If you’ve been stretching for months and your mobility and flexibility have not improved, here’s a likely explanation as to why. And it is not because your muscles are somehow just ridiculously tight. Whenever we start talking about mobility and flexibility, obviously one of the biggest complaints I run into across the board and have for the last few decades is people say like I do stretching and do mobility all the time.
I come from a martial arts background so people are always trying to get deeper into squats and deeper into splits, et cetera, because they want to be able to kick higher. That’s all cool. I’m not going to do a whole lecture on why sometimes that’s a bad idea, because again flexibility and performance don’t go hand in hand, but we do know that we all need a basic level of mobility and flexibility to get through life.
And very often people work at it and work at it and wind up incredibly frustrated because they can make progress in a session maybe, but then it doesn’t last. So the next time they go back they’re like I am always tight, right? That’s what I always hear. I am always tight. It doesn’t matter how much I stretch the next morning I wake up and I have to start from scratch.
So if that is you, we’re going to spend the next few minutes talking about why that might be happening from a brain-based perspective, because one of the things you have to understand is that your range of motion, your flexibility is governed by your brain. It is not governed by the local tissue.
Now before I get into the neurology behind all this, if you are a movement professional of any kind, a doctor, a therapist, a coach, massage therapist, physical therapist, occupational therapist, yoga, pilates, martial arts, basketball tennis, whatever. If you’re a movement professional of any kind, then you’re interested in blending what you’re awesome at with current, modern, pain and movement neuroscience, go to the pinned comment, click the link there to either email us or set up a call because we’d love to share or live to talk with you to see if our education can offer you something.
Now, having said that, let’s get back into this whole mobility thing. Let’s start off practically. What I want you to actually do is test a few flexibility things on yourself. So maybe go ahead and do a forward bend, see how the hamstrings feel.
Try to move into the basics of let’s say a cossack squat or something just to see how your adductors and whatever your hips are feeling. If you want to check something in your shoulders, check your shoulders, check your spine. All right, because we, again, we all need a kind of base level of mobility and flexibility to get through our day and do our sports or whatever it is.
So I want you to get a baseline of where you’re at. Once you have that baseline, what we’re going to say now is the reminder that your mobility, your flexibility, particularly is not governed by local tissues. It is governed by your brain.
Now, one caveat I will say within this is I do get the question all the time about genetics. And this is something I’ve been fascinated about my whole life as well because again, I was a martial artist, might kick people in the head and I always struggled even as a child with like doing straddles and doing splits and everything in class. Some people seem to be able to do it really easily and I had to work at it, work at it, work at it, and it was always excruciating. I never enjoyed it.
Now, is there then a genetic component to mobility and flexibility? And you should go like this, yes, right? But how much? Well, the most current research that we can find on this is that your general flexibility levels are governed at a 50 to maybe 57% by your genes. So if you’re super stiff, call your folks up, tell them, thanks a lot.
And if you’re super hypermobile and you can’t stand up in a heavy wind, call your parents to say, thanks a lot because their genetics do play a role in our level of flexibility and mobility. But if I say, hey, 50% of this is governed by genetics, what does that leave? The other half is stuff that I can deal with. Stuff that I can do, stuff that I can change.
And so as a brain-based practitioner, this is what we’re always focused on. We can have genetics conversations all day, but I’m interested in what you can do behaviorally and from a practice perspective that will actually make a change. So even if you are naturally genetically tight, does that mean then that your local tissues are always in charge of your level of flexibility? No.
We know that our level of movement is governed by the brain. Your brain decides how much range of motion to give you based off a whole lot of decision-making that it has to do given the current environment that it’s operating in, all right?
So let me just give you a simple example. If, let’s say, I have a normal stride length, right? And it’s pretty good. And in order to take a big step, I have to have some hip flexibility, hip flexor mobility, et cetera. And if I’m walking on this mat or I’m on the sidewalk here in sunny Las Vegas and it’s nice and warm out there, my brain, as long as it can see stuff, doesn’t have a big reason to change my current level of step length or step speed.
But if you then put me on a plane and you fly me into somewhere cold and snowy and icy and I open the front door and I step out, my brain will automatically do what? It will change my gait pattern.
It will actually reduce my range of motion. It will create tension in certain areas of my body in order to protect me from slipping on ice and falling and injuring myself. That’s just a simple example that everything that is happening in our body is governed by the brain based off its interpretation of the environment that it’s currently in and its understanding of what’s happening inside us.
So as brain-based practitioners, if someone has stiffness or inflexibility, we have to look at multiple systems, their eyes, their inner ear, the respiratory system, their joint proprioception. We have to look at their ability to sense the ground. And whenever we look deeply into the research, this is all actually interconnected.
We now know that if you have poor plantar sensation, meaning you can’t really feel the bottom of your foot very well, we can do eye drills and that will improve. Yes, there’s research that shows that. All these systems are weighting, as in how much something weighs. Your brain is weighting the information coming from your feet versus what’s coming from your eyes and it will shift its weighting of these different input systems based off what we do.
So I already had you test a bunch of different things. I said, okay, test your hamstring flexibility, adductors, rotation, spine, shoulders. Let’s do something now to stimulate one of our other systems and see if it changes things. We’re going to test your vestibular system. I want you to put your feet together or if you’re feeling kind of spicy, you can do it on one foot.
If you have terrible balance, do neither of those things, okay? Keep your feet wide and hold on to a wall. I don’t want anyone to fall and hurt themselves.
But let’s say we’re going to be here feet together. I’m going to use the camera as my target. You can use your thumb.
You’re going to focus on your thumb. I’m just going to focus on my thumb and the camera so you can see what’s happening. And I’m going to again, turning my head back and forth. This is called a vestibulocular reflex exercise.
All right, vestibular, meaning my inner ear, ocular eyes. My eyes are not moving, my head is. This is one of the most basic reflexes in the human body.
I want you to go at a pretty good pace, all right? Now you can do that 10, 20, 30 times or up to a minute and you may go, whoo, I’m a little bit dizzy. If you’re dizzy, that may be too much, all right?
So go at a speed, go at a distance, whatever that is comfortable for you. But I do want it to feel challenging to your balance.
After you’ve done this, I then want you to go up and down. All right, we’re just going to do yes as it knows. We’ll do that for about 10 more seconds.
We’ll relax, whoo, shake out any tension, let your head clear and then do what? Reassess, all right? Did that make a change for you? Did that change your range of motion?
Now it didn’t do a huge amount for me. It’s a little bit better, but I do a lot of vestibular work. So that’s not that hard.
It’s not that stimulating for me. For you, it may have made an enormous difference. So this is just an example of one of the things that we can look at.
Now for me, in order to get more out of this drill, I probably have to make it harder. How can I make a vestibular drill harder? Well, I can go faster. I can go longer. I can change my stance so that now instead of having two feet on the ground, I have one and I can go a little bit faster. All right, so I now challenge my vestibular system more. And guess what? All of a sudden for me, that feels much better.
So everything that we do is changing our brain’s perception of what’s happening internally and what’s happening externally. And that ultimately is going to determine how much range of motion and flexibility your brain is going to allow you in any given moment of the day.
Now, the next question that always comes up is, okay, cool. I did some vestibular work, or I did some vision work, or I did some breathing, or I did some other neuro stuff. And I went from here to now I can comfortably touch my toes. How do I make it stick? Because I can also get to the point that I can touch my feet from stretching, from doing kind of classic stuff, from rolling my foot on a ball. How do I make it stick?
This again comes back to your brain