Does stretching get rid of tightness?

This is a question that seems a little silly right?

You’re probably thinking of course it does.
But does it really?
Does it actually make it go away??

In some cases, if you have a very well targeted strategy, it may well do. But in most cases, all that is happening is that your are alleviating symptoms.

Tightness is a symptom of dysfunction.

Muscle tightness is reactive to something.

We don’t just tend to randomly get tight! So the key to addressing tightness, is essentially to look at what might be going on to cause muscles to get tight in the first place. Keeping in mind, that "tight" is a pretty crap word to explain this physiologically, but we will use it for now.

A key point I want to make in this is that tightness doesn’t mean short.

Lets imagine for a moment 2 poles with an elastic band at the top, one at the bottom. As the bottom of one pole moves away from the centre the bottom band will increase in tension. The system may recognise this as tightness, and in the real life version, we would likely feel the need to stretch. But as we can see, this would just cause the pole to move further away from centre.

This is a good example of structural misalignment on the body. Rotated pelvises, ribcages, and tilted and protracted bits and bones, will most often cause muscles that connect to them, to become under tension on one side, and shortened on the other.

As is the case of the example using the 2 pencils, the band at the top is now in a shortened position, and unable to fire as many muscle units. In both cases, both areas will probably be weaker, due to their inability to return to their true centre and move back and forth from a shortened position to a lengthened position, stimulating muscle contraction at both extremes.

Both areas may well feel tight, but point b will be mistaken to have good range of motion, whereas point a will be thought to be tight, and the culprit, even though its shortened position has just been reactive to point b’s position. But this is not true.

While point a will feel tight as it approaches the point beyond neutral (lengthened position), point b will constantly feel tight as it is unable to return to neutral.

True mobility is the ability to control a joint through both sides of neutral.

A real life example may be a pelvis stuck in an anterior tilted position-like a duck butt position.

In this case, the hamstrings are stuck in a lengthened position, while the hip flexors at the front are shortened. This leaves the hamstrings feeling tight. And what does everyone do in this instance-stretch their hamstrings!! These people will be aware that the front of the hip is tight as they look to move it through normal range of motion, but it will the hamstrings that will have their attention, as they always feel tight.

In this instance, the weekend hamstrings would do well do experience some eccentric loading (strength under lengthening positions) to stimulate the muscle fibres to contract the muscle back to resting length, and the hip flexors could do with some release work (stretching, massage), while some work was done to move the pelvis equally into anterior and posterior tilted positions.

This is general stuff though. Figuring out what got the person there in the first place is important. It could be a mechanism to protect a previous back injury or pain, it may be repetitive working or sporting positions, it may be a missing component of the gait cycle.

All these things should come together to alleviate the tightness that has become a symptom of the initial dysfunction.

So can stretching alleviate tightness?

It can certainly be a part of the process. But remember, stretching the bit that feels tight may not always be what you need to do.

Would you like to be handheld through how to improve your performance and reduce injury, without having to think on all of the Sciencey stuff (that most people tend to miss!!)??

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