STRETCH DAILY TO STRENGTHEN YOUR CORE
Popular wisdom says stretching doesn’t build muscle, burn fat, or shave time off a 5K race. As a result, many of us shortchange or skip the practice altogether in our daily workouts.
But according to many chiropractors popular wisdom is wrong —and we’re missing out on its benefits.
Stretching has been shown to help prevent injury, correct and stabilize spinal imbalances, improve range of motion, reduce muscle tightness and improve athletic performance. In fact, it’s so important to overall fitness that it’s not something to approach haphazardly.
Welcome to stretching 2.0. This stretching protocol — created by a chiropractor who advises several pro sports teams and trained our own Dr. Merai — aims to build strength and flexibility systematically and progressively.
Though commonly treated as separate skills, flexibility and strength are closely related; together, they comprise mobility. Often restrictions in spinal mobility will occur because our muscles lack strength or flexibility (or both) at their end-range positions.
This may take the form of tight hip flexors that make it hard to squat, or tight shoulders that make it tough to raise your arms overhead.
Another expression is hyperflexibility, which often forces people to avoid certain movements for fear of going too far and injuring themselves. Common examples include over-rotating your lower back or overextending your neck.
Whether the problem is too little or too much flexibility, Dr. Merai address the issues with dedicated exercises that aim to find balance in strength. It’s an effective approach that has caught the attention of many pro athletes alike in recent years.
Dr. Merai's methodology is based on careful analysis of existing chiropractic research about the best ways to make muscles simultaneously stronger and more supple. It builds on tried-and-true techniques from yoga (in which practitioners actively move themselves into poses) and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, or PNF (in which a resistance is applied in an attempt to shorten and then stretch the muscle).
We focus on building strength and flexibility in the end ranges of motion along with adjustments of the spinal joints which offers an innovative way to improve spinal mobility and correct chronic imbalances in both the shoulder and pelvic girdles.
Mobility is essential both in athletics and in daily life: It helps you maintain control of your body and avoid injury, even when unusual circumstances — slipping on ice, jumping to catch a Frisbee — place your joints in potentially dangerous positions.
It’s no secret that our modern lifestyle has deleterious effects on our health, joints included. “We sit rather than stand, drive rather than walk,” says Dr. Merai. “The body has no reason to hold on to mobility it doesn’t need. So we lose it and then wonder why we hurt ourselves in the gym.”
Our Spinal Care Program aims to restore those lost ranges of motion so that complex movements — be it reaching into the back seat of a car to retrieve a purse become easy once again.
.
.CARS SHOULDER ROTATIONS
Purpose: To increase the functional range in your shoulder joint.
How to Do It:
Purpose: To increase control and awareness throughout your spine.
How to Do It:
Purpose: Trains muscles to support the joint at the outer edges of their range of motion, giving you more control and usable range.
How to Do It:
Purpose: Builds and maintains range of motion in the hips, and prepares joints for challenging strength-training and athletic movements like squats, deadlifts, and jumps.
How to Do It:
Popular wisdom says stretching doesn’t build muscle, burn fat, or shave time off a 5K. As a result, many of us shortchange or skip the practice altogether in our workouts.
But according to many fitness experts, popular wisdom is wrong —and we’re missing out on its benefits.
Stretching has been shown to help prevent injury, heal old hurts, improve range of motion, reduce muscle tightness and imbalance, and improve athletic performance. In fact, it’s so important to overall fitness that it’s not something to approach haphazardly.
Welcome to stretching 2.0 by way of Functional Range Conditioning (FRC). This stretching protocol — created by Toronto-based sports-specialist chiropractor Andreo Spina, DC, FCCSS(C), CPT, who advises several pro sports teams — aims to build strength and flexibility systematically and progressively.
Though commonly treated as separate skills, flexibility and strength are closely related; together, they comprise mobility. Often, says Spina, mobility restrictions occur because our muscles lack strength or flexibility (or both) at their end-range positions.
This may take the form of tight hips that make it hard to squat, or tight shoulders that make it tough to raise your arms overhead.
