Stretching Techniques and Performance Myths

but the the first thing is you got you have to go through at least some type of orthopedic assessment and then figuring out okay how do we unwind this which a lot of it is something that people say the evidence-based crowd will say it doesn't work like stretching stretching could be invaluable here because if i have someone who can get their arm overhead we might actually be able to stretch that enough to then get an extra 15 to 20 degrees of range of motion Now I can train in that position So let say this hurts Okay But this doesn't hurt. All right. So landmine presses, not a real bodybuilder thing to do. But if you can't go overhead and you want to go overhead, well, you can find an angle that you can still apply tension without causing joint irritation. Gotcha. And then we're going to use stretching. We're going to use activation work in range liftoff. anything that we can use to free the joint up. But stretching in this aspect is never going to work unless you train as well. So we'll have people do the stretching, see if we can get more range of motion. Now we need to use work movements, loaded movements to then make it stick. And over time, if I can get the brain to not safety guard that joint, I can actually work on it. So then movement is your medicine at that point. It's like use low loading. Don't lift. And if you feel pain, stop. So it might be like I have a client right now. Anything over five kilos, she goes overhead, hurts, but she can she can lift five kilos. Once she hits 10 reps. Now, fatigue management is an issue because now the joints fine until she hits fatigue. So the prescription for this is stay at five kilos. When it doesn't hurt at 10 reps, try 11. When it doesn't hurt at 11, go to 12. So you have to slowly get this stuff better because in a lot of cases, this tissue, it can take months to fix. Muscles are really easy. You have a muscle issue. Muscles can repair themselves in 48 to 72 hours. If it's a soft tissue injury in the joint, like a tendon, ligament issue, or fascia issue, then that's going to take a lot longer. Tendons can take months. Ligaments can take about twice as long as tendons. So let's say you have a tendon issue. It could take you three or four months. A ligament issue could take you seven or eight months or longer. A fascial issue could take you a year or longer. Gotcha. Because this stuff doesn't reorganize itself that quickly. Right. And the older you get, the longer it takes. Awesome. Sounds like my left shoulder. but this is why peptides are great awesome before i came over i had a talk with a guy who's coming on for training and he's getting really close to getting his pro card and he's having some some issues we were talking about it he says yeah i think it's my my left hamstring he goes i think it's the the medial so semi-membranosus tendinose something like that and i go well hold on a second before you start dialing in on what muscle you think it is just keep in mind there's a lot of stuff in that area. So where you're feeling it could be the issue or it could be something else. So we keep talking and he goes, yeah, I really feel it when I do single leg or unilateral leg press. I go, interesting. So let's investigate that. Now, when you do unilateral, there's two different ways people are going to do this. Are you putting that one leg in the middle of the sled and doing it that way? Or are you keeping it off to the side and basically doing a bilateral, but removing a leg because that's interesting that you asked that because i train at two different places when i train at one place i put my foot in the middle of the sled and it doesn't hurt at the other place i can't do that because the rails are there i have to move keep my leg out to the side that's where i feel it i go okay so is it a semi-membranosus tendinosis issue or is it your adductor because that would make sense now that your leg is out there that it's already being stretched and if you have some type of adhesion in that adductor there's going to be a reason why you feel it on that one and not the other leg press and he goes should i even think about that and i go well it's not something a bodybuilder would normally think because it's it's a 95 sagittally dominant sport right so what are bodybuilders good at moving things this direction they're terrible at moving things to the frontal plane than the transverse plane so they just they never tend to do stuff because they're not bodybuilding exercises So like getting people doing more weighted mobility as some of their exercise. And yes, stretching, even though people will, I'll die on this hill where people say stretching doesn't work. It's just a tool. It works just as well as everything else if you know how to use it correctly. So people will tell me, well, stretching doesn't work because when I stop stretching, I lose my flexibility. I'm like, cool, then bench pressing doesn't work. Like, what do you mean? I go, well, if you built your bench press up to 405 pounds, you didn't bench for three years, you wouldn't be able to bench 405 pounds. So now if stretching doesn't work because you stopped using it and you lost some of that flexibility, then bench press also doesn't work because you stop doing that and you're going to shrink and you're going to lose size. So it's a really weird argument. And people have to stop throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just understanding these are all tools and those tools are going to be appropriate on demand for when you need them. It blows my mind that some people will say that stretching doesn work That kind of crazy I mean do you know Coach Christopher Sommer at Gymnastic Bodies So he probably one of the most well gymnastic coaches He created a whole program about building the gymnastics body and brought scalable gymnastics, calisthenics stuff to general population. And 40 years, he