Stretching and strengthening?
The human body is a wondrous machine, the complexities of which we are still unraveling. It is perfect just the way it came in the package! If you impose any stress upon it, it will adapt. But remember, it’s perfect just the way it is.
We are born with an innate ability to harmonise and balance all the systems in the body. This never changes. With pain or dysfunction, there is never any need to introduce ‘extra’ strength to any part of the body as is so often advocated by physiotherapy. For instance if you have a painful knee, do lots of leg extensions! strengthen the quads (thigh muscles) to support the knee.. The theory, sounds intelligent, but is flawed. For several reasons:-
One is that the body is designed to function harmoniously all the time, if there is a weakness in the quads, it is not because they need strengthening it is because somewhere the body is out of balance, there are any number of kinetic chains (patterns of multiple muscle functions) that could lead to this effect, but the purely symptomatic approach of strengthening a weak muscle is NOT the answer.
We are all conditioned to believe ( by current medical practice) that pain is due to muscle weakness, that if we just 'strengthened' our back it would be ok. We are also conditioned to believe that we must stretch tight muscles in order to bring them back to normal.
So most of us believe stretching and strengthening to be potential answers to all our problems.
So why doesn’t strengthening help my back/knee/shoulder/neck pain?
Consider this. All muscles work in pairs. That’s ALL muscles. Imagine the rigging of a mast ship, the mast is kept straight and upright by the equal tension of the ropes on each side. If we tighten or shorten a rope on one side, the other side must become stretched and taught.
This is the very simplest explanation of muscle imbalance. Now, look again at rigging and the mast on the boat in the picture. Both ropes are taut, but which rope is the problem? If these were muscles which one would cause pain? The stretched taut and weak one or the short tight one?
Its actually the stretched taut and weakened muscle that is much more prone to pain and spasm. But because it feels tight and painful, its natural to assume that its short, taut and tight. So what do we do? We stretch it, and what happens to the already stretched and weakened muscle? Well at best nothing, and at worse it will go into even more of a contraction if not during the stretch, then sometime afterwards.
Why?
Because the body is naturally designed to protect itself. Stretched tight knotted and overworked fibres quite simply find the added stretch an insult and in response go into even more of a protective spasm.
In fact the stretched, weak fibres simply cannot change until their opposing muscles which are short tight and often painless, are normalised. This is due to the law of reciprocal inhibition, which basically means that if one muscle contracts its opposing muscle must relax. Remember if a muscle is consistently in a state of relaxed or switched off mode it will become weaker, or more prone to spasm when asked to work or is stretched, culminating in what appears to be an even tighter muscle.
A good example is the tension people often experience in their upper back and trapezius muscles (the area from the shoulders to the neck) the underlying cause of this tension is short, tight chest muscles caused by occupational postures where the arms are constantly forward and the head is often forward bent. We can work on the tight, painful trapezius until the cows come home, but until we work on the chest muscles nothing is likely to effectively change.
With strengthening, we have to remember that in relation to any stress, the body tends to tighten muscles and connective tissue, not weaken them, weakness comes from a reciprocal reaction to these tensions, therefore trying to tighten and strengthen a weak muscle is never going to solve the problem. We are trying to force strength into an area that is only inhibited, or switched off, not actually weak.
There are ways in which stretching or strenghening could appear to help, in that movement increases blood flow to the affected areas and helps move out some of the toxins or waste products which are irritating the muscle, but untill muscle balance is restored by working with the short tight muscle, (which remember may not actually be painful) then it will only ever be a temporary measure.
There is no artificial way for man to improve on nature… we DO need our appendix and our tonsils, We DON'T get weak for no reason. Its as simple as this, man cannot improve on nature, when in doubt about what is right when it comes to our health, always look to nature, whatever nature intended us to do with our bodies is exactly what we need to do in order to maintain health.
We are hunter-gatherers by nature, and whatever that entails physically and nutritionally is what we are supposed to do for optimum health. Man is not even a thousandth of the way to fully understanding the mysteries of the human body, how can he then determine what we do and don’t need? We can only look to nature to be sure.
Cheetahs and antelopes are sleek trim and disease free , their lives are spent chasing and running from each other respectively. You rarely see either in ‘training’ doing squats or lunges to increase their strength for sprinting. Their natural activities keep them trim, and all their muscles balanced and ready for the next hunt. Nature keeps each muscle group in optimum condition balanced perfectly with each other for maximum performance.
Gorillas maintain massive strength through out their lives, but you rarely see them doing bench press with tree trunks...
Overall, I believe stretching and strengthening healthy muscles is great, it will keep the muscles healthy, supple and adhesion free. It will enhance our natural abilities enormously. But when used to try and rehabilitate chronically painful and tightened muscles, then the results are very likely to fall short of expectations.
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