Another expression is hyperflexibility, which often forces people to avoid certain movements for fear of going too far and injuring themselves. Common examples include over-rotating your lower back or overextending your neck.
Whether the problem is too little or too much flexibility, FRC practitioners address the issues with dedicated exercises that aim to find balance in strength. It’s an effective approach that has caught the attention of trainers, therapists, and pro athletes alike in recent years.
Spina based the FRC methodology on careful analysis of existing research about the best ways to make muscles simultaneously stronger and more supple. It builds on tried-and-true techniques from yoga (in which practitioners actively move themselves into poses) and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, or PNF (in which a coach applies resistance as practitioners attempt to shorten a stretching muscle). (Learn more about PNF at “Smart Stretching“.)
By focusing on building strength and flexibility in the end ranges of motion, FRC is an innovative way to improve mobility and overall movement quality.
Mobility is essential both in athletics and in daily life: It helps you maintain control of your body and avoid injury, even when unusual circumstances — slipping on ice, jumping to catch a Frisbee — place your joints in potentially dangerous positions.
It’s no secret that our modern lifestyle has deleterious effects on our health, joints included. “We sit rather than stand, drive rather than walk,” says Spina. “The body has no reason to hold on to mobility it doesn’t need. So we lose it and then wonder why we hurt ourselves squatting or doing Olympic lifts in the gym.”
FRC aims to restore those lost ranges of motion so that complex movements — be it reaching into the back seat of a car to retrieve a purse or performing a deficit deadlift — become easy once again.
One way FRC does this is by focusing on building your joints’ passive flexibility, while also increasing their active range of motion. To feel the difference, try this test: Stand on one foot and lift your other knee as high as you can. Then grab your knee and see how much higher you can pull it.
The first position is the limit of the active range of motion you can control, or your mobility. The second position is the passive range your joint can reach but over which you have little control — your flexibility. There will always be some difference between these two points; the goal of FRC is to reduce this gap.
“Passive flexibility isn’t very useful,” says FRC instructor Dewey Nielsen, owner of Impact Performance Training in Newberg, Ore. At best, haphazard stretching, no matter how well-intentioned, can be ineffective, resulting in little functional improvement. At worst, Nielsen notes, it can be outright dangerous to passively push your body into ranges of motion it can’t actively control.
Forcing your body into the full expression of an exercise when you cannot control it is asking for trouble, agrees personal trainer Hunter Cook, NASM, AFAA, FRCms, based in Long Beach, Calif.
“Injuries happen when your body encounters a force that exceeds the load-bearing capacity of the tissue,” he explains. Imagine, for instance, a 200-pound man who gets injured by putting his full weight on an anklejoint that can’t handle his weight. “If he doesn’t increase the capacity of the tissue to bear load beyond what it did before the injury, he’ll reinjure the same area when he puts that same force on it again.”
When FRC practitioners are working with injured clients, they take care to rehab the area so it can withstand more force than it could before the injury, resulting in an ankle, joint, or knee that’s more resilient and injury-proof.
Ready to try FRC? The following workout just might change your mind about the value of stretching.
An FRC-certified trainer can help you learn and refine the method, but having a coach isn’t necessary to get a feel for the FRC system. For a primer on this tough-but-effective approach to amping up your stretching routine, add these moves to your workout program — once or even several times a day. You can do the exercises on their own, or right after a workout, when muscles are warmed up and pliable.
Purpose: To increase the functional range in your shoulder joint.
How to Do It:
Purpose: To increase control and awareness throughout your spine.
How to Do It:
Purpose: Trains muscles to support the joint at the outer edges of their range of motion, giving you more control and usable range.
How to Do It:
Purpose: Builds and maintains range of motion in the hips, and prepares joints for challenging strength-training and athletic movements like squats, deadlifts, and jumps.
How to Do It:
Andrew Heffernan, CSCS, GCFP, is an Experience Life contributing editor.
For more on functional range conditioning, see the original article at Experience Life.