The Science of Stretching
Do you do stretching? There's no point in doing it because stretching doesn't make you soft, right? It takes time, doesn't it? It's tedious.
Well, I have heard many thoughts and stories about stretching.
There are many different ways of thinking about this, depending on the source, but let me explain one of them, what is stretching? Let's take a look at one of them.
Purpose of Stretching
Stretching is intended to reduce tension, improve range of motion and flexibility of muscles with reduced elasticity. Ideally, it should be done by efficiently stretching muscles that are involved in the same direction of motion, with awareness of individual muscle fiber runs and muscle connections.
As mentioned earlier
Decrease in muscle tension
Improved range of motion
Relief of muscle pain
Improving blood circulation
Injury prevention
Improvement of athletic performance
These are just a few of the objectives.
Selecting muscles for stretching
It is important to select the muscles to be stretched, and it is best to start from the areas where muscle tension is strongest, or those considered to be the cause of movement restriction or pain.
When used in sports, it is considered efficient and effective to start from the center of the body to the periphery.Some muscles are located in the superficial layer under the skin, while others are located in the deeper layers.
Basically, it is necessary to stretch from the superficial layer and then stretch the deeper layers, the reason being that when you try to stretch the deeper muscles, you cannot effectively stretch them when there is tension in the superficial muscles.
And one thing to keep in mind when making a choice is that the muscle causing the problem cannot be easily identified.
As an example
When there is a limitation in the range of motion of the shoulder joint flexion, the soft tissues of the shoulder joint may be the cause instead of the antagonist deltoid and vastus lateralis muscles.
In such cases, stretching is performed to the main operating muscles, as they are often considered to be the cause of increased muscle tone or pain.This means that depending on the situation where the stretching is to be done, it is necessary to know the cause that creates the inconvenience in order to be able to do it properly.
When you can't stretch a joint movement
Basically, muscles are attached across joints, so there are many stretches that involve joint movement, but in some muscles (areas where the trunk or other parts of the body interfere), the method of using the fingers to stretch the muscle fibers is often used.This technique is similar to the palpation method, where pressure is applied vertically to the targeted muscle fibers, maintaining depth and stretching directly against the muscle fibers.
As mentioned earlier, there are areas where the trunk interferes with the stretching motion (e.g., the middle deltoid fibers and the supraspinatus), so this method is applicable to those areas.
Concept of time
In terms of how long to perform the stretch for a given position, around 30 seconds is considered good.Depending on the research, 60 seconds may be better, 10 seconds may be better, and so on.
The median value may be good because the environment varies depending on the muscle, age, gender, and sporting activity at the time of the study.
Physiologically, it is sometimes said that it takes 10~20 seconds for muscle resistance to weaken due to Ib inhibition and other factors, and for muscle elasticity to increase.And the reason why there is no uniformity about the time of stretching is due to the effect of Ib afferent fibers in the Golgi tendon organ and other factors, such as pain caused by increased muscle tension.
This is partly because suppressing depolarization of spinal cord anterior horn cells is expected to depend on the resting potential state.
Conclusion
Generally recommended stretches and other exercises can be practiced as they are, but they will differ depending on the body's situation.
If you are experiencing pain in a different part of your body than the muscle you are stretching, chronic pain, central nervous system disorder, or acute inflammation, it may have a negative impact if you perform it as usual.The only information that could be used in this article is about the order and duration of muscle stretching.
