Does Flexibility Prevent Injury?
Discussing the details of how flexibility affects joint health.
Most of us know that flexibility is an important physical attribute to cultivate. But do you really know how it affects our body when we perform?
We can define flexibility as the capacity of a given muscle (or group of) to undergo extension. Contrary to some of the old beliefs, flexibility does not necessarily involve active movement. What determines the limit of a person’s flexibility is the reflexive action of the mechanoreceptors. When we train for flexibility, we are training our muscle proprioceptors to determine a new safety threshold. In other words, we are tricking our brain to let us go further into extension. As much as it is important to be flexible, there are cautions to observe.
People often include flexibility training in their workout regime with the naiveness that it will suffice. Although it is essential, being only flexible might create a false sensation of the ability to support external load in newly acquired ranges of motion. What do I mean?
When you increase flexibility in a given segment of the body, you gain a few degrees in the joint. However, the soft tissue is still not ready to hold external load. That is when injuries might happen, and it is something we need to keep in mind.
Excellent! Now, if flexibility alone does not do the job, what do we need to do? When we free up space in our joints from flexibility training, we open a few degrees of temporary awesomeness to work on top of. To improve the capacity to hold external load, we need to strengthen the segment. That is when mobility training comes in. That’s right, if you didn’t already know, mobility training and strength training are almost the same. Hence, the statement that strength is the most important physical capacity to develop.
Shifting back to flexibility training, it is imperative to understand that after a flexibility session, we increase what we call Articular Workspace which is the available range of motion to work with, actively. That workspace is now abundant passively, increasing a gap between the active and passive range. The soft tissues are still fragile in these extreme ranges. The next step is to close the gap because these newly acquired ranges of motion lack neural control. We need to have lots of caution when picking up weights after this. The wisest thing to do is to start stimulating these joints actively to establish control.
In future issues, we will discuss mobility more in-depth. To conclude, the important takeaway is to understand the concept of articular workspace and the difference between passive vs. active gains in joints. These differences can be small or large, and we should always try to shorten it.
Let me know what you think of flexibility training, its correlation to resistance training, and how you include it in your training program. Also, let me know if these concepts make sense to you.
Strength to you!
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Originally published at https://craftingmovement.substack.com.
