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Friday, February 28, 2014

Stiff Muscle and Your Ability to Move


Good video were Kelly Starrett of MobilityWOD talks about working on the sticking points within muscle and the need to incorporate tissue mobility work in with just classical stretching.  He makes a great point about "dynamic stretching" and other forms of stretching before working out or competing and that he prefers the use of pure dynamic/movement warm up.  The research has shown that you get a decrease in force with stretching prior to activity.  For the best chance of increasing tissue length, static stretching is most beneficial after activity when your muscle are at their greatest warmth and ability to stretch.

Also talking about stretching is if you do have restrictions or knots/trigger points within a muscle what benefit are you getting from continually stretching that muscle?  Think about a knot in a rope.  If you pull that rope from both sides (i.e stretching) what you're getting is just pulling that knot tighter and making it harder to break up and get ride of.  Do NOT forget about the benefits of soft tissue immobilization and manual therapy.  His idea of using Rolfing type techniques is great but focus on it for one session a day and do not over do it, which can result in more tissue damage and an increased problem.

More on regaining hip flexion range of motion at another time.

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