2 April

You see these charts in lots of workplaces. And quite a few people do the stretches. The ideas behind stretching are really quite bizarre though, here’s another go at it. The idea that your muscles and other connective tissue get too tight, and you then need to stretch them out again. It’s like nobody stops to think, *why* did those muscles get tight? Tissue (muscles and other connective tissue) is living, it’s you. It will behave and change to match what you are doing. If you’re sitting narrowly hunched over a keyboard all day, staring at a screen, your tissue will ‘shrink’ up to support you in that hunching. If you then do a more open activity, like getting up and going for a walk, you’ll feel tightness. Because now you’re asking your body to support you in that much more open activity. So the same tissue that was supporting your hunching, now needs to be able to expand to support much wider movement. So it feels tight. Stretching it using exercises like these assumes it’s a passive inert thing. Like a spring or bit of fixed elastic. Stretch it out and hey presto, tightness gone. Except people never, ever, stop stretching. Every day. It should tell us something isn’t right about the ideas, but it doesn’t. I’ve posted before. That tightness you feel IS your body ALREADY stretching. If you just leave it be, while you go about your more open activity, the tissue will use that stretching (tightness) to change and adapt to your new more open way of doing things. It’s your body already doing what you think you need stretching to do. Here’s one last way to see the truth of this. You need to hold any of the stretches in these charts for at least 2-3 minutes to have any real impact on the muscle fibres and fascia, to begin them changing their behaviour in a lasting way. Nearly everybody does the stretches for less than a minute. It’s more a subjective comfort thing, it’s not really changing the tissue. But if you just let that tightness be there and open up your activity more, be less hunched, be more open to what’s around you, it will do the stretching for you, *all day*. Leave it alone, stop trying to ‘stretch’ yourself. If you’re always tight, it means you’re always narrowed. You need to be more open, not to stretch.