Heart of Motion

Unlocking the Secrets to Flexibility and Joint Health

• Susannah Steers • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Ready to unlock the secrets behind true flexibility and joint health? Discover how understanding the interplay between muscles, bones, and soft tissues can transform your range of motion and overall mobility. On this episode of the Heart of Motion podcast, we tackle common complaints like tight hips, stiff backs, and sore necks by examining the crucial roles of ligaments, tendons, and fascia. You'll gain valuable insights into how these elements contribute to your body's stability and flexibility, and you'll learn practical tips for achieving a balanced state of functional flexibility.

We dive deep into the importance of hydration and varied movement for maintaining fascia health, and how skeletal muscles and the nervous system work together to enable smooth, flexible movement.  Plus, discover the profound link between physical exercise and cognitive health, and how embracing flexibility in both body and mind can lead to a more vibrant, connected life. Tune in to this episode and transform your approach to flexibility and joint health.

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Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.

Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.

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Susannah Steers:

Stop me, if you've heard this one, my hips are so tight. Or maybe this one oh man, my back is so stiff. Or maybe even this one my neck is killing me. Those lines are like a list of the greatest hits for tension and tightness in the body. Maybe you felt them either intermittently or maybe all the time. Wherever you experience it, and however often it happens, these feelings of tension in the body have one common denominator they create a sense of limitation in our bodies and a feeling that we can't move with ease. Now, if you're struggling with chronic tension and tightness in your body, stay tuned.

Susannah Steers:

Today I want to talk to you about flexibility, what it is and some of the different ways that we can go about creating it for ourselves. Many of us, when we're faced with tightness in our muscles, will actively work to get rid of it in one way or another, and more often than not, we look for a good stretch, we lean into the stretch, trying to lengthen our muscles and find that sigh of relief that comes with it. The path to a flexible body involves more than just stretching muscles, though. Whether you consider yourself a generally stiff body or maybe a bendy one, you'll probably find different pathways to a mobile and functionally flexible body. But before you reach for your favorite stretch again, let's explore what flexibility actually means and the different systems in the body that might help us get there. So, if we look for sort of a you know textbook definition, physical flexibility is the ability of the body's muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia to support and move the bones through their full range of motion without restriction or pain. This involves the coordinated elongation and retraction of soft tissues to accommodate joint movements and maintain overall mobility and function.

Susannah Steers:

Let's focus for a second on the skeleton, which we typically think of as the hard structure of our bodies. We're not stretching that, but our bones are organized in such a way to provide quite a lot of mobility. The spine, for example, isn't just a single long stick of bone that would keep us upright and rigid. It's made of 26 bones stacked up on each other, with joints in between each of those bones, facilitating movement at every segment in many different directions. We can bend and extend and rotate our spines and other bones in a myriad of ways, thanks in part to the structure of the bones themselves and the way they're organized, and in part to the soft tissues that support them. Now, that's a lot of flexibility, without even talking about things that we're stretching. That's just innate flexibility and mobility that's built into our systems innate flexibility and mobility that's built into our systems. But without our soft tissues, all of those bones would simply clatter to the ground, useless. Different kinds of soft tissues do different jobs, and if those different kinds of tissues aren't doing their jobs effectively, it might have an effect on your flexibility long before we get to whether an individual muscle can stretch the way you want to or not. So we're going to start there.

Susannah Steers:

Ligaments, for example, provide structural support for your joints at a deep level. They are connective tissues full of collagen fibers that link bone to bone. When there are lots of collagen fibers present in a ligament, then the ligament is typically fairly robust and they're strong enough to support the functional integrity of the joint structure without needing much help from the surrounding muscles. When there are fewer collagen fibers, though, those ligaments may be somewhat lax or loose, introducing more play or instability to the joint, there's a whole lot more room for that joint to move around. If you're someone with lots of collagen in your ligaments, you're likely going to have joints that feel pretty solid and they move pretty well through a healthy range of motion without having to use extra muscle power to simply stabilize the joint itself. If you've ever rolled over on your ankle and sprained it, though, you'll know that once you've strained or torn the ligaments they don't tighten up again. So unless you do something active with your muscles to stabilize the ankle, it may continually be prone to further sprains and strains. The structural integrity of the joint is compromised by the damaged ligamentous tissue, so you have to stabilize the joint in another way, and if this sounds like you enjoy it, you might not have a massive natural range of motion, but you'll likely have an easier time stabilizing your structure and just moving around in space overall.

