Effortless Energy
Why strengthening and stretching muscles doesn't work.
Restriction of the body's movement, acute and long term pain and injury, are often diagnosed as muscles being too weak or too tight. The seemingly logical response is therefore to strengthen those muscles (weight training etc) which are weak, and to stretch those muscles which are tight, (by manual manipulation or self stretching exercises). Unfortunately in most cases the initial diagnosis is correct only up to a point, and the results of such strengthening and stretching are largely ineffective in resolving the presented problem. The clear proof is people's own experience of such treatment, in that it doesn't in truth give a lasting solution to their problem, you either have to keep doing them or return to be treated again and again to maintain the benefits.
Weak muscles are most often weak from the exhaustion of being continually contracted. Weight training and other such regimes, only further contract the muscles without focussing on releasing of those muscles.
Why muscles hurt
A muscle which is chronically contracted is like a dimmer switch that is always on. In a muscle which is in constant contraction the glycogen stored in the muscle is constantly being burned up, this produces a continuous stream of lactic acid as the glycogen is always being processed. The more lactic acid build up the more the sensory cells become irritated, the more the muscles feels sore and tired. At a certain level of contraction the bloodstream cannot flush the lactic acid out fast enough and the muscle will constantly feel hard and painful.
Muscles need releasing not stretching
Muscles which are too tight and contracted need releasing, not stretching. Stretching only triggers the body's strong reaction to return a muscle to its habitual contraction within minutes or hours of having been stretched. It is a sticking-plaster repair at best, it needs to be done daily to maintain the stretch, or re-adjusted, for example each month. It is in reality a treatment not a true solution to the problem.
If the solution is therefore to release or relax those muscles rather than strengthen or stretch them why can't we simply do that? Try as much as you can, you can only consciously relax a muscle a certain amount. And this is the point, if you cannot relax a muscle at command, then the problem is in your ability to control (relax) that muscle, that is the lack of fine control you have over the level of tension in the muscle, and not the muscle itself, which is quite unconcerned about the level of tension it exhibits.
Normal muscle tone
Muscles at rest have a "normal" muscle tone, muscles under action have a higher level of muscle tone appropriate to the work that is being done. You learned to select the appropriate level of tone for the appropriate function, over your lifetime as your body grew and developed from a small child to an adult. At the point of learning your conscious mind set down those muscle patterns, and since then it has become automatic, functioning under the radar of your conscious attention so to speak. It may have been set out wrongly simply because those around you had that dysfunction themselves and you copied it by rote, not knowing it was bad postural alignment, or you may have suffered some trauma which caused a temporary adaptive response which never went away.
The key point to understand is that chronically tense muscles are now below your level of conscious control, and that is why you can't release those muscles at will. If you cannot sense it, you cannot move it, it becomes a negative circle. The more you can sense it, the more you can move it. It becomes a positive circle. A learned adaptive response can be relearned. It does not require a treatment, it requires education.
Restriction of the body's movement, acute and long term pain and injury, are often diagnosed as muscles being too weak or too tight. The seemingly logical response is therefore to strengthen those muscles (weight training etc) which are weak, and to stretch those muscles which are tight, (by manual manipulation or self stretching exercises). Unfortunately in most cases the initial diagnosis is correct only up to a point, and the results of such strengthening and stretching are largely ineffective in resolving the presented problem. The clear proof is people's own experience of such treatment, in that it doesn't in truth give a lasting solution to their problem, you either have to keep doing them or return to be treated again and again to maintain the benefits.
Weak muscles are most often weak from the exhaustion of being continually contracted. Weight training and other such regimes, only further contract the muscles without focussing on releasing of those muscles.
Why muscles hurt
A muscle which is chronically contracted is like a dimmer switch that is always on. In a muscle which is in constant contraction the glycogen stored in the muscle is constantly being burned up, this produces a continuous stream of lactic acid as the glycogen is always being processed. The more lactic acid build up the more the sensory cells become irritated, the more the muscles feels sore and tired. At a certain level of contraction the bloodstream cannot flush the lactic acid out fast enough and the muscle will constantly feel hard and painful.
Muscles need releasing not stretching
Muscles which are too tight and contracted need releasing, not stretching. Stretching only triggers the body's strong reaction to return a muscle to its habitual contraction within minutes or hours of having been stretched. It is a sticking-plaster repair at best, it needs to be done daily to maintain the stretch, or re-adjusted, for example each month. It is in reality a treatment not a true solution to the problem.
