Tag: beginner flexibility

How Breathing Affects Posture and Spinal Flexibility

As long as we are alive, we are breathing! So it is very useful to understand how breathing affects both our posture and our spinal flexibility. Many different muscles participate in the breathing process, and breathing is one of the few physical functions that is both automatic and under our control. While there is no wrong way to breathe, taking control of our breath and learning to strengthen our central breathing muscles like the diaphragm is a great tool to improve many aspects of our physical and emotional state, including posture and spinal flexibility.

How We Breathe Affects our Posture

The spine is designed to be extremely mobile, able to move forwards, backwards, twist, and side bend. For more information on spinal mobility check out this blog post on spinal anatomy for back benders.

The ability of our spine to take advantage of this exquisite range of motion depends in part on our posture. If we habitually stand and move in ways that force our back muscles to become tight and over-worked, we will find ourselves with tension, even pain. The muscles in our back and neck can become resentful and stressed out. The way we breath can either help or hinder our back’s ability to relax and feel full mobility.

Breathing Can Relax the Spinal Muscles

One of the most important skills we need in order to relax our spinal muscles is the full exhale. When we exhale all the way our rib cage drops down away from our chin and our diaphragm relaxes, created a dome shape up inside our rib cage. This big, muscular dome, even relaxed, provides a lot of support for the rib cage (called the zone of apposition), so when we exhale fully our upper back and neck muscles get a little break, lengthen out, and the rib cage just floats on that diaphragm.

Surprisingly, many of us don’t do a great job of exhaling. As I explain in my blog post on core muscles and how they coordinate together, a full exhale and relaxation of the diaphragm requires a corresponding increase in participation from the “meat corset” muscles that wrap around your waist (the transversus abdominus, the internal obliques, and the external obliques) as well as the pelvic floor muscles.

If we have neglected to develop our relationship with this group of core muscles, it will be hard for the diaphragm to relax and therefore we will never get that corresponding relaxation in our upper back and neck muscles.

10 Minutes of Breathing to Improve Posture and Spinal Flexibility

I created a 10 minute series of exercises that guide your body through a coordinated breathing routine that facilitates these long, complete exhales while encouraging your waist muscles to participate while your neck and spinal muscles to relax. It is a series of four exercises in increasing levels of challenge, each one building on the last to develop the deep awareness of both diaphragmatic relaxation and core engagement, with a little spinal flexion thrown in since this is the first direction that we want to spine to go if we are working to increase spinal mobility.

All you need to try it out is a spot on the floor and a few pillows to get comfy. No previous fitness experience or flexibility is needed to do this. It is an exercise for any body. If, as the exercises progress, you find yourself feeling tension in your back or unable to find the meat corset muscles, just go back to the first exercise for a while.

This series is a good way to start to strengthen your core muscles if traditional ab strengtheners like crunches feel awkward and miserable, or cause your neck and back to over work. It is also an excellent warm up for a core workout like Pilates, or for anything involving spinal flexibility like contortion, pole, dance, or yoga.

Happy Bendings!

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What’s the Difference Between Active and Passive Flexibility?

There are two different ways that we can measure our flexibility in any joint: active flexibility and passive flexibility. It is important to know the difference between them and how to use them to achieve your flexibility goals.

Active Flexibility

Active flexibility is the amount that we can use our own muscles to move into an end range position.

Active Flexibility Illustration

The active range is how far you can move into a stretch using your own muscles

So if I want to lengthen my hamstrings and the back of my leg, my active flexibility would be the amount that I could use my hip flexors to bring my leg closer to my body without touching it.

 

Active flexibility is the measurement of the shortened muscles’ ability to contract when it gets very short, which can be very challenging at first. Often active stretching doesn’t feel like a traditional stretch, it feels more like a strength exercise. Most of us aren’t used to strengthening our joints at our end range.

Active flexibility is essential for building strength and flexibility together, and keeping our joints stable. It’s important for addressing alignment, and correcting muscle imbalances that could be causing chronic tightness. It is also valuable for preventing injuries and making sure that our flexibility is helpful and useful for our chosen activities.

 

Passive Flexibility

Passive flexibility is the amount that we can move into an end range with help from an external force, whether it’s pulling with a strap, pushing from a coach, or gravity pressing us to the floor as it does in a split.

Drawing showing that passive flexibility is greater than active flexibility

Passive flexibility, using help to stretch, will almost always be greater than active flexibility.

 

 

To find my passive flexibility in my hamstrings/back of the leg, I would pull gently on my leg with my hands or a yoga strap, or have a knowledgeable coach push the leg into a deeper stretch.

Passive flexibility means that the resting length of your muscles and connective tissues is longer, and that your nervous system is comfortable with a larger range of motion. Passive stretching will increase those two factors and facilitate a feeling of relaxation and decreased pain.

Finding the Balance

It is very important to find the proper balance between active and passive stretching for your body and your goals. Passive stretching is often over-emphasized because it is better-known. Too much passive stretching can create unstable joints, less useful flexibility, and possibly injury, especially in hypermobile people.

If you are experiencing joint pain, difficulty with strength movements, or you are struggling to make any progress in your flexibility quest you may not be doing enough active stretching.

If there is a very big difference between your active and passive flexibility in any particular joint, incorporate more active exercises to decrease that difference. You will always have more passive flexibility than active flexibility, but it is our goal to minimize the difference in order to ensure the health of our joints and prevent injury.  FaB courses and Video on Demand service offer a variety of workouts combining the many approaches to stretching for optimal results.