Susannah Steers:

Think about the people you know who have like double jointed elbows and wrists and hyperextended knees, and who seem kind of loose and flowy when they walk around. Those folks may have some laxity in their ligaments, a little less collagen, which lets them bend in ways that seem impossible for people with stiffer ligaments. They can move almost effortlessly into long stretches and crazy positions because they don't have a lot of innate stability in the joint itself. The ligaments are not tight enough to prevent extreme ranges of motion. But it's a double-edged sword. That range of motion often comes at the expense of stability and power. Without the stability to support it, it's really hard to create force and velocity. So folks with more laxity in the ligaments have to work really hard to train their muscles to assist the soft tissues in creating support for their joints, and it's not always easy. This one aspect of your flexibility is pretty much genetically determined.

Susannah Steers:

Sometimes diminishing mobility is actually your body crying out for more stability. When your body doesn't have the stability it needs to perform important tasks, it'll start to tighten up other structures to create the support it needs. That might mean that certain muscles begin to feel tight and in need of a stretch, when what's needed is a new stabilizing strategy. We got to stabilize the stuff that actually needs support so that we can release those compensating muscles to do whatever their other job normally is. I see this in many clients, particularly those who come in complaining about tight hamstrings, for example. In many cases the hamstrings feel tight and the client can't touch their toes, and they can't lengthen the hamstrings.

Susannah Steers:

Well, sometimes because the pelvic floor or the lumbar spine or the hip flexors are either overactive or a little sleepy, or the hip flexors are either overactive or a little sleepy and the hamstrings are simply trying to pick up the slack. In most cases, aggressive stretching of the hamstrings won't work because those hamstrings are busy doing another job that feels more important to your brain. Or if you're successful in lengthening the hamstrings when all those other conditions are present, the result might be a cascade of other things, like back pain or pelvic floor dysfunction or something else. When that happens, we know that the problem was really something else and the release of the hamstrings simply decompensated the system and let the other dysfunctions shine. Let's say so when we're releasing and stretching, we have to be mindful. Don't try and push too hard. When the conditions are right, it's surprising what the body will give you.

Susannah Steers:

I think the message here is that if you're feeling chronically tight in a particular area of your body and all the stretches and the release work that you're doing aren't making any lasting progress, then you need to start thinking about things in a different direction. And, as I've often said to my clients who come in seeking extreme flexibility, with great mobility comes great responsibility. You have to be able to look after that whole range of motion. You have to be able to stabilize it through the entire range that you open up, and that takes some effort. So when you're looking to create splits and that doesn't come naturally for you just recognize that there's some other things beyond just being able to do the splits. You need to be able to look after that range of motion. Okay, so let's go to another level.

Susannah Steers:

Tendons connect our muscles to our bones. These are not elastic tissues and they're not designed to elongate the way our muscles do. They're typically pretty thick and fibrous and strong. They're surrounded by a fascial sheath that allows them to slide and move relative to the other tissues around them and they keep the muscle contractions sort of on track. But generally we don't target the tendons themselves with stretching, so I'm not going to dive deep into those.

Susannah Steers:

You might have just heard that word, though fascia. You've likely heard about it everywhere these days. Honestly, we could do a whole episode, in fact a whole podcast, on fascia and its function and its impact on our bodies and our movement. Our understanding of fascia is relatively new, and there's lots of research showing just how important fascia is to every system in the body. Today, though, with all due respect to fascia specialists all over the world, we are simply going to dip our toes in. That subject is too huge to do too much in this one topic about flexibility, but here we go. I'm diving in one topic about flexibility, but here we go. I'm diving in.

Susannah Steers:

Fascia is a network of thin fibrous connective tissue that wraps around and supports every muscle, tendon, ligament and organ in the body. It's infused in everything. When fascia is healthy, it's flexible and it allows tissues to glide smoothly over each other, facilitating free and efficient movement. However, when fascia becomes tight due to lack of movement, injury or inflammation, it can restrict the muscles and tissue movement, leading to reduced mobility and even to pain. Gil Headley, a prominent American fascia researcher, explained fascia in a way that made it very clear for me.