If the solution is therefore to release or relax those muscles rather than strengthen or stretch them why can't we simply do that? Try as much as you can, you can only consciously relax a muscle a certain amount. And this is the point, if you cannot relax a muscle at command, then the problem is in your ability to control (relax) that muscle, that is the lack of fine control you have over the level of tension in the muscle, and not the muscle itself, which is quite unconcerned about the level of tension it exhibits.
Normal muscle tone
Muscles at rest have a "normal" muscle tone, muscles under action have a higher level of muscle tone appropriate to the work that is being done. You learned to select the appropriate level of tone for the appropriate function, over your lifetime as your body grew and developed from a small child to an adult. At the point of learning your conscious mind set down those muscle patterns, and since then it has become automatic, functioning under the radar of your conscious attention so to speak. It may have been set out wrongly simply because those around you had that dysfunction themselves and you copied it by rote, not knowing it was bad postural alignment, or you may have suffered some trauma which caused a temporary adaptive response which never went away.
The key point to understand is that chronically tense muscles are now below your level of conscious control, and that is why you can't release those muscles at will. If you cannot sense it, you cannot move it, it becomes a negative circle. The more you can sense it, the more you can move it. It becomes a positive circle. A learned adaptive response can be relearned. It does not require a treatment, it requires education.
You can learn to release your muscle tension
We learn all our movements by observation, instruction and repetition, and through a process of sensory feedback we self-correct and adjust, teaching ourselves. Once we have learned, it becomes a habit, etched in your memory and bypassing your conscious control. It is not however your muscles that have a "muscle memory" but your nervous system that has a memory of an habitual level of tension, a tension that it instructs the muscles to hold.
The solution is to bring those muscles back into conscious control, and to do that, you have to be able to feel them again. We can only consciously guide our actions when we can feel them. Using basic sensory awareness, that is feedback of where we are in space, of our physical movement, allows us to re-educate those muscles to release their tension and sets up a new instruction in place of the old instruction.
Muscles have no control of their own, they are like foot soldiers who act out the instructions from their Generals. The General is the brain and it is the General that needs to issue new instructions to the foot soldiers. The movement memory instruction of how you are (bound up) needs to be replaced with a new instruction of how you want to be (free of tension).
You do that by learning your way out of it. Plain and simple. Not by thinking about it, not by intellectually understanding the process, not by some form of verbal mantra, but by the same way you learned to walk, or gained control of your bladder as a child: by feeling your body, by gaining conscious control (through feedback) over its movements and by feeling the new instruction. With repetition you develop the ability to control the muscle tone in the movement. By incorporating smaller movement elements into larger ones, then individual movement elements into multiple movement elements you develop coordination and connection in your body movement and you become, free from movement restriction and pain and yes! you can become graceful in your movement.
You can start now
You can commit to starting this now whatever your age. You can be free from pain that has been with you for many years when you understand the process of how muscles are able to be re-educated to release their holding patterns and put them into practice.
You work at your own level, the lessons only move at the pace of the people in the class. The success is in the system, just become quietly committed, turn up and practice - that's it.
We learn all our movements by observation, instruction and repetition, and through a process of sensory feedback we self-correct and adjust, teaching ourselves. Once we have learned, it becomes a habit, etched in your memory and bypassing your conscious control. It is not however your muscles that have a "muscle memory" but your nervous system that has a memory of an habitual level of tension, a tension that it instructs the muscles to hold.
The solution is to bring those muscles back into conscious control, and to do that, you have to be able to feel them again. We can only consciously guide our actions when we can feel them. Using basic sensory awareness, that is feedback of where we are in space, of our physical movement, allows us to re-educate those muscles to release their tension and sets up a new instruction in place of the old instruction.
Muscles have no control of their own, they are like foot soldiers who act out the instructions from their Generals. The General is the brain and it is the General that needs to issue new instructions to the foot soldiers. The movement memory instruction of how you are (bound up) needs to be replaced with a new instruction of how you want to be (free of tension).
You do that by learning your way out of it. Plain and simple. Not by thinking about it, not by intellectually understanding the process, not by some form of verbal mantra, but by the same way you learned to walk, or gained control of your bladder as a child: by feeling your body, by gaining conscious control (through feedback) over its movements and by feeling the new instruction. With repetition you develop the ability to control the muscle tone in the movement. By incorporating smaller movement elements into larger ones, then individual movement elements into multiple movement elements you develop coordination and connection in your body movement and you become, free from movement restriction and pain and yes! you can become graceful in your movement.
You can start now
You can commit to starting this now whatever your age. You can be free from pain that has been with you for many years when you understand the process of how muscles are able to be re-educated to release their holding patterns and put them into practice.
You work at your own level, the lessons only move at the pace of the people in the class. The success is in the system, just become quietly committed, turn up and practice - that's it.
