Tightness vs. Tautness in Muscles

i feel the word tightness is one of the most overused words and people chronically stretching for hours and hours i did it with the um with a few of the guys i'm mentoring at the moment i was like right i'm i'm a prime example because my my matter interior top just slowly sorting out but i've never really been able to touch my toes so i was like i'm gonna do a lot of experiments like i'm not gonna stretch a single hamstring and i just did some hip thrusts i just did some things to like get the hip flexor activated all of a sudden like i found that range um and then then i did that horrible master release to get an extra few inches um but like look at those things like where's he like what's your thoughts on the people coming in with like the word tightness like what you feel is actually going on when people feel a sensation of tight well i mean for me their their body's searching for something right and most of the time it's trying to find a stable place stable safe area because your body is inherently doesn't like pain like pain is really important imagine if you didn't have pain and you stepped on a fucking rusty nail and you didn't know what was in there. And then you got a bacterial infection and you got septic and you fucking died. Right. So, you know, you, you, you, it's not that you don't want to feel pain. It's just, you want to feel the appropriate amount of pain and you want to recognize what that pain means. So when somebody feels a tight muscle the first thing we have to distinguish is okay what is is it tight or is it taunt Because those are two two very different things And if we want to think about that if we think tight is it short or taunt Is it long? Because the, the treatment pattern and what we might do might be completely different. So a lot of people with tight hamstrings, I would say the vast majority of them, they're not tight. They're tight because they're being pulled, taunt, they're being pulled to a long lengthened state and they're having a hard time holding on. So it's going to make it feel like tight, even though that's not exactly what it is. So considering that your hips are rotated anteriorly, that takes your ischial tuberosity and moves it up this direction. Well, that's the origin of your semimembranosus tendinosis in your biceps femoris longhead. and those are attached to biceps, long heads attached to the fibula and the other two are attached to your tibia. So as your hips start to rotate, well, that's going to affect your shin and how it rotates and how your foot rotates and our ankle rotates. But as you rotate and pull the origin away from the insertion, that's pulling that into a state of length, which then gets tight. It's like having a guitar and you're tuning your guitar and you keep tuning, you're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and it breaks. Like you just keep tightening and tightening and tightening. It's not functioning correctly. So in that situation, we think, okay, this needs to be shortened actually, but it's not in a good mechanical position to create force. So what we have to do is how do I put this muscle in a better resting position? Well, I've got to take the ischial tuberosity and bring it back towards its insertion points, which means I have to rotate the hip, which means the hamstring is not a great hip rotator. Um, a better hip rotators, the glute and the obliques. So if I can focus on my glutes and my obliques, I can rotate that back normally and naturally, and I can use my hamstrings to anchor it to the lower, lower limbs. Um, there's a, man, there's a lot of shit going on, right? We may have got to look. So as is the, psoas short or is it tight or taut you know shorter lengthen it what about the rectum you know all these things can can pull um the joints out of position could be sartorius if you look at the psoas back onto a little bit of the diaphragm stuff we're looking at as tight or torn would you look at rib cage position being the determining factor whether the psoas is actually tight or torn the rib cage is flared with that pelvic tilt you probably find this also an overly lengthened state no because i think the ribs follow the hips so and here's the thing um is it the psoas it's pulling everything down or is it something else that's the thing you got to think about what's the best muscle what's the muscle that has the greatest leverage to rotate your hips anteriorly rotate my hips anteriorly probably the right i would have thought right that's a good anchor point that's a good anchor muscle but this one has a more direct potential it's a muscle no one ever gives any love to you're looking at the start oh yes ah because that's a secondary hip flexor yeah so that's what i was thinking iliacus of course yeah yeah i mean because you just think of this iliacus right you think hip flexor everyone says psoas but then you go okay well you've got the psoas satoria secondary hip flexor rec fem is a powerful hip flexor so you go through all of these and no one ever goes what about the iliacus because it's attached to the inside of the hip and no one ever thinks about it right but it attaches in the same place so as does so and it holds on the entire hip so if you see this anteriorly especially anteriorly it's an inflare the best muscle that could be pulling that would be the iliacus because if the psoas was pulling on on anything it's going to be ripping your lower back so that's the one that's going to be ripping the shit out of your lower back but that's not the one that's going to be ripping on your hip that makes a lot of sense because if you look at the way that you know the the fibro orientation the psoas you're probably looking more of a lumbar stabilizer than it really is a hip flexor and that would make much much more sense looking at that yeah interesting well that is its number one job is a lumbar stabilizer