you to move further.
I have personally learned to use my breath as a guide to how ‘deep’ into a stretch I move, imagining allowing my breath to create the movements in my body. I have found that I may well start folding forwards and my hands are only at my knees, however, if I let my body move as I breathe, (which took me quite a lot of practice and a skill called patience that I’m still learning), over time my hands will reach the floor.
See attached video for a set of stretches and my approach to them, I have deliberately moved from head to toe, as I’m easily distracted and that’s my simple way of covering most basis!
Next week I will take you through some breathing exercises that may help you get more out of your lungs on your run and also help you to recover.
Stay safe, stay well, Take Care