I recently had a patient of mine ask me about how they can get their hamstring flexibility better so they can touch their head to their knees in a forward fold with their legs completely straight. So I thought I wanted to write about this question in this blog to explore how you can improve your flexibility.
Why Do You Want To Improve Your Flexibility
Before discussing flexibility, the first thing I want to state is that I think with all movement you want to know why you are working towards what you are working towards. If it’s just to say you can touch your head to your knees, that could be an exciting goal for you. However, you have to know how such flexibility can improve your life. It may make you feel good about yourself because you accomplished something but it’s really important to know why you want to do something and what it means to you to achieve that goal.
What You Need To Know About Flexibility
The first thing to know about flexibility is it is something that seems to be a slower change than strength changes in our body. We are not still quite sure why, but part of my hypothesis and other people in the movement world’s hypotheses are that it is due to our posture that makes it more difficult for flexibility to change.
For example, if you have a desk job and you are sitting all day, your hamstrings are just going to be tighter. In a seated position, you are bending your knees and possibly slumping. You are getting to the point where the muscles are not getting into a stretched position and the muscle is becoming shorter. The hamstring is in a stretched position when your leg is straight and you are being forward.
Although your muscles become shorter when you are seated, it is not the end of the world but it is something to consider when you are trying to make flexibility changes. The big thing I will say to this is that if you are someone who sits a lot, you want to try to move throughout the day and do some quick stretching here and there to be able to see that change in flexibility.
If you are familiar with yoga, one of the ways you can achieve change in flexibility is if you do sun salutations. It is essentially standing up and bending forward a couple of times to change the flexibility of the hamstring.
What We Think Is Going On When We Are Changing Our Muscles
In the studies, it is showing that the muscles might not actually be changing length when we are doing our stretching to improve our flexibility. The muscle is just having improved tolerance to stretching further. So, you may notice that at the beginning of a stretch, you aren’t able to go as far as when you hold the stretch a little bit longer. For a while we thought maybe we were changing something to the nervous system. In particular we thought we were blocking a certain reflex that allows a certain muscle to “relax” further into the stretch, but now we are just seeing that the muscles are able to tolerate the stress of stretching a little bit better.
That is why it is important to hold stretches between 15 and 60 seconds. However, this shows that individual needs are different so you might be on the shorter end of the spectrum and you can only hold the stretch for a shorter amount of time and notice that your muscle tolerates that stretch more quickly than somebody else. You would see this in dancers who can hold the stretch for not quite as long and go a little bit further quickly only because the way that they work their body is stretching all the time so their muscles have built up a tolerance to that stretch. In contrast, for body builders, they do not do stretches or mobility activities often so they might have to hold the stretch a little longer to notice a change in the flexibility of their tissues.
Flexibility stretching changes within 15 to 60 seconds and this is a pretty short time that you can definitely do. If you are somebody who is busy and working all day, if you could get up and choose three different stretches and do them in three minutes, that is already a great thing for your body.
Difference Between Static And Dynamic Stretching
Static stretching would look like when you are standing and you just bent forward to touch your toes because you are not really moving and you are just staying in one position. A dynamic stretching, on the other hand, is when you are walking and basically doing a kick then doing this repetitively. It is dynamic because you are not holding the muscle under tension for as long and you are cycling through the movement.
The importance of this based on research is that dynamic stretching tends to be better as a warm-up when you play a sport that involves jumping, running, and other like explosive and quick movements. For other sports, the dynamic stretching seems to be better to improve your performance. What studies are showing is that with static stretching, it tends to make the muscle not contract quite as well because strength is taken away. When you are playing sports, you want to have your full strength and ability to contract your muscles well so that you can move through those explosive movements quickly.
Static stretching is better for gymnasts and dancers as their sports require them to be highly flexible to perform at an elite level.
I tell this to my patients when they are coming to me for an injury. Further, I see a lot of people who do not know how to warm up before their sport. They know that stretching is good after doing their sport, but they do not know how to warm up for their sport as it was not necessarily taught to them. Knowing a good dynamic stretching routine can be really helpful to perform in your sport better.
We are still studying this area because the human body is still sometimes a mystery .The way that we do research studies is taking a very small population size and making sure it is all very similar so that we can control things. So it is difficult to necessarily apply all of this to everyone and what is important is to know these things, try them out, and if you realize that it doesn’t work for you, that is okay because you can try something else and explore what is best for your body in stretching.
Obsession With Stretching To Decrease Injuries
Another thing I noticed is that some people get really obsessed with the idea that stretching decreases injuries. However, it is not shown that stretching itself can decrease the occurrence of injuries. It is still better to strengthen your muscles to decrease injuries and the reason for this is when you are doing strengthening activities, it puts the muscles under more load so they can handle stressful situations better like when doing sports or even just picking up your toddler. Being able to have more strength can be really helpful.
Conclusion
The final thing I will add is that sometimes contracting your muscle before stretching it allows the muscle to stretch further. The theory behind this is we have these little sensors in our tendons and by putting more load on them, it allows them to “relax,” so it allows you to further stretch into a position after you let go of the contraction.
This is why I really love yoga because in such practice, we are contracting our muscles while we are stretching them and that is why you will see a change in your muscle flexibility from the beginning of the yoga practice to the end.
To round up the things I talked about, let me reiterate the following:
- Dynamic stretching is really great for prior to your sport.
- Your posture will affect what your flexibility looks like.
- Contracting the muscle itself before holding a stretch can lengthen the muscle.
- Holding a stretch anywhere between 15 to 60 seconds can help to change the flexibility of your muscles.
- Know why you are doing what you are doing and you will be more likely to stick with it.