You’re getting out of the automotive after an extended drive, or up out of your pc after a nerve-racking workday, and there it’s—that tight, achy feeling in your neck. Your first intuition is to tug your head towards your shoulder, attempting to elongate your stiff, sore muscle groups.
We’ve all been informed stretching is a good way to maintain your physique free and limber and beat back any potential achy tightness. However does doing it whenever you’re already hurting really assist you—or are there higher methods to assuage the soreness as an alternative? We tapped bodily therapists, sports activities medication medical doctors, and power coaches to interrupt all of it down.
The reply relies upon, partly, on why your muscle groups damage within the first place.
To know whether or not stretching sore muscle groups may gain advantage you, it helps to know what’s behind that ache, board-certified sports activities bodily therapist Leada Malek, DPT, CSCS, writer of the e book Science of Stretch, tells SELF. There are three issues to bear in mind:
- Your muscle groups may be weak.
- Your vary of movement may be restricted resulting from continual tightness.
- Your muscle groups could have been (micro)broken resulting from a troublesome exercise.
Let’s take the primary one. Merely holding your physique in a set place—say, display time or an extended drive—can fatigue your muscle groups, making them really feel stiff or sore, since they’re working exhausting to carry that place. The much less power and endurance your muscle groups have, the extra susceptible you’re to this type of ache, she says.
Secondly, you may additionally really feel ache in your neck (or different areas) as a result of your muscle groups have shortened or tightened over time, reducing your vary of movement, or how far you possibly can transfer your muscle groups or joints within the instructions they’re purported to go. As an illustration, the extra time you spend hunched over screens, the much less flexibility you may need within the muscle groups round your neck and shoulders.
Lastly, should you’ve simply accomplished a troublesome exercise, you may be coping with delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS. If you train for the primary time shortly or change up your routine, you possibly can trigger minor harm or microtrauma to your muscle fibers, Susie Reiner, PhD, CSCS, licensed train physiologist and postdoctoral researcher on the College of Kentucky’s Sports activities Drugs Analysis Institute, tells SELF. In wholesome muscle, small threadlike elements referred to as actin and myosin neatly line up subsequent to one another. With DOMs, “the entire actin and myosin are mixed in,” Dr. Reiner says. This triggers an inflammatory response, which additional will increase ache and stiffness.
Stretching, when acceptable, can assist in a number of alternative ways.
If you’re performing a static stretch—say, you’re holding a place for a set period of time—you’re pulling these actin and myosin threads aside, lengthening your muscle groups, Dr. Reiner says. If you’re coping with minor stiffness and ache, stretching sore muscle groups can improve your mobility and vary of movement within the second, permitting you to maneuver extra freely. Executed usually, it could protect that vary of movement and hold your muscle groups extra versatile and ready to deal with the challenges of your day.
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