Susannah Steers:

Picture a tree in your mind's eye Nice, tall tree with a beautiful, thick bark around its trunk. Think about how that tree moves. The leaves rustle and the branches wave in the breeze. In a strong wind you might even see the trunk begin to sway, but the bark is fixed to that trunk. There is no movement at all between the bark and the trunk of to sway, but the bark is fixed to that trunk. There is no movement at all between the bark and the trunk of the tree underneath.

Susannah Steers:

Humans, on the other hand, have fascial tissue wrapped around and through every tissue in the body. Our skin can slide on the muscles and bones and fat underneath, our blood vessels and our nerves can slide over around and in between our muscles and organs and bones for an incredible level of mobility across our entire system. We're not like trees. We need differentiated movement between our various structures so we can move in all the big and little ways that we need to move in our lives. Some of that's functional in terms of just keeping us alive and some of it is moving around in space.

Susannah Steers:

So if you're looking for freedom of movement, it's important to keep your fascia healthy and happy. What keeps fascia healthy? Hydration. What hydrates fascia? Movement. The best way to hydrate fascia is to drink water and move your body around in as many different ways as you can. Movement is what brings water into your fascial tissues. When we're too sedentary or when we move too much in the same way all the time our fascial tissues can become dehydrated, they lose their ability to slip and slide around easily, they become sticky and they thicken up, reducing mobility. Not through tension in the muscles themselves, but because the fascial tissue has lost its fluidity. It's less like water and now is a little more like Velcro. That's extreme, but I think you get the drift. Traditional stretches will help a little, but to make real, lasting change you'll need to make sure you're hydrating enough and that you're moving, shaking, rolling, twisting and manipulating your tissues with movement as much as you can to rehydrate the fascial tissues to their slippery, fluid state. It's like rehydrating a dry sponge. You can't just run water over it, you have to squeeze and twist the sponge around so that the water penetrates it. Well, if you starve a body of movement, the fascia will lose much of its fluid quality over time, and that means stiffness. So let's keep that fascia happy.

Susannah Steers:

Okay, now we're going to talk about flexibility in the way that most people think of it, in the muscles. According to the National Institutes of Health, the main functions of the skeletal muscles are to contract, to produce movement, sustain body posture and position, maintain body temperature, store nutrients and stabilize joints. So now we got to talk a little bit about muscles, because there's a bunch of things here that I think are important. Each one of your muscles is made up of a whole bunch of muscle fibers grouped into little bundles called motor units. A motor unit is simply one motor neuron or a nerve cell and the muscle fibers that it innervates. There are lots of motor units within each muscle. The power of a muscle contraction is determined by the number of motor units activated, not how hard they activate. So that's sometimes a little bit of a head spin. The message that comes down the chain from the nervous system is the same. It's kind of like a binary switch. The motor neuron turns its associated fibers on and off. On and off. When lots of different motor units within a muscle get the message, we get a really strong muscle contraction with lots of fibers and lots of motor units contracting together. When only a few of those motor units get the cue, then the muscle contraction is weaker. I mention this only because it shows us an important link between muscles and the nervous system, which has its own influence on your flexibility. So let's go back to muscles on a larger scale now.

Susannah Steers:

Muscles are elastic tissues that are designed to contract and lengthen to facilitate movement. They work in pairs around a joint. When a muscle contracts and gets shorter on one side of a joint, the muscle on the other side of the joint needs to be able to extend or lengthen, and that allows the joint to either flex or extend. Well, if either one of those actions is impaired, movement will be impacted. Since our focus today is flexibility, let's look on how we can create the necessary length in our muscles to balance the joints for optimal function.

Susannah Steers:

The first thing people usually think of when it comes to flexibility is a stretch. Stretching works to improve flexibility in a muscle by gradually lengthening and loosening the muscle fibers and surrounding connective tissues. When you stretch, you create a gentle tension that extends the muscle fibers and relaxes the muscle itself. This process temporarily disrupts the bonds between muscle fibers, making them more pliable and increasing the available range of motion. Regular stretching helps to maintain this extended state, reducing stiffness and improving overall mobility.

Susannah Steers:

Now, when I was a kid and dance was all I thought about, stretching was everything. Without really understanding what I was doing, I contorted myself into all kinds of weird positions to get a better, deeper stretch, which I thought would help me split, kick, twist and do all kinds of dancerly things better. I did some pretty dumb stuff back in the day, and often to extremes, but over the years I've learned a much more strategic approach to creating flexibility. That includes stretching, but that also includes some important distinctions about how and when. So there's many different kinds of stretching.

