You’re stretching.
It feels great, but it’s probably not doing what you think it’s doing.
The brain is in charge of what is perceived as tight and what’s not.
Mashing, attacking and stretching at what is perceived as tight probably won’t be the intervention needed to override the brain’s decision to make the muscles tight.
Treat the cause, not the symptoms… right?
Here’s what I would suggest:
– Hit 10k steps/day.
– Have a training plan catered to your goals. *This will combat your not-very-optimal posture throughout the day. If you do not have a training plan catered to your goals, your 2 minute aggressive bouts of stretching are purely futile.
– Sleep ~8 hours/night.
– Eat mostly vegetables and protein, and your occasional carbs around the time you train or are active.
– Home cook 90% of your food intake (this would mean you probably have to go food shopping 1-2x/wk).
– Cut the blue light at night… like all of it.
Those are some big rocks I take a look at when it comes to better choices to influencing the brain’s decision of making the muscles ‘tight.’
What do you have most trouble with in with the things listed? Start with what’s easiest to achieve, then start checking off your boxes.
If you’re looking for something to help to actually help open up movement during your training session or throughout the day, read on.
You don’t have an efficient warm up.
Your warm up should count for about 7-15 minutes of your training session.
If you’re doing things for more than 15 minutes that you feel you NEED to do before you train… there might be something wrong. See a PT.
Since we are spending about 10 minutes prepping for training, and we train 3-6x/wk, that’s about 30-60 minutes of practice we are missing out on if we are not utilizing the time appropriately.
I figure it would be wise using this time practicing movements we are generally not good at, feeling muscles we generally don’t, and breathing calmly through positions that may be hard to get into.
Repetition = learning.
Instead of doing your 15 minutes on the elliptical, 10 minutes of painful static stretching, or your 3×10 external rotations with a band – practice exploring movement. Practice breathing while moving through all the ranges of motion in our joints we have available to us.
Here are some guidelines to exploring movement.
Posterior tilt your pelvis. (If the pelvis was a bowl, spill the soup backwards).
Longest exhale possible.
While exhaling, feel abs helping to rotate pelvis posteriorly AND pulling ribcage down , back and in WITHOUT losing overall height.
Stay tall, while keeping ribs down. Breath normally. Use exhale to help rotate pelvis, and ribcage.
If you apply these guidelines to exploring movement, you should feel a more efficient “stretch” while also working muscles, and learning different movement strategies without putting joints and the tissues around them at risk.
Explore our website or reach out for various patterns we focus on teaching!
You have too many goals.
Or you’re just not sure what your goal should be.
Find 1 goal. Think of a logical process of how to achieve it. Then begin. All your efforts need to be to sticking to it and making lifestyle choices around it. Effort over a long period of time aimed at ONE goal can be a total gamechanger for some.
As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The goal is to make slow incremental progress day in and day out, until we reach where we want to be.
You’re eating too much/too little.
For almost all cases, if you’re not gaining weight and want to gain weight, you’re not eating enough to support those goals.
Opposite proves to be true for losing weight.
Still think you’re eating too much/too little? Prove it to me. Download MyFitnessPal, the free food journal, and add everything you consume to the app and see for yourself.
How much calories are you eating? Try to take account for your daily activity in your journal as well.
Make small changes in your diet, one by one… and effort over time will get you where you want to be. Don’t fall off. If you do, don’t get discouraged… hop back on the gain train ASAP.
You’re doing that little jump/dip type thing to “finish” reps.
If you’re doing a dumbbell row, and you’re doing a full body twitch to finish your rep for multiple reps… you’re not training what you think you are. You’re literally doing everything, but the desired stimulus.
Put your ego away, and count successful controlled reps.
Even if your goal is strongman, you are putting yourself in a pickle when you have to beat last session’s reps and you now have to cheat your way through another couple reps to top what you did. This is dangerous and defeats the purpose of training.
Be true to yourself. Practice great technique and control your reps.