 

Important Factoids about Active vs Passive Flexibility

1. Don’t let the name fool you, passive flexibility isn’t all about relaxation. When you are in a passive stretch you still need to engage your supporting muscles to hold your form. It is extremely rare that you want to be completely relaxed in a stretch as this can compromise your joint alignment and you may miss the tightest muscles that really need the stretch.

2. When it comes to passive stretching, more pressure does not mean more progress. Unless you are extremely muscled you don’t want to be pushing super hard on your stretches. Light to medium pressure is sufficient in almost all cases and more pressure can just cause tears and strains.

3. One of the reasons that active flexibility is so important is that the limiting factor in our flexibility isn’t always the muscle that’s stretching. Sometimes it’s the muscle that’s shortening. So that tightness in bringing your leg to your chest may be the result of hip flexors that don’t want to get shorter! If that is the case, contracting those muscles in an active stretch can be immensely helpful.

4. Active and passive stretching don’t have to be done separately, they can be combined. Play with alternating between the two, adding an active component to a passive stretch, and using movement in your stretches. For lots of ideas on how to do that check out our classes and video library.

Read more about the benefits of different varieties of stretching in this blog post, and check out the video below for all you visual learners who want to see these concepts in action.

Happy Bendings!

Kristina

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Advanced Hip Flexibility: Swim Through Splits Tutorial

The swim through splits (not sure where this term originates, I may have made it up but I don’t think so), are a beautiful transitional movement requiring advanced hip flexibility, strength, and control. I love this transition which can quickly and dramatically take you from sitting on your rump to laying on your belly and, with a little more effort, back again.

Below please enjoy a tutorial that breaks this movement down into stages, demonstrating the swim through both with and without assistance from the arms.

I only recommend this tutorial to folks who already have an established practice of hip stretching and strengthening and are close to 180 degrees on both straddle and middle splits. I have seen this transition used as a training tool for folks who are still far off the ground in middle splits and I’ll be honest that it isn’t my favorite. I feel that it can put too much pressure on the hips and, without adequate control, its a bit risky for my taste.

If you are still working on getting those deep straddle and middle splits, check out our free splits workouts on YouTube or full-length workouts on the Fit & Bendy Video Club Membership.

For those of you ready to tackle swim throughs, my recommendation is to start with the straddle slides and the no-hands leaning forward to pancake. These two movements build strength in the external rotators (piriformis and friends), outside butt (gluteus medius and minimus), and upstairs butt/lower back (upper gluteus maximus and spinal extensors) that you will need to successfully execute the full movement.

The most common misadventure I see in learning this movement is to heave your hips up and over to transition into the middle split. If this is you, continue to build that active flexibility in your hips with side leg lifts in a tucked position. The goal here (which I admit I do not execute to perfection in this tutorial but am continuing to work towards) is to be able to do the entire movement without lifting the pelvis off the floor at all.

As always, enjoy the process and many happy bendings!

-Kristina

 

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How Long Should I Sit in My Split? How Long Should I Hold a Stretch? Learn About the Stretch Reflex

 

 

I wish I had a simple, straightforward answer to this question like: hold your split for exactly 45 seconds then take a 60 second break and hold it again. It would make this blog post nice and short, and everyone would go away knowing exactly what to do. Unfortunately I can’t give that advice because it would be wrong and even potentially damaging, depending on where your body is with flexibility training.

The only way to truly know how long to hold your splits, or any other stretch, is to learn to listen to your body and the feedback it gives you. The body has it’s language but we are often conditioned to ignore or override its voice with the conventional, and in my opinion terrible, adages: “mind over matter” and “no pain no gain”.

 

Let’s go over what happens in our muscles when we stretch:

-When we first enter a stretch, our nervous system senses that the muscle is lengthening and, at a certain point, says “that’s far enough”. It sends a signal that contracts the stretched muscle to prevent it from going past the safety limit your neurons have set. This is called the Stretch Reflex.

-Various methods can be employed to convince the nervous system that it’s safe to go a little deeper: you can contract the opposing muscle, wiggle a little, gently contract and release the stretched muscle, do some deep breathing and mentally (or out loud) tell that muscle that everything is going to be ok.

-Depending on your nervous system, your experience, your body, it is possible that at some point the neurons will feel reassured and allow the muscle to lengthen a bit more. This is that lovely feeling of “sinking” into a stretch, when you feel that split get a little closer to the floor. It is that “ahhhhh” moment we love.

-As you go deeper into the stretch, at some point the muscle will lengthen to the point that the neurons get alarmed again, and the Stretch Reflex will kick in again. We have now entered the Danger Zone.

 

I highly caution folks against pushing your body past this second Stretch Reflex, when you feel your muscles contract against the stretch a second time. This is where injuries are most likely to occur and, in my experience, when we start to lose control of our form and control. We are also training that Stretch Reflex to go away, thus creating conditions for hypermobility and decreased muscle function at our end range. Our muscles start to lose their springiness and reactivity.

My best practice advice: when you feel your muscles contract into their second round of Stretch Reflex, come out of the stretch. Take a short break, move, feel your muscles work, jiggle them around, and then try again for 2-3 repetitions. 

You will find that over time the neurons are comfortable accommodating a larger and larger range of motion without fighting back, while still retaining their functionality. This gives us the optimal mix of strength and flexibility and control/body awareness that we need for healthy, yummy, beautiful movement.

So while I acknowledge that this isn’t the simplest answer to a common question, I maintain that it is the most honest and useful one that I can offer. And if all that comes out of this is that you get better at listening to your body and respecting what it has to say then I will feel my work here is done!

For some visuals, please check out this video below. You can learn more about what to do when you are stuck in your splits progress from my previous blog post and get splits workouts from our Video Club.

Happy Bendings!

-Kristina

 

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