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Sometimes people pit static stretching
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and active stretching against each other,
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like one could be better than the other. Do you know what I'm talking about?
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"I'm active isolated stretching certified." "I do static stretching." "Static
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stretching sucks, because I do active stretching." "Really?" "Yeah." "I do dynamic
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stretching, dynamic stretching is the best, everybody knows dynamic stretching is the
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best and the other two suck, you don't need active stretching." They all do different things!
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You are comparing apples to oranges, stop it. As long as they fly on the continuum of
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intensity and speed. So, static stretching. We only use static stretching
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to lengthen a muscle that has adaptively shortened. So, even if a muscle is
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overactive but not short, we wouldn't use static stretching. It's all about
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lengthening the fascial network around a muscle. Are you familiar with endomecium,
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paramecium, all of that stuff?
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So that's the fascial network around a muscle. What static stretching does is
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you pull a muscle into a stretch position, and when you first pull a
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muscle into a stretch position does that muscle become more active or less
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active? More active, right? You can feel the tension build up in your muscle
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a little bit when you stretch it. And the reason that's happening is what? The
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muscle spindle gets triggered, that sends a signal back to your CNS, your central nervous
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system in your spinal cord, and that signal goes right back out and tells
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that muscle to start contracting again. It's almost like a protective mechanism
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to keep you from ripping your muscles in half. Alright,
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so the first thing you do when you pull a muscle into stretch is activate that
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muscle spindle. Now, tension builds up, and providing it's only a small amount of
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tension, and not a huge amount of tension,
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that tension starts stimulating somebody else:
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the Golgi tendon organ. The Golgi tendon organ are tension receptors. So muscle spindles
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are stretch receptors, gogli tendon are tension receptors. Now, as the tension builds up,
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but not in a way that we feel unsafe, and those GTOs are getting stimulated,
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they send their signal through the CNS, and what does their signal do? It inhibits. It shuts
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down. That is what autogenic inhibition is. Are you with me? So autogenic
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inhibition is what the GTO does. So we get a little bit of muscle spindle
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activity, and then GTO overrides it, and the muscle calms back down. Once the muscle
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calms back down, now we can actually stretch the fascia around the muscle. Initially we can't.
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You pull on the muscle, the muscle is just pulling back. That's it. All
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you're doing is pulling against muscle until you get that release. Once that release
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happens, you stretch out that fascial network. The pressure on that fascial
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network hopefully causes an adaptive process to start, and that adaptive
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process lays down new fascia, kind of, and lengthens the muscle out.
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Now, active stretching doesn't do that. Active stretching we use as a
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progression. Now we've gotten the muscle back to its original length, so we start
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working on contracting the functional antagonist. So if I'm stretching my hip
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flexors, I'm going to start contracting my glutes to help increase the strength
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of my glute max in this new range of motion I didn't have before. Because if my
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glute max hadn't even been getting there, is it going to be stronger?
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No, strength is somewhat range of motion specific. So I strengthen my glute max as
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well as start returning optimal reciprocal inhibition. Remember, it was
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altered before. These were really overactive, shutting this down. I'm
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contracting this, and shutting these down, that starts reversing the process.
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Are you with me? The static stretching lengthens, active stretching helps return
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strength and reciprocal inhibition.