Susannah Steers:

We're going to talk about three today. First one is static stretching. Static stretches are probably the kind of stretch most people are familiar with. You stand, you lie or you sit, still holding a position where you're lengthening the targeted muscle, essentially moving the two ends of the muscle further away from each other. You typically hold a stretch for somewhere between 30 seconds to a minute and then move on to the next bit, gently moving across the body. This way can help you feel more fluid and even experience a sense of lightness in your muscles that I really enjoy. It can be really relaxing.

Susannah Steers:

But if your goal with a stretch is to actually increase the length of the muscle for a longer term, save your deep stretches for after you've finished a more vigorous activity. I call this a developmental stretch, and these deeper, more intense static stretches will work best when you're still warm, but after the immediate demands for strength, power and speed have passed. You don't want to do these ones immediately prior to your activity because it's possible that your performance may suffer as a result. You know you've lengthened the muscles out. It might be harder to go for a good hard run with all of the muscles long and loose and relaxed, but after the fact you can take advantage of the effects of all that movement in the muscle and get perhaps a deeper stretch than you would if you approached it cold.

Susannah Steers:

When a muscle is really tight, static stretches can feel hard to do, depending on the reason that a muscle is tight. And, yes, your body has a reason that it does things. It doesn't always make sense to us, but the body makes choices to do what it can for us in the moment. So, depending on the reason that a muscle is tight, it can be a challenge to get length in individual muscles. It's important to pay attention to your posture and your positioning as you do a stretch that's hard for you, that muscle that you're really going after because it's been tight for a while, it's used to being short and your body likely has some interesting compensations all lined up to help you manage that. So here it's worthwhile to be very specific.

Susannah Steers:

Make sure you're stretching what you think you're stretching. It's better to maintain a good position and a relatively small range of motion to stretch the muscle you want. You know you want to feel a little bit of a pull rather than to pull yourself into a big position that feels extreme stretch, that soothes your ego but doesn't really get at what you're trying to do. A little humble pie can be your best friend here. I think of things like the figure four stretch. You know where you're lying on your back. You've got one knee up and the other one crossed over it. I see a lot of interesting variations there, with people tipped over to one side, the hip hiked up, the back arched all kinds of crazy positions. Look to get as much of a neutral position as you can and just go after that one muscle where it's available.

Susannah Steers:

If we want to get loose and fluid before our favorite sports and activities and we know that static stretches are not necessarily the first choice ahead of those, what do we do? Well, we do something called dynamic stretching, and it might not look like the kind of stretching you're used to. This type of stretch uses momentum and fundamental movements taken from your sport or your chosen activity. For example, runners might gallop and hop, while swimmers might swing their arms around in different ways. It involves the active tightening of your muscles and moving your joints through their full range of motion throughout the stretch. This kind of stretching can improve speed, agility and acceleration. It gets you loose and primed for adventure. The use of functional and sport-specific movements helps increase muscle temperature and decrease muscle stiffness. It's not about going hard right away, though. Stay loose and easy. You can lunge, hop, kick, swing, twist and gallop to your heart's content. Just remember it's a warm-up. Get there gently.

Susannah Steers:

Since we're here for the deep dive, let me describe yet another kind of stretching called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, or PNF. Pnf stretching is a technique that involves both stretching and contracting the muscle being targeted. It typically includes three main steps First, the muscle is stretched, then it's contracted against resistance, often with a partner's help, and finally it's stretched again. We're basically taking advantage of a moment of natural relaxing into extension that happens immediately after a muscle contraction, and amplifying it with a deepening stretch. This method can sometimes enhance flexibility and increase the range of motion more effectively than standard stretching techniques can. It's not for everyone, though, and I think it's best done with someone who understands your anatomy pretty clearly and who knows how deep to go and when it's not a good idea to do this kind of stretch. It can be pretty intense and you can get hurt doing it if you don't know what you're doing. So now that we have these different strategies for stretching, the next question is to ask whether a stretch is really what you need when your body feels tight.

Susannah Steers:

At the beginning of this episode, we talked about how the joints are held together and we explored the notion of muscles working in pairs around a joint. I want you to keep those thoughts in mind for a minute, because I think this is really interesting. Sometimes, when a muscle feels like it needs a really good stretch, it doesn't. When there are postural challenges or movement inefficiencies, the muscles on either side of the joint are likely working in an imbalanced way. So what that might mean is that the muscles on either side of the joint are not doing their partnering dance well enough to get good function.

