Are You Stretching Properly?  

The body can be challenging to understand, especially without extensive study both academically and experientially. Most people don’t stretch properly, simply out of a misunderstanding of what needs to be stretched. For example, you may feel sensation in your low back and so you stretch it, when the reality might be that the low back actually needs the opposite and the sensation you feel is your low back trying to pull itself back together.

That can be extremely frustrating.  The good news is there are things you can do to assess your body and make sensible decisions on how to best approach your next stretching session.

First thing to know is that many issues start from the ground up, so if you missed my last blog on foot and ankle health, definitely check that out here. For many of us “the ground” could actually be our hips, especially if you have an office job or spend the majority of your day sitting. The human body is pretty adaptable which has its blessings and its curses. When you sit all day your body adapts itself to that position. Depending on your posture, the buttock muscles might become weakened, the hip flexors shortened, the back muscles over stretched and so on. In short no matter what you do, patterns will always form in your body. Sometimes the patters serve us and sometimes they do not. Even if you decided, I am going to get a standing desk, well that’s a great shift and will create new patterns that may serve you for a while, but eventually you may find that you create a new problem. There is no shortcut around keeping the body healthy, you simply have to develop a deeper understanding of the beautifully complex vessel that you are living in.

The health of your hips quite often dictates the health of your low back. Why? Because your hips are meant to move significantly when you walk and run (and by hips, I mean where the thigh bones set into the pelvic sockets). If the thighs don’t have mobility at the hip joints, then that means your pelvis will start to move instead, and that movement will occur in your sacrum or lumbar spine (low back). When too much movement occurs where it shouldn’t, the body tenses up in order to re-stabilize itself.

Then what do we do? We typically feel that tension and try to release it by stretching.  When we do this, it may feel good for a bit but unfortunately, it’s short lived because we are treating the symptom not the cause. This doesn’t mean there isn’t an appropriate time to stretch the back, but if you sit most of the day with your low back in a rounded position, you are already putting it in a stretch for a very long time, and the tightness we feel there is often a result of the body intelligently trying to bring us back to our natural lumbar curve (back bend). Rather than stretching your low back where you feel the tension, you may need to actually stretch your hips and strengthen your low back. Bring mobility into the hips, stabilize the back and you are likely to feel more at ease.

Are my Hips Connected to My Knees?

How about the knees? Knee pain is often a result of either hyper-mobility of the ligaments that hold it together or an imbalance of mobility and stability of all the muscles that cross the joint, and there are a lot of them!  The knee can be one of the trickiest areas of the body to assess, so if you have knee pain, I highly recommend seeing a movement specialist to evaluate where your imbalances are so that you aren’t playing a long guessing game and potentially doing more harm than good.

To give you a stronger understanding of how tight muscles of the hips can affect the knee, let’s look at one muscle in particular: the Gluteus Maximus.  Your buttock muscle appears and feels like it would only exist in the area of your back side of your hips. However, your buttocks actually runs down the outside of your thigh and attaches all the way down below the knee joint. How? Well the I.T band is a long band of tendon, like tissue, that runs down the side of your leg. The Gluteus Maximus runs from the back of your pelvis and attaches at the I.T band. The “I” stands for ilio which is your pelvis, and the “t” stands for Tibia, which is your shin bone. If your glutes are tight, they pull on the I.T. band which pulls on the shin bone which can twist the knee or pull the knee out of alignment. In addition to the gluteus maximus, the T.F.L which is a hip flexor also attaches to the I.T band, so this muscle can affect the alignment of your knee as well.

So, where do you start?

If you have either low back or knee discomfort, I recommend start with hip stretching. The simplified approach is to think of your hips in four quadrants – front, back, inside and outside of your hips. Do a stretch that targets the front (hip flexors and quads), then another that targets the back (hamstrings and buttock muscles), next comes outer hips (abductors), and inner thighs (adductors). Personally, I hardly ever do passive stretching, but rather I focus on facilitated stretching, which means engaging the muscles that are stretching. I find this to be the most effective way to increase range of motion in a shorter period of time. The downside is that it takes effort and it’s not relaxing. The upside is that as range of motion increases, so does strength, which is ideal for a muscle: at any length it is able to contract. A muscle that can’t contract is called “locked long” and it’s likely to throw off the alignment of your joints and present movement complications.

–Matt Giordano, aka @TheYogiMatt

 

The content of this post does not constitute and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions or concerns you may have about your health or a medical condition.