Stretching Simplified ✨

Most people stretch because they feel tight or they don't want to feel tight. Others just love the feeling of stretching. Which could be linked to a release of endorphins (a feel good chemical) and GABA (a neurotransmitter that reduces anxiety).

But when you look a little further into the stretch and see it from a more scientific perspective 🔭, it completely changes how your brain processes what you are doing 🧠. This is called adopting a neurophysiological or somatosensory perspective on stretching. Big words I know.

And I know some "yogis" don't like to call yoga "stretching". I get it. But just because you call an apple a pear, it doesn't make it a pear 😵‍💫🍎. Some people say yoga is a "moving meditation", but i've seen some of your faces in Warrior 3. That aint no meditation fam. Yoga at some point does transcend stretching for sure. But for many, stretching is what it is for a long long time and we should just be humble enough to embrace what it is we are doing. Anyway, I feel like thats a rant for another email 🫣.

So muscles are generally "tight", and they have to be. If their default setting from the brain was to be all loose, flexible, and floppy, we couldn't stand up (let alone move). Muscles are always working to pull bones into the right place to create the upright structure that we are. And all of this "tightening and contracting" of muscles to create integrity goes on unconsciously controlled by the brain 🧠

The downside to this amazingly efficient programming is that over time, because the brain is constantly seeking the path of least resistance (an evolutionary survival thing), it adapts quickly to what we do and finds ways to save energy to do the things that we do most.

Take walking: 🚶‍♀️

over many hundreds of steps, walking gets easier because our brain is adapting and it is trying to save energy 🔋. Our stride gets smaller and our muscles now do less work to produce the same result 🚶🏻‍♂️.

Essentially, the muscles now get "tighter" because it's easier for the muscle to coil and recoil from a shorter distance. The further away the two ends of the muscles are, the more energy it takes to coil.

Over time, these tight and shortened muscles can restrict the joint the muscle surrounds. Take the lower back for example. Tight muscles compress the lower back, leaving less space for the discs to "breathe". This is the heavy feeling in the lower back that so many people experience. Again, not pain, just that feeling of heaviness towards the end of the day 😤.

So what stretching does simplistically, is decompress the joint by reminding the muscle what its optimal length was before we started walking and hammering the muscles. Stretching elongates the muscle back to its original length. That is why I look at stretching not as flexibility where I am constantly striving to go further, but a decompressing protocol that allows me to somewhat resemble an upright Homo sapien.

Changing the mindset from flexibility to decompressing keeps the challenge of yoga poses well within an individual's tolerance and helps us avoid striving for poses that are unrealistic and don't suit our bodies.

I appreciate this is a huge mindset shift but an important one because it encourages a deeper feel into what we are doing. We can't just go from pose to pose forever, at some stage there has to be a closer examination of what we are feeling in the yoga pose. This massively reduces the chances of injury and aids in what the cool kids call a sustainable practice. Which means yoga that you can do today and still do well into your later years.

The mindset shift is hard, I won't lie 😵‍💫. Changing habits and attitudes towards something you love can feel impossible at times. But you shouldn't see it as changing your ways, rather seeing this mindset shift as a natural process of evolving. As we age and our body changes, we must adapt what we do.

And the mindset shift looks a bit like this....

In Janu Sirsasana (below), I used to do this pose to stretch my lower back (and to a lesser degree my hamstrings). And because "stretch" to me just meant go further and further over time, I ended up so often feeling worse than when I arrived. But last night in Laura's class, when doing the same pose, I felt the sensation of stretching in my lower back and I closed my eyes. Then I just focused on my lower back and focused on the feeling that I was slowly decompressing my lower back rather than stretching. In my head, every exhale created more "space" for my discs to breathe. And after class, i felt marvelous 😀😎

We all grow and evolve to some degree. Each day I am trying to learn from yesterday. To be a better dad and husband primarily. I try (as hard as it can be) to find a lesson in each day so I can be better tomorrow. And now I apply that the same mindset to yoga. It's not what I want from yoga (more and more stretching), It's more about what can I learn from Yoga. I learn something today, and try to apply it tomorrow. So i can continue to be better and do better (as is our dharma).

The mindset shift doesn't happen overnight and no one has to adopt it. I just want you to see it all from a different perspective. Because trust me, you can only stretch so far.

Namaskar

Zahir Akram

Exercise Physiologist and lifelong seeker.

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