Susannah Steers:

Picture your neck and your shoulder girdle for a minute. This won't work for everyone, but it will probably work for a whole bunch of people, particularly those who tend to be a little round-shouldered from spending hours sitting in front of the computer. Trace your hand along the long trapezius muscles that run from the top of either side of your neck down to the outside of your shoulder. If you put your hand over top of your collarbone and squeeze the muscles between your shoulder and your neck, you're likely going to have a fistful of trapezius. It might feel really tight, and if you do spend hours riding a desk, you may even experience stiffness and soreness in these muscles. You do your best to stretch them out, but does that ever really solve the problem? In this example, when the shoulders are kind of rounded forward and there's a bit of a slouch, the muscles at the front of the chest, the pectoralis muscles, for example, are likely pretty short and tight.

Susannah Steers:

The trapezius muscles those ones that we've been talking about on the back of the body, are getting pulled into length, while they are also trying to support the load of the upper body. If you've ever tried to hold a bowling ball away from your body with an outstretched arm for any length of time, you'll know that it's much harder to do than supporting that same bowling ball with your arm bent and close to your body so that trapezius muscle becomes long and weak. A stretch will feel good in the moment, but the tightness will return again and again because you're not solving the problem. What that particular joint needs is actually a tightening up or a strengthening of the long weak muscle and an elongation of the shorter one. The pectoralis muscle needs lengthening and the trapezius needs strengthening. Often, though, what gets stretched is the long one, the trapezius, because it's the one talking loudly and telling you it's tight and uncomfortable and a stretch in the moment feels better. So if you're consistently tight in one group of muscles and you aren't getting relief from stretches, you might want to consult a professional to help you figure out how to balance the muscles around the joints a little better. It might mean releasing some, it may mean uptreating the muscles around others, and it might mean a little bit more of a global movement strategy, but a generic stretch or warm-up may not be serving you well enough. So just something to think about.

Susannah Steers:

If you've known me for any length of time, you'll know I've been fascinated by the way the state of the autonomic nervous system impacts our posture, our movement and our way of inhabiting our bodies and living in the world. There is evidence to show that low intensity stretching increases the activity of our parasympathetic nervous system, that rest and digest side of things, improving all our restorative functions like relaxation and sleep. Recent evidence even shows improvements in things like heart rate variability with low intensity stretching. More high intensity stretches may activate the sympathetic nervous system but promote flexibility in other ways really just that whole body movement thing. But this might explain another benefit of doing dynamic stretches before a race, for example. Right, you're getting the activation of those muscles. With more dynamic stretching, your nervous system is getting woken up, so you're ready for a race. The static stretches are probably better as you're winding down. Pnf stretches seem to straddle the autonomic scale, providing benefits for both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of your nervous system.

Susannah Steers:

Finally, as you already likely know, I am a firm believer that how we move is a reflection of our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual practice, experiences, habits, training and beliefs. There is no real way to compartmentalize. These things all exist within us at the same time, in varying degrees of activity. And as I sail through my 50s, towards 60, and with a history of dementia in my family, I think about my cognitive health a lot more these days. Recent research has begun to explore the connection between physical exercise and cognitive functions, particularly focusing on how improvements in physical activity might enhance mental flexibility and acuity, which is critical for tasks involving problem solving, multitasking and adapting to new information and to change. Studies in the past few years provide pretty strong evidence on this relationship, highlighting significant findings in the domain of cognitive and mental performance, and, as I understand the research, it really seems that just moving your body a lot, challenging your strength with things like high intensity interval training and improving your cardiovascular fitness can lead to enhancements in mental and cognitive flexibility. This is obviously mediated by complex neurophysiological mechanisms that boost brain function and adaptability. All this to say that flexibility in all its various manifestations is important for whole person health. When we can access a state of flexibility in body, mind and spirit, we're happier, healthier, more relaxed and more functional human beings. And if this little excursion into flexibility has reminded me of anything, it's that living the lives of our bodies to the fullest that we are capable is good for us and for everyone else.

Susannah Steers:

And with that, it's time to sign off and go out and play. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks. For now, let's get moving. Thank you.

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