Playing With Fire #7

In Playing With Fire #5 I mentioned that stretching is not all it is cracked up to be. Let me recap this. Many people are taught to warm up by stretching. What is stretching and warming up?

When you stretch a muscle, you create micro tears to the muscle fibers and the body rushes warm blood to the site to begin immobilization and start repairing the damage. This rush of warm blood gives us the illusion of warming up. Body builders like this feeling because as the muscles inflame with tissue repairing blood it makes them feel bigger and their clothes tighter. Actors and models will often do pushups or other exercises before being photographed for it indeed makes them look slightly larger or more muscular.

Your muscles become tendons which are then attached to your bones. When the muscles are cold, they are contracted and tight. If you force your muscles to move when they are contracted, the tendon is caught between the forces of the muscle and bone. Most often, the tendon will strain or tear. Tendons, just like like muscle, contract and expand. Like uncooked spaghetti, bend it and it will break but add a little heat . . .

The greatest danger to any musician or athlete is the high school gym teacher or ignorant music teacher. Indeed, muscles operate at peak efficiency when they are warm, blood is flowing freely and they are expanded. You can't force that by tearing tissue. A better way to warm up is to sit in a warm room.

In the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, they found that stretching led to more than an 8% decrease in body strength. Researchers suggest that stretching may change or limit your muscles’ ability to fire efficiently because they are damaged. If you try to lengthen a muscle before giving it the chance to warm up, you can limit its potential to generate strength and power. This not only reduces your performance but it may also increase your risk of injury. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22692125

You also can't spot warm up. If you stretch your legs in an attempt to warm up, the blood that you are using quickly circulates to other parts of the body. The only way to safely warm up the whole body is to actually warm up the whole body. You can not force warming up by stretching. Micro tears to the tendons may feel good on first stretch but over time the scar tissue that is placed in those tiny tears will build up to become full blown tendinitis.

In place of stretching, I would suggest gentle movement in your mid range of motion. When you static move to the extreme range of motion where you feel that satisfying stretch, you are creating damage.

Just because your teacher said that stretching is good, that does not mean they are correct. It only means that their teacher was wrong, too. However, if you do have scar tissue on your tendons which will result in inflammation and sharp pain when you move, breaking up the scar tissue is the first step to healing. Instead of stretching and risking augmented damage, get a deep tissue myofascial massage and let the therapist break it up for you without you risking another stretch and further amplification of damage.