What is your "Tight" _____ (insert body part) trying to tell you?
If you feel stiff and tight everyday, and have the urge to stretch it out to not feel tight and restricted, then you only putting a small bandaid on a big cut AND you are NOT doing the RIGHT things to solve the problem.
What if I told you here is a way to not feel tight and stiff all the time. I know this this, because I have tried it myself on my own body and helped hundreds of clients achieve the same results.
After you read this post, not only will you understand what your body might be trying to tell you when it feels stiff, tight and restricted but you will also understand the difference between flexibility and mobility - and find out how you can approach fixing it!
First, What is mobility and how is it different for flexibility?
All these words are so technical but I am going make sure we are talking about the same thing by simplify it.
Range Of Motion (ROM) stands for the whole movement a joint can go through. For each individual joint this is different for shoulders, knees, elbows etc but this is relatively standardized for all humans.
Why is ROM important? A person needs a certain amount of ROM to function and to be able to perform some basic movements such as full shoulder flexion (read: arms above your head) to hang on the pull-up bar and to overhead squat comfortably.
Other examples to run injury free you need full extension in your knee. You also need 90 degrees of flexion in your knee to use a bicycle and 135 degrees of flexion to walk down stairs
- just to name some examples. If this is missing, you either CAN’T perform the movement, or have to compensate with other joints to be able to.
ROM is further split into Flexibility of the joint and passive ROM if someone else moves your joint for you. Mobility is the active ROM you can access through movement. The feeling "tightness" can come from lacking in one or both of these abilities. Because if this basic mobility is not there, you might have issues with all kinds of movements OR experience tightness (that can develop later into PAIN from a given joint/area).
What this might look like
For example, if the person who works at a desk for 8-10 hours per day while tapping away on their keyboard, can barely lift their arms above their head. They then hit the gym, join a crossfit class and want to do kipping toes to bar or hanging knee raises. We can all see they might experience some tightness in his shoulder when hanging from the bar and they would probably not be happy if they did 100 repetitions. The quick solution might be to say that they should stretch his shoulders before class
- but what should they stretch?
From just reading this description, it is difficult to say because this individual's ROM can be limited for many reasons that can be sourced in either your passive Flexibility, or active Mobility.
Their limitations may be due to:
Shortening of a muscle or tendon, in their chest, back and upper body.
Weakness at end range, inability to stabilise their shoulder blades.
Poor motor control.
Overuse, from over training or not enough rest from the 100 pushups they do every morning.
Bony/ligament structure, from birth or deformation from repetitive overuse. Their ribs and upper back can't extend as much as needed to hang on a pull-up bar.
Spasm due to underlying injury: from their discs and vertebrae in the upper back and neck.
I hope you can see the feeling of tightness doesn't tell us what it is. It is just a feeling, and the body is just telling you that you are at the end range of where it is comfortable and can be for any of the reasons above.
Here is a quick test. If you take your finger, and bend it back.
What do you feel?
Tightness?
Should you stretch your finger to go further back?
Answer is no
Stretching isn't always the answer. Each of these reasons listed above has its own "recipe" or protocol on how to improve that specific limited ROM. To avoid wasting time on doing a protocol that does not fit your restrictions or worse doing more damage, it is important to identify what is limiting your ROM from achieving your best.
If not stretching then what?
Here are some ideas on how to approach common problems.
In mobility testing if your muscles are short, aka there is a measurably decreased length on tissue - for example when you try to touch your toes, and your hamstrings are tensed up like guitar strings and your hands have not reached the floor, you can use slow eccentric strength training and dynamic stretching to active better ROM.
If on the other hand you often feel stiff in your hips, lower back
- it could mean your tissues are reactively shortened, as a protection mechanism. The body is smart and it tells the surrounding muscles to brace while the body is recovering from previous activities or load.
Most often this happens when either you overuse a certain muscle/ joint and/or when you don't have good control over the movement at end range with poor motor control.
For example if you can not hold tension in the bottom doing a squat full depth but get carried away in a workout when the music is playing and do 150 wall balls with deep ass to the grass squats. Then more than likely your hips and lower back will feel stiff afterwards. But what if you do squats every other day in the gym, how would your hips feel then?
For stiffness the solution is to strength train the right areas. Identify what muscles are working too much and what muscles are not working enough to establish balance again. In this case it would be strengthening the core to keep tension in the bottom of the squat and make sure you have the mobility to keep good mechanics. As you can see there is some stretching and mobility involved in this recipe, but more of your time will be spent on strengthening weak areas and improving motor control in a range of movements.
The bottom line is:
That if you have to do something for 10 minutes everyday to feel okay, (for example, you stretch your shoulders with a band before every class) then it's not really solving the problem.
The internet is filled with freebies and stretching protocols, but if you are here reading this, the odds are that you have tried them, felt some relief but then you just went back to feeling tight and stiff again.
This is why you need to get more specific with figuring out what it is that is limiting your movement and if you still need to do 10 min of mobility to feel like a human after attempting something for 30 days, then it's time to seek professional assistance to decode what the body is trying to tell you.
If you have already hit a wall with your stiffness and tightness turning more into pain, you can read more about training with pain here
I offer 20 min free mobility consultations. Both in person and Online, Book your slot and let me know what your tightness or stiffness issues are in notes when you book your consult. Together we will run you through a mobility screening and figure out a plan for you!
