Over stretching is counter productive to training, exercise and sports
Athletes and most stretching practitioners, are still over stretching which is terrible considering what we know about tonus. If you don’t know what tonus is (like my spell check right now), you are probably over stretching! Unfortunately, over stretching is woven into the fabric of athletic and competitive training.
This mindset needs to change to improve competition and reduce injuries but the old fashioned mentality of pushing a muscle to its farthest length is still around. That’s why it hurts when you stretch too far, because your body is telling you not to do it that way! Welcome to Tonus, the muscles continuous passive and partial contractions to a muscle when at rest, just to hold the body together whether sitting, standing or lying down.
In our Blog Post titled What is Your Behavioral DNA Response to Stress and How to Control It we discuss the term tensegrity. On a macro level, every part of the body is interconnected. Pressure in one area creates a response in the others. On a micro level, the muscles, fascia and nerves have the similar interconnectedness.
Human Muscle Resting Tone (HRMT) has built into it a passive resistance to stretch and contributes to the structural stability of the entire musculoskeletal system. Your sensory organs are sending millions of signals to the brain all the time and many of them are relating to the position your body is in.
When a part of your body starts to fall out of alignment, the sensory organs send that signal and the brain sends a corresponding motor signal to the muscles of the body to correct that issue. This is the biotensegrity system of the body. The HRMT and it’s integration with the other passive fascial and ligamentous tensional networks of the body.
Nature is frugal and man’s adaptations to gravitational forces and erect postures seemingly evolved mechanisms in skeletal muscle tissues to economically enhance stability. Normal passive muscle tone helps to maintain relaxed standing body posture with minimally increased energy costs…
Stretching On Demand
Our On Demand Video Library has hundreds of stretches for every part of your body. There are 5, 10 and 15 minute stretches, full body routines, sport specific and injury focused stretches. Our Stretch Education section teaches you about your body and the benefits stretching has to fight stress and anxiety.