Pandiculation vs Stretching
Why does stretching causes more long term tension ?
Ask your self why you’re needing to stretch?
The most likely reason is because your muscles feel tight.
If your muscles are tight it’s because they’re remaining partially contracted and not fully releasing to their natural resting length.
So the result you’re looking for with stretching is wanting your muscles to return to this natural resting length - no more tension.
If you can’t release your muscle tension when you’re not using it means you’ve lost control of your muscle. Most people call this muscle memory. In Somatics we call this sensory-motor amnesia.
Why stretching causes more tension.
Stretching pulls the muscles past their natural length causing the nervous system to contract the muscle to avoid it tearing. So it actually long term creates even greater subconscious muscle tension.
The conscious and subconscious parts of your nervous system are fighting against each other trying to achieve opposite results:
When you’re actively stretching the conscious part of your brain is sending a message via your nervous system to manually lengthen your muscles by pulling them.
This causes your subconscious stretch reflex (which doesn’t involve the brain), to automatically kick in and contract your muscles to prevent you from over stretching and tearing your muscles, ligaments and tendons.
What is Stretch Reflex?
It’s an subconscious nervous system response when a muscle is being stretched.
When your muscle is being lengthened beyond a point where it can comfortably stretch muscle spindles (proprioceptors in the muscle) are stretched and the nerves jumps into protector mode immediately sending a message to the muscle for it to contract and protect it from being torn.
It’s the same subconscious response when a doctor hits you on the knee with a hammer to test your reflexes - your leg responds involuntarily by contracting jerking your leg upwards. The sense of being hit is the same a static stretch - the muscle contracts because it feels a threat of being overstretched and torn.
This reflex exists to help us stay alive and avoid injury of our muscles, tendons and ligaments.
What else does the stretch reflex do?
It helps us stand upright.
For example:
When you stand upright and begin to lean to the right side the postural muscles on the opposite left side of the vertebral column will be stretched.
When the muscle spindles in those muscles sense they are being lengthened, the message to contract them is automatically sent to correct your posture.
Our stretch reflex subconsciously maintains our balance to keep us from falling over!
Why does it feel like stretching works?
Prolonged static stretching pulls your muscles and tendons beyond the point they can voluntarily lengthen. This in turn begins to stretch your ligaments. Over time the ligaments can be stretched resulting in more flexible and often less stable joints. Once stretched ligaments may never regain their original length and strength.
It can also cause the stretch reflex to become much less active, leaving muscles lengthened for a period of time. Which is why you may feel looser after you stretch. However the effect works off fairly quickly. Muscles often tightening up again within just a few hours as your stretch reflex regains normal function.
Stretching decreases muscle performance by temporarily reducing the muscle’s ability to contract.
Repeated stretching can make you feel more flexible because you can build up a tolerance to the sensation of pulling on your muscles. Even though by nature it’s an uncomfortable sensation with repetition it can become tolerable, enjoyable and even an addictive sensation.
Clinical Somatics will relieve pain and tension.
Stretching doesn’t re-educate the nervous system. No amount of pulling on muscles will change the resting level of muscle tension set by the stretch reflex’s bio feedback loop.
The resting level of muscle tension must be reset through an active process of relearning - involving slow, conscious, voluntary movement and the integration of sensory feedback from the muscle. I can teach you how to do this by practicing Clinical Somatics.
When you pull on an already tight muscle the stretch reflex is activated, making the muscle contract even more.
It’s possible to get temporary pain relief from gentle prolonged static stretching, but the increased muscle length is only temporary and the muscle will rebound within a short period of time.
Most likely stretching will not only do little for your pain but instead increase and prolong pain by making your muscles tighter.