If you’ve ever dealt with nagging muscle tension or recurring body aches, someone has probably told you, “just stretch more.” And while stretching can feel great, relying on it alone can lead to continual and repetitive aches, pains, and tightness. You stretch, it offers you some temporary relief, and then the tightness comes right back. Why?
Stretching is amazing and has a lot of benefits. Sometimes a good stretch can help relax a muscle or the classic stretching before a workout prepares movement and reduces injury. Tight muscles are often because of something bigger than muscle. Muscle tightness is often present because it’s the body’s way of guarding an injury in the body or restriction in a joint. The issue with constantly stretching is that you’re knocking down the defenses that the body has put in place to protect you.
If your brain perceives instability, threat, or poor movement control, it increases muscle tone as a form of protection. When people tell me that their back, shoulders, or legs are tight, I try to find out what is the root cause for the tension. Hip tightness could actually tell me a lot about the pelvic movement and rotation. Tension down the arm could actually be your shoulder or postural position. Back tightness can often be due to spinal restrictions that are limiting movement. These are the big three things that you can notice when an injury occurs:
- The muscles tighten to guard the area
- Motor patterns can change because of the tight muscle and joints
- Pain and stiffness develops in and around the area
So what do we do about tight muscles? The evidence for fixing a chronically tight muscle is actually to strengthen the muscle and the surrounding supportive muscles. When you start exercising, the brain will try to tell you that the muscle is weak and needs to be protected. As you exercise more and increase the range of motion of the joint and muscle, fewer signals are sent to protect giving more functional movement to the area.
Chiropractic can help with injury and chronic pain by sending “safe movement” signals to the brain. An adjustment allows for a bit more motion through a joint and signals are sent to say “I’m moving” which can inhibit guarding. Often, people get off the treatment table with increased pain-free motion. That’s why it is important to get assessed to see if the tight spot of pain is actually the spot that is producing the pain.
Happy moving, happy strengthening,
Dr. Cole Maranger