Apologies for the month of radio silence! Road life and a fall respiratory infection had me under water for the last five weeks but I’m back and continuing this series on mobility and the nervous system…

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Muscles are always tight for a reason. The reason may not be immediately obvious, but it is there. If we can take the time to discover why our body is holding on to tension we can be far more effective and sustainable in our flexibility training.

Tension is Rooted in Feeling Unsafe

Our body’s primary, essential job is to keep us alive. All of the systems that run beneath the levels of conscious thought are constantly absorbing information from within and around us, making calculations based on previous experiences, and deciding on the best course of action to keep us from dying.

The nervous system is extremely complex with messages constantly running to and from our brains and every tissue in our body. Many of the decisions about how our muscles move (or don’t move) never even reach our conscious brain. This is necessary to free our brains up from the minutiae of movement and posture, but it does mean that we have less conscious control over our muscle function than we may imagine.

This is particularly true for the ability to relax a muscle. If you stare at your biceps and say “flex”, it is pretty likely that you will get some level of activation in that muscle even if you never work out. But if your hip flexors are crazy tight and you stare at them and say “relax” they will most likely ignore you completely.

That is because the decision to tense up that muscle is made at a level far below conscious thought. That muscle is tense because your nervous system has decided that tension is necessary for stability, and stability is necessary to keep you safe. If your hips fall apart and your femur detaches and you can’t walk, that increases the likelihood of death (according to your nervous system that is still worried about being chased by lions). If you want to get that hip flexor to relax, talking to it, even yelling at it to “relax” isn’t going to help your nervous system feel safer and let it go.

Finding the root cause of tightness requires sleuthing out the reason that your body feels unsafe enough to create that tension in its own defense.

How Do You Determine the Root Cause of Tightness?

That is the million dollar question! Millions of dollars are spent every year on chiros, physios, acupuncture, stretch classes, yoga, massage, and all the other modalities that endeavor to help us with tight muscles. I have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to studying flexibility and learning from the experts and it’s clear that no one has a lock on the best ways to unravel tight muscles.

Here is a definitely not comprehensive list of things that can cause a muscle to be chronically tight:

• Weakness/instability somewhere in the body

• Imbalances in muscle strength/activation

• Over-stretching

• Inactivity

• Over-training

• Under-training

• Dehydration

• Chronic stress

• Grief/rage

• Exhaustion

• Trauma (physical or mental)

• Injuries/surgery

• Jaw misalignment

• Issues with eyesight/eyeball muscles

• Breathing mechanics

There are many more, and all of them vary in the ways that they manifest since every body is different and has it’s own expression of fear and tension. We also all have different reactions to the same stimuli, so one person may experience debilitating tightness from something that would hardly affect someone else.

While this may make you throw up your hands in frustration, it is also a beautiful invitation to exploration. There is no one way to train mobility that will work for everyone. There are tools and my job as a coach is to learn, develop, and disseminate as many tools as I can so that you can have an ample toolbox to choose from to address your mobility needs. Some tools will work, others wont.

The primary thing to remember is that muscle tightness isn’t your enemy. It is there for a reason as part of your body’s miraculous and complex survival system. Reducing tightness is most effective, safe, and sustainable when we work with that survival system, in partnership with our body.

Get to know your body. Experiment. Play. Try stuff out. And above all, be kind to your body. It is your training partner!

Next week, some info on the most common tool to address muscle tightness: passive static stretching…

Happy Bendings,

Kristina