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All the previous Concept Wednesdays

Today we’ll be talking about Loaded Stretching.

This is part two of the stretching mini-series:

Flexibility Training Basics

In the previous post, we talked about how the main limiting factor in your range of motion was what was happening in your brain. Your body perceives certain ranges of motion with certain loads too threatening, and contracts the muscles to stop you from going any further. The threat your body perceives is relative to the effective load divided by your ability to generate force in that range.

Basically, the stronger you are in a range, the less threat is perceived. So how do you get strong in a range?

Contract

The key to getting stronger in a range is generating force with those muscles in that range. By contracting! By contracting the muscles you are stretching, you will cause the muscles to adapt to become stronger in that range. The greater the volume and intensity of the contraction, in general, the greater the response.

But the problem with contracting hard, is that as soon as you contract, your muscles shorten, and you’re no longer strengthening the desired range.

So the key is to add resistance to your stretch.

Leverage

One form of such resistance is your own bodyweight. When you stretch, you are nearly always using some amount of load. When you do a pike stretch, your torso is acting as the load pulling on your hamstrings. When you do a hip flexor stretch, the amount you push into the stretch is the load. Against that load, you are going to be contracting to hold yourself in that position. If you didn’t you would collapse.

But that’s a relatively low intensity contraction, so how do we increase the intensity of the contraction? By contracting against some unyielding resistance, we can increase the intensity of the contraction without changing the range in which we are contracting. For instance: if you get into a straddle splits position, the adductors must switch on to keep you from collapsing, but they aren’t working as hard as they could be. By trying to squeeze the legs together, you are going to increase the intensity of the adductor contraction, but the weight of your body against the unyielding surface of the floor will hold you in position.

Unfortunately, just like unyielding resistance not being a viable long term training solution by itself, neither is using unyielding resistance for training flexibility, as you can’t just keep squeezing harder.

Just like with any bodyweight exercise, leverage is your friend, and you can change your position to increase the load on the stretched muscles. For instance: doing a pike stretch on one leg is going to put a greater load on the hamstring than on two. As you increase load, the baseline contraction to hold you up will be higher, and the maximum voluntary contraction you can generate will increase too.

External Load

Whether that’s holding or wearing a weight, or even having someone else provide resistance, external load is another great way to increase the intensity of a contraction.

Training with Load

Training to improve your strength in a particular range follows the same rules as “regular” strength training for the most part. You need to train specifically, you need to progressively overload your training and you need enough stimulus to promote adaptation.

The important idea is that we only strengthen in a short range around the muscle length we are contracting at, so it is imperative that we are training in a useful range. A range that is close to our end-range. If you add load in such a way that you severely shorten your range, you aren’t going to improve much.

The next idea is that like other maximal strength training, you want to increase the load in that range to increase the intensity of the stimulus. How do you get strong with squats? You squat heavy weight. How do you get strong with your pike position? You pike with heavy weights.

Then we increase the volume of the stimulus to ensure adaptation. There are a few ways to approach this:

Train it as an isometric:

Hold and contract against resistance, once you get to a certain time threshold, you increase the ROM and/or weight.

Increase the time of the hold or the number of sets of holds you do to increase overall volume as you need.

Just as you would train an isometric strength exercise, you should program an isometric stretch similarly, use these tables as a jumping point and work up to eventually using 3-5 sets on average.

Train it as a dynamic:

Move towards your end range, pause at that range, then contract back out of that range. Repeat for repetitions.

Increase the number of repetitions, the length of the hold or the number of sets to increase overall volume as you need.

You probably don’t want to use a rep range similar to other dynamic exercises, but instead, consider how much time you’re spending near that end range, and try to progress using isometric hold times. Don’t forget, reps are just a convenient way to describe time under tension.

Neurological Magic

As a bonus, as you increase load, you may find the natural extra contraction of your muscles allows you to go deeper into a stretch than you would without a weight, so try to find that sweet spot.

Resources:

Comparison of PNF (a contracting stretch) vs Static Stretching

Emmet’s Blackboard: Loaded Progressive Stretching

Questions:

What’s your loaded stretch programming look like?

What’s your best leverage loaded stretches?

Why does it seem like fat people are naturally more flexible?