Flexibility tips you wouldn’t get from your yoga instructor
Mention flexibility and people immediately talk about
‘touching your toes’ or ‘doing the splits’.
Now I don’t dispute how great these things are but they should not be
seen as the ‘be-all and end-all’ of flexibility and fitness; for how many
dancers do you know are suffering from aches and pains yet they are some of
society’s most flexible people.
Do we need to touch our toes or do the splits?
Not necessarily. In
this blog we talk about functional fitness so let us talk about the splits;
rarely during the day are we required to perform the splits so is there any
point? Having said that, it is still
necessary to have a certain degree of flexibility in the groin area to perform
acts like, well you know, use your imagination!!! So stretching this area to get SUFFICIENTLY
FLEXIBLE would be a requirement, that’s the key word.
How about touching the toes?
A little more important as while it isn’t quite a daily life
requirement with good and fluid lower extremity reach we have less need to
round our backs so much when lifting. So
once again we simply work on getting enough flexibility to make our heavy
lifting safer.
Is there such thing as tight shoulder?
Sort of. While not
quite a misnomer a more correct description would be ‘restriction in shoulder
mobility’. The shoulder is the most
mobile joint in the body and the movement there is more multi-dimensional than
anywhere else. The overwhelming majority
of western society have very poor external rotation at the shoulder joint
simply because phones, computers and steering wheels always require our arms to
be turned inwards. The other mobility
issue we tend to have is limited overhead reach. Try to get in this position as a test. Heels, back and shoulders against the wall
then lift your arms and try to hit the wall behind you, WITHOUT ARCHING YOUR
BACK. If you can’t do this comfortably
then every time you reach for that can of beans on the top shelf or reach for
the support bars on a train you can potentially aggravate something in the
lower or upper back, even somewhere in the shoulders.
So here is my gift to you; perform this mobility exercise to
help with all round shoulder mobility.
Lie on your side and place hips and knees at 90 degree angles. Then straighten your top arms and make a
circle with it, ideally by keeping fingers in contact with the floor at all
times. There is also a progression there
to help you. It’s an exercise performed
by Olympic lifters (who are not body builders) showing that there is more to
flexibility then what your yoga instructor teaches you.
Why are super-flexible people so flexible then?
To a certain extent there is just that notion we have of
flexible and flexible people; they tend to be people that can lift their leg up
very high and do the splits. These
people tend to only be flexible by virtue of their natural skeletal shape and
the way they have trained through their lives giving their bodies a tolerance
for excessive lengthening. We perhaps
can’t lengthen so much because our pain receptors kick in so early. It is also
worth knowing that with so much movement, what the super-flexible might be
lacking is the ability to control their movement which exposes them to risk of
injury. Moving on further, when we begin
to envy such movement and try to overstretch to do the same what we may be
creating is adaptive-lengthening around the joints which can have the
detrimental effect of destabilising them.
I hope this has shown you that there is more to flexibility
than meets the eye so don’t worry if you can’t do the splits and attach more
importance to good movement, your ability to get down and up in the most fluid
manner, or pick something off the floor in a very safe way.
Hopefully, the last paragraph made things a little
clearer. For more of an insight into
functional flexibility refer to the Gray Institute.
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