Flexibility -- What's happening UNDER THE SKIN?
(Disclaimer: My intention is to make a super duper complex subject digestible and easy to understand but keep in mind the subject of this blog could easily be at least 16 different PhD dissertations).
It’s easy to believe that flexibility is as simple as lengthening a muscle, and that if you’re able to swing your leg behind your head or go into the splits, your muscles must be long, and if you have trouble touching your toes, then your muscles are short.
Not so.
There’s a whole lot of different things happening that create a greater range of motion in some people than in other people, and in some areas of your body than in other areas!
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Here I will attempt to explain a few of the things that occur:
1) Neurological tolerance at end range -- this is to do with your NERVOUS SYSTEM and nothing to do with your muscles. Well, not really. It's about how the BRAIN interprets what's happening as you move towards end range. Because your brain wants to protect your body and it knows that if you stretch too far, you could hurt yourself. And pain is actually a very complex thing that's way more than just nociception (the signal from the nerve endings to the brain that something potentially harmful could be happening). There's a whole psychology to pain! I won't get into all of that right now.
I made a whole workshop on this topic!
Click on the image to check it out!
Simply put, one thing that occurs when we gain flexibility through regular stretching like in our yoga practice isn't that anything changes in the tissues such as the muscles, tendons, or fascia. It's just that our nervous system and brain get more comfortable with moving towards that end range, because it learns over time that it's not harmful.
So, practice and all is coming. Or, practice and neurological tolerance at end range is coming :-)
2) Viscoelasticity -- this is part of what you feel when you're able to go deeper into your forward fold at the end of a yoga class than you were at the beginning (as well as Glide—see 3) Sometimes we refer to it as "the muscles getting warmer" and it's the idea that as we warm our muscles up, they become more supple. But then what happens? You leave the yoga class, have a night's sleep, and you're back to where you were before that yoga class, right? That is, in part, because of this viscoelasticity.
Let me explain: the term viscoelasticity comes from two words: viscosity, and elasticity.
Viscosity refers to the myofascia becoming more supple through movement and heat. Think about silly putty or play dough, which is stiff when you first pick it up cold, but becomes softer and more malleable as you gently stretch it and warm it up.
Elasticity refers to the myofascia's ability to be deformed (stretched) and then return to its shape, like a rubber band.
Our body's elasticity is what allows us to bounce, switch directions, run, and jump. Think about that rubber band which can be stretched, but then always bounces back to its original length.
So, you can think of viscoelasticity as being how fast or slow our tissues are deformed/stretched and how fast or slow they return to their original shape.
Training our viscoelasticity is something we do when we go though a surya namaskar, for example, where we move between opposing postures (forward folds and back bends) at a rate of about one movement per breath, or somewhere between 2-30 seconds per posture.
We can also train our viscoelasticity with much faster movements, like explosive jumping and other movements that occur in less than a second. This is something we don't really do in yoga, but we as humans need it! If you’re like me and yoga is your only regular form of movement, then you may be glad to know that this form of training will appear in many of the YouTube classes I’m going to film soon.
3) GLIDE, both of the myofascia and the nerves -- this refers to the ability for the tissues to move around with minimal friction.
Think about if you tried to give your loved one a nice back massage without oil, and then you add some oil to your hands and suddenly there's a smooth glide that enhances the massage experience for that lucky person.
It's similar in the body. Under your skin, before you get to bone, the body is a tightly packed sac of muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and fascia which wraps around it all. There's no space between all that stuff! They're crammed together! And as you move, those things need to be able to glide smoothly. The greater the glide, the better it feels ;-)
So, how to promote glide? Move regularly! Movement is what lubricates the extra cellular matrix (basically the gooey stuff between the cells). But specifically, move in a way that gets
A) the muscles that cross one joint, and
B) their neighbouring muscles that cross multiple joints, to move synergistically.
Sounds complicated? I’ll be including it in my upcoming YouTube videos so you’ll see what I mean!
For now, just think about moving in as many different ways as you can! (Yoga is great for this, especially styles such as vinyasa that allow for creativity of movement.) And stay hydrated!
4) Remodelling -- this is what you see when people post those "2 years ago / Today" photos showing how much more flexible they've become. This is because the myofascia is constantly changing as we move…and as we DON’T move. Constantly. So repetitive movements and postures send what's called a piezo-electric charge — let’s think of it as a signal — that tells the cells to change.
We dictate how this remodelling happens by training the plasticity of the myofascia. Plasticity, in the realm of stretching for greater flexibility, refers to stressing a tissue beyond the point of elasticity (remember that’s where it bounces back to its original shape) so that the cells augment the intercellular elements of that area.
Most important thing to know about this:
it takes TIME.
You won't see these changes in a week or two -- think more like a year or two.
But again, THANK your body that it takes this long! If your body changed permanently overnight, then we'd have a lot of work to do every morning getting out of bed to get our bodies ready to walk and sit and stand again!
So, how to train plasticity? This is often what we do in our yoga practice through holding postures under load for 30 - 60 seconds, especially if we're working into our ACTIVE range of motion i.e keeping the muscles engaged as we move them towards end range.
Another thing to keep in mind when working into plasticity is that you've got lines of tension through the body, connecting your head to your toes! That means tightness in your hamstrings might not be alleviated by stretching your hamstrings alone -- rather you could benefit from stretching the whole superficial backline of the myofascia.
If I've lost you, don't worry! I've got some YouTube videos coming up soon where I'll flow with you through these lines!
There are many more things that go into flexibility than just these things, and that's not even taking into account all the individual differences between our own unique bodies (any geneticists out there want to join the conversation?!)
But the important thing to remember, no matter who you are, is that REGULAR MOVEMENT is the best thing you can do for your body in terms of flexibility, strength, and mobility, and to move in a variety of ways! Change it up!