and then the secondary jobs is as an extensor and a lumbar and a side flexor um and possibly you might even think a little bit of rotation to or stabilization or rotation but man there's a lot of there's a lot of pretty cool things i've been looking at lately with that type of thing and trying to think outside the box of what's really causing these problems. There's some stuff in the neck. I was looking at some old Paul Chek stuff about like the SCM obviously is a problem and then the SCM is going to affect the left scab you start looking at scalenes then i started looking at the hyoid muscles infra and super hynoid muscles in the as a neck flexors and also as their relation in the tongue and it's like i started looking at that as i think paul chick might have said this at some point of looking at those high-yield muscles as kind of the psoas of the neck. And I started thinking about the occipitates as being the glutes of the skull, right? Because if you have this issue where your head's rotating, let's say you're losing flexion and you're starting to come into like forward head posture, you know, you start thinking about what are the relationships of those small little muscles, the very top of the skull. And also what's the, what about the high wood muscles that are coming through here and attached into the neck as pulling this down and also extending your head back and be able to keep normal position of the head. Now I'm still junkie. I'm still junkie with it because I've only been thinking about this for the last three weeks, but it makes a lot of sense because everything's going to rotate. so and and everything pretty much rotates almost in the same way so the hips rotate very similar to the glen or humeral joints and that rotates very similar to how the head rotates on the axis the atlas that's really interesting if you want if you when you learn some of this stuff if you want to get any pick for that stuff i'm probably the an absolute yeah 100 like it's because because it was you know when certain things you start listening to things okay i'm starting to see some of the issues that I have like for a while um so like I I always find that like every now and again I feel almost like I come almost got like swirling glands and I'm like not ill though there's nothing going on here and I'm just getting worried about it for a while but almost literally like that like it feels like oh that is incredibly tight all of a sudden around here and I also find that like if I again if I rotate back that's where a lot of my upper back pain comes from so I I reckon there's a lot in that that could potentially be a lot of issues around my neck. So that's really interesting. This will blow your mind because I train, I have a lot of clients with Hashimoto's. And I was talking to Amanda, which you've seen me post her online a lot. Hashimoto's, I think she's lost 30 something kilos by now. And we've been straightening her back. But her neck is still there. We're still trying to fix that. It's gotten so much better, but we got a long road. When I was going through this hyoid muscles, which I was basically researching it for her, there's a lot of thyroid muscles or the hyoid muscles in relation to thyroid. And I'm thinking, okay, so when somebody has Hashimoto's and the brain starts sending out more TSH in order to get the thyroid to create more thyroid hormones, what does the thyroid do? Well, it hypertrophies. okay well if it's hypertrophy to the point where a doctor can palpate and tell that it's too big what's that doing to the muscles they cross it is it possible that they're pulling those muscles to a state of length and destabilizing them so i don't know this is the type of shit that keeps me up at night but it makes it makes sense that if that was dysfunctional and pushing on nerves or pushing on muscles and moving them into places they weren't supposed to be or in the lengths they weren't supposed to be that can destabilize them and if those those neck flexors get destabilized the scm has to work harder what does that do shortens position to forward head posture that that's that's that's really interesting yeah i'm i'm you know i'm with you on these things sort of like keep me up i'll i'll be getting my anatomy after we finish this i remember um the one that always blew my mind um i'll speak this about tommy but he came up solution i wonder if you have an idea of it as well that um i went to have you done be activated douglas hill no but i've done rpr which is it's like it's like uh be activated light yeah like incredibly there's a really weird seminar because it was so ridiculously painful like you've got to go i'm so interested i want it to continue but i'm so fed up of being prodded in my diaphragm that i just want to go home um yeah there's this one guy that came in i generally would have thought was a plant um unless unless i saw this marriage and spoke to the guy but he came in he had glass on he was blind in one eye and he got him up and doug's always managed to get people right people up for the right demonstrations he stopped playing around with these serratus interior it's like digging his thumb into his serratus interior and around the rib cage and this room and then he goes every time we go into his blind spot i'd flinch so he just slowly kept working and he got up and he went started to see blurs in my my eye so he kept working kept working and keep working. The next day he came in with his glasses on I just like what You know and like that that fuels like any knowledge i have an anatomy now it almost entirely fueled by that i was just like i want to know eventually i get dr so i'm going to ask him directly what's going on here and see if he knows but like that just like what yeah that's weird i don't know man i mean you gotta wonder if that was a plant or whatever but fuck who knows um i've seen them i've seen some crazy shit um