Forget the Splits Focus on Mobility and Strength.
It’s heartening to see that ‘Scientists are questioning whether stretching is as essential as we think”.
Since studying Professor Stuart Mc Gill’s work on Low Back Disorders, I have changed my approach to exercise. I used to be a fan of yoga for all. However, I have come to see how a personally appropriate mix of mobility and stability supported by a strong muscular system and an understanding of how our bodies are designed to move, stand, carry, lift and pull, is essential.
“There may be more efficient ways to improve flexibility than pulling yourself into awkward positions. And for people with little time to exercise, ditching the stretches could free up time for something more effective.”
As Nuzzo says, “resistance training, you will not only improve your flexibility, but you will also improve your muscle strength and power and muscle endurance, maybe even improve cardiovascular-related outcomes so you get more bang for your buck”.
Enjoy the full article below.
Keep moving and stay strong
Ophelia
Is flexibility important? Why yoga may not be worth it.
Scientists are questioning whether stretching is as essential as we think.
There’s always that one person at the front of the yoga class. Leg behind her head, smiling serenely while you grunt and strain to reach your toes. Flexibility not only looks impressive, but it has long been held up as a vital ingredient of any fitness regimen. Ask anyone in a yoga class why they’re there and that will be a key goal.
But if we can’t touch our toes or contort our bodies into a convincing downward dog, should we be worried? Is flexibility really that important? And, crucially, is stretching the best way to achieve it? It turns out that even among sports scientists there is little agreement.
First, the obvious part: stretching feels good. We, and many other species of animals, spontaneously stretch after sitting or lying around for a while, a reflex called “pandiculation”, which is thought to wake up the body and prepare it for action. Remembering to stop and pandiculate every now and then is not only a good way to relieve tension, it can also prevent chronic pain such as the aches and pains you get from sitting at a keyboard all day.
“You can get elbow pain because there is always tension on the muscle,” says Markus Tilp, an exercise scientist at the University of Graz in Austria, “while the pectoralis muscle in the chest gets shorter because you always have your arms in front of you. Stretching these muscles helps.”
Tilp was among the first scientists to show exactly what happens to the muscles and other tissues when we pull ourselves into a stretch. Incredibly, this basic piece of information wasn’t understood until the mid to late 2000s. Using ultrasound, Tilp showed that when we stretch, “both the tendon and the muscle elongates by about 5 to 10 per cent depending on the muscle”.
This effect is, sadly, temporary, which is why we stiffen up as soon as we get back to our desks. But as other studies have shown, and many yogis can attest, regular stretching can increase range of motion for the longer term. Only a handful of studies have looked at what happens in the muscles when someone stretches regularly over long periods. However, Tilp says, there is little evidence to suggest that the muscles themselves keep getting longer. Instead, it seems that the nervous system gradually learns that it is safe to allow the joint to extend further and release a little more slack.
Whether it’s worth taking the time and effort to do this is another matter. The short answer seems to be: it depends. How flexible your body needs to be depends very much on what you plan to do with it. And while most of us will never need to do the splits, there is some evidence that our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are chipping away at the basic flexibility we need. A study published in February found that people who sat for more than four hours a day had hip joints that were significantly less flexible than those who were more active. Over time, this stiffening up could be enough to make the most sedentary people more unsteady on their feet and more at risk of falling.
Studies also suggest that stretching can prevent or reverse this kind of loss of range of motion. This sounds like pretty strong evidence in favour of making time to stretch, but the sports scientist James Nuzzo is not so sure. In a recent analysis he argued that we need to ditch the idea that stretching is the only way to maintain and improve flexibility. Aerobic exercise, strength training and just moving more in general are as effective in maintaining range of motion, he says.
Tilp agrees that making movement part of your life can prevent a decline in flexibility with ageing. “What we see from some studies is that it is possible to maintain flexibility,” he says. “There was a study, for example, in marathon runners. When they get older they don’t get less flexible because they stay active.”
Nuzzo says that what’s most important is to move through the entire range of motion, which means not only shortening the muscles to lift something, but also lengthening them while they are under load. “What’s really important here is the eccentric phase [when you lengthen the muscle] of an exercise,” he says. “So long as you are going down deep in your exercise and trying to go through your full range of motion, you will improve your flexibility.”
This kind of exercise can also be done away from the gym. Simply walking down the stairs lengthens the quad muscles at the same time as loading them, and lowering heavy bags of shopping or lifting something down from a shelf loads the arms as they extend. Yoga and other forms of exercise that involve controlled shifting of body weight, such as t’ai chi and Pilates, also lengthen and strengthen muscles at the same time. A deep squat on to your haunches does something similar. It’s uncomfortable at first for most adults, at least in the West, but it has the bonus of keeping the hips, knees and ankles strong and flexible enough to walk, run and get up and down from the floor without too much grunting. Analysis of skeletons dating back more than two million years suggests that this is the way humans rested until we invented chairs and started stiffening up.
None of this suggests that stretching is necessarily bad, just that there may be more efficient ways to improve flexibility than pulling yourself into awkward positions. And for people with little time to exercise, ditching the stretches could free up time for something more effective.
“If you do something like resistance training, you will not only improve your flexibility, but you will also improve your muscle strength and power and muscle endurance, maybe even improve cardiovascular-related outcomes so you get more bang for your buck,” Nuzzo says.
Intriguing new research also suggests that keeping the body supple may have other benefits beyond increasing our range of motion. Researchers at Harvard University have been examining the fascia, a clingfilm-like tissue that wraps our muscles and allows them to slide over each other when we move. Experiments suggest that when this tissue is stretched, cells in it change shape and release chemicals that are known to reduce inflammation. In animal studies, rats with injured backs that were encouraged to stretch healed faster than others that were not.
Helene Langevin, who led the team at Harvard and is now at the US National Institutes of Health, is working on a series of studies to see if the same is true in humans. If so, staying supple enough to stretch not only your muscles but also the fascia surrounding them could be important for a fully functioning immune system. The details are yet to be filled in, but Langevin says that it is an area that is crying out for more research. “An important question is: how do body movements influence the immune responses?” she says.
Importantly, though, all these benefits come from moving the body through a normal range of movement, gently stretching until you feel resistance. If a sedentary lifestyle has left you too stiff to dress without help, tie your shoelaces, or get up from a chair without support, it is a good idea to work on mobility, either through moving more or by a programme of stretching. If you are supple enough already, keep it up. But forget the splits. From a health point of view, there’s really no good reason to torture yourself.
Four Was to be Flexible
1 Carry Heavy Shopping bags – Loading your muscles while they extend (as when lowering shopping bags to the floor) lengthens them in the same way a classic stretch does. Loads the calves and quads as they lengthen, keeping them flexible for walking and running.
2. Walk Down Stairs
3. Reach – If something is on a high shelf, don’t grab the nearest chair; reach for it. You’ll get a back stretch on the way up and also load the arms on the way down, for double flexibility gains.
4. Keep Moving – The best way to stay supple enough to move, is to move as much as possible at every age.
REFERENCE
Caroline Williams
The Times Saturday 18th September 2021