Your range of motion should extend beyond mouse and keyboard.
 Everyone knows Austin is a health conscious and physically active community, but you’d be surprised to learn how few people fully understand how important flexibility training is in order to maintain a functional and healthy lifestyle. Sadly, what a lot of unaware people think of as having functional flexibility can be better described by fitness and health professionals as more like having a premature form of rigor mortis.
Benefits Of Flexibility Training
Flexibility, defined as the ability to move a joint through its full range of motion with ease, has multiple benefits besides enabling you to squeeze into a compact French automobile. Flexibility is critical for returning the muscles back to their normal length, which not only improves postural balance and athletic agility but also helps limit joint stress and injury. In addition, having adequate flexibility helps increase blood circulation and healing to soft tissues all throughout the body.
 Although studies show a person’s degree of flexibility usually declines with age, it probably has more to do with inactivity than aging. Much of the blame is due to major advancements in technology and the increase in convenience it has given us, causing society to be more and more sedentary. This downshift in physical activity makes us more susceptible to muscular and postural imbalances. Exacerbating the situation, much of the Austin workforce has office jobs that require sitting at a desk for long hours doing tasks that require repetitive movements. This is a prime example where muscle imbalances and overuse injuries, such as chronic lower back strain and carpal tunnel syndrome, can become prevalent.
It’s also common in today’s modern world to see people walking around like prehistoric cavemen with their shoulders rounded and head slouching forward. This is typically an indication of excessively tight chest muscles caused from spending an excessive amount of time working on our personal assistant, the computer. Having this form of poor posture, or upper body postural distortion, can create a chain event of other health problems such as strained neck and shoulders, which can decrease blood flow to the brain and increase the occurrence of tension headaches—as if we don’t have enough in our busy lives already.
For athletic minded individuals, having insufficient flexibility might hinder performance by decreasing neuromuscular efficiency as well as increasing the risk of injury. Neuromuscular efficiency is your body’s ability to properly recruit the right muscles to produce and stop movement efficiently in all directions. One of the causes of decreased neuromuscular efficiency is when you have a muscle (agonist) that is tighter than its opposing muscle (antagonist). Because one muscle is tighter, it prohibits the other from contracting properly, thus disrupting the fluent flow of movement. Keeping muscles balanced and flexible can be the difference between moving like a young Michael Jordan or like a Galapagos giant tortoise.
As mentioned earlier, flexibility training improves blood circulation, which is important for delivering oxygen rich blood and nutrients to working muscles as well as removing waste and bi-products from them. When your muscles are tight, there is less blood flow and fewer nutrients supplied to the living soft tissues in your body, causing a reduction in performance and healing capabilities. Think of your muscles as sea anemones in a tide pool. When the tide is low, the sea anemones don’t receive enough nutrient-rich water. They soon dry out, become less supple, and shrink in size. If they go too long without water, they die and the dried-up tide pool soon ends up looking like a depository of dirty Kleenexes. Basic Flexibility Training Guidelines Always begin flexibility training by first warming up for 5 to 10 minutes prior to stretching to increase blood flow and to help avoid injury to soft tissue such as the muscles, ligaments, and tendons. To increase each joint’s range of motion, slowly stretch the muscles past resting length without any bouncing or ballistic movements, and then hold each stretch for 15-30 seconds. You should feel discomfort, but not pain. This is an area where the “no pain, no gain” motto should be thrown out the window; you don’t need to be Rocky during stretch time. On common problem areas—like the lower back, hip flexors, hamstrings, quads, Achilles heel and shoulders—it’s usually a good idea to perform two to four repetitions on each. For optimum results, perform flexibility training a minimum of two to three times a week.
Last, in an ongoing effort to prevent boredom, try mixing up your routine by incorporating different forms of movement that help increase flexibility like yoga, tai chi, and pilates. As a final reminder, don’t forget to consult with a physician if you have a pre-existing joint injury or experience joint pain or swelling before beginning a new flexibility or exercise program.
For more information on specific workout and stretching routines, please contact SYNRG Fitness or other qualified fitness professionals.
Rob Ramey Jr. is a NASM-certified personal trainer with over 20 years experience as a personal trainer, fitness director, and fitness retail business owner. He’s currently the owner of SYNRG Fitness Training and may be contacted by visiting synrgfitness.com. |