was a national coach for American Gymnastics. So I've known him, God, 15 years. And I was in Phoenix recently. We went out to dinner, and we were talking about all this. And I go, I don't understand. Gymnasts do like two to three hours of stretching, and then they get on the rings. Or they do two to three hours of stretching, and they go tumble. And people go, well, it's going to kill your performance. And these are the best athletes in the world. And they're all flexible as shit and also massively powerful. So it's such a weird thing to say stretching isn't helpful when you have martial artists and you have gymnastics and you have all these people that do tons of stretching and still perform at a high level. but a lot of people have a misunderstanding of what stretching actually is. And there's more, more ways to stretch than just like sitting in a static stretch. What are these other ways? So you got, I mean, ballistic stretching, dynamic stretching, which most people will know like when they're doing leg swings before workout. Right. And that's a good way to get into like rapidly extending the muscle and, and yeah, preparing the joint, preparing the muscle for dynamic movement. But you obviously have static stretching. I use a lot of PNF stretching. So basically, contract, relax. So if you look at stretching, it works on a number of things. We could look at what we talked about, biological tissue change. If you hold a static stretch for a long time, the tissue, because of the tension you're putting through the tissue, is going to now change shape biologically. That's the adaptation. Just like lifting weights causes the muscle to either put more sarcomeres in series or sarcomeres in parallel. The muscles either get longer or thicker. Stretching will do the same thing. Stretching is strength training. If you do a hard stretch, let's say you're doing a hurdler stretch on the floor, and you start to go forward, and all of a sudden you can't go forward anymore. Why can't you go forward? So, for example, can you do the splits? I can't. You can't. Okay. So I'm going to disagree. Like, you have the potential. Everyone has the potential to do the splits. You just have to convince your brain that you can do it. so if you stood up next to a dining room table could you put the heel of one leg on that table in like a half split yes so then could you put that on the ground turn around and put the other leg up there and that's a half split yes okay well there's no muscles that attach your legs to each other so if you can do a split with one leg and a split with the other leg you can do the splits the thing that keeps you from getting there is your brain saying i don't feel safe and secure so the brain contracts the muscles and you can't go further. So there's a neurological component and there's also a biological component as far as tissue quality and its ability to extend. So if you can get over those two hurdles, you can do the splits. So PNF stretching, you contract and you create relaxation in the muscles. So do a hard contraction, relax, you'll get a few degrees deeper. Do another contract, relax, a few degrees deeper. And then you can do an end range lift off by pulling yourself down with the muscles that are antagonistic to what you're doing. So let's say you're doing a middle split. You're going to feel it in your adductors mainly, right? Push through the floor, relax. You should sink down a little bit more. Push down the floor a little bit more, and you can do this five or six times. You get 10, 15 more degrees of range of motion. Once you get to that end range, kind of hang out there statically for a little bit of time. Then try to- How much time would you say? I would say a couple of minutes. Oh, wow. Couple of minutes. Oh, damn. So what about when everyone says like, you know stretching like 20 seconds max is what's recommended they're they're looking at studies that they're poor man they're poorly designed studies they're like okay if i do static stretching it's going to reduce power output okay so don't don't do excessive amounts of stretching if you're going to do olympic weight lifting or go or like do 100 meter sprints but bodybuilding isn't a sport of rapid dynamic movement and it's not typically most movements aren't as unstable as like running and doing agility and jumping and things like that. But like the most notorious study that I know of is the one that almost everybody will talk about. They did hard static stretching and then they tested their vertical jump and found their vertical jump was reduced. So therefore it reduces power output, but no one's going to stretch like that and go do vertical jump. And that effect will dissipate. So if you did static stretching and then you rest it and then you do some dynamic ballistic stretching your power output goes right back so it's silly to think that stretching itself is going to cause this down regulation and power production because we as long as you any anything you use any method or technique your body is going to eventually adapt to so yeah maybe initially you do some static

stretching and it's going to affect power output. But over time, your brain will figure out how to reduce that reduction in power output. So, and like I said, with physique work and bodybuilding, it doesn't really matter all that much because the weight lifting is just a vehicle to put tension in the muscle, but you can only apply tension in the positions you have access to. So if you have partial range of motion, you're not going to get the most out of that movement until you try to unlock more range of motion. And I remember Charles at one point, because Charles did ART. He had certifications, ART, acupuncture, all this stuff. And he had an IFBB pro, and this was decades ago, who was complaining that he had no peak in his biceps. He didn't know what happened. Charles annihilated his biceps with ART, and the guy put on like a half an inch immediately just by him improving the tissue quality and getting it to actually extend and contract again. Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, it's nuts. I've heard of stories like that, which is why I always try to get myself into stretching. But man, that shit's... Yeah. It's another job sometimes. Along with everything else we should be doing. Exactly. You already have a lot of stuff to do. So in some cases, it's just periodizing what you're doing. So if you can't get into a certain position, you may need... Consider doing more stretching and less weightlifting. but over time when you can get into that position without the stretching, then lengthen position and lengthen types of movements will help keep that as long as you don't load it up so much that you reduce length. How much time would you say, how much downtime would you say is necessary before going back to or receiving the same, having the same power output after stretching? So if you were to stretch and then go in your workout. Yeah. I know most people just try to stretch afterwards, but yeah, I mean, for what I've seen, it's like 15 minutes or so, but then you can speed that up with dynamic and ballistic types of stretching as well. Just do arm swings. So let's say if you were, if you were going to do dumbbell flies today and you've got to the point where you can barely do the fly, like, because maybe you spent the last three years really like stroking your ego and just, just progressive resistance and used to, you could do a really good fly. And now you're here or you have to bend your elbows a lot to get it up. Okay. Well, we've just used as a poor loading strategy over time that is good for tension, but it's also removing your ability to get into horizontal extension. So, all right, how about this? Let's take the weight down and start slowly getting into those positions, come down slow, hold it, use a PNF here where I can contract against the weight and then see if I can get more length and just keep doing that until you reestablish that. And it's amazing how quickly people grow. But I don't want people to take me take me out of context it's like it's not like you need to do his crazy stretching protocol and then go train yeah the key is to find the stretches that you can do for a few sets then go train and see if the stretching movements allow you to have new access to old ranges of motion you don't have anymore now i have to just put load in my hands and work through those ranges of motion and then the next workout let's check our range of motion maybe we need to do the stretches again to get more range of motion. But over time, you'll be able to pull the stretches out and you'll just be able to warm up and go into those positions. Wouldn't you say it's also just as effective for a bodybuilder to say, just stretch at night before bed or maybe even anytime after his workout? Yeah, it could be. It could be. I think that's a good strategy. But if you go to the gym and let's say you test your ranges, you're like, I feel really tight. People shouldn't be scared to stretch and then train. Okay, I see what you're saying. And the thing, again, if you, let's say you do lower your, your force output. Okay. Is there a way to work around this? Yeah. Just reduce the load every day. We have different amounts of force output anyways, right? So you might like, you've seen it one week, you go in, you're feeling really particularly strong that day and you smash it the next week you come in and that first warmup set just doesn't feel right. And maybe you've lost 10, 10 pounds off your eight to 12 rep max that you're doing today. Does that keep you from training or do you just finish the workout? It doesn't keep you from training. It doesn't keep you from training. Like you're not, you're not going to go, okay, I had to take 10 pounds off my dumbbell press. Fuck it. I'm going to go home. No, you'd probably still train anyways. And the next week you come in and you're strong again. So it's like, even if you have that small reduction in power, bodybuilding is not about that. Do you think it's valid though, for people to worry about progressive overload if they do so what's progressive overload uh continuously having stimulus to grow yeah well okay but the way they measure progressive overload is with their with their load it depends if we if we're talking about progressive overload from the traditional sense of trying to do one more rep add more weight but progressive overload could be increasing range of motion you can apply the concept progressive overload just means you progressively improved some aspect of what you doing So I even use this for endurance athletes. What's progressive overload for endurance athlete? Well, they're doing their endurance stuff. They're starting to make more red blood cells. So I can see on someone's labs where their red blood cells was this number. And then after three months of endurance training, it's this number and that's improved. That's progressive overload as well. Yeah. But I think it's more important for people to pay attention to their bodies and say, okay, we have to progress and you should be progressing something in most workouts. If you're not, you're probably doing something's not right. Like you're either using movements that aren't right for you, or you've tried, you've tried improving load or improving something a little bit too fast, which you can get away with for a small period of time. But eventually there's a ceiling where you're not going to be able to push more than that, unless you figure out why, like, what's the problem, like more, too much load, too much volume, too much frequency, not enough rest you know you push it for months you're going to feel that right and then you go okay well what's the logical thing to do do a deload either do a deload for volume or take a week off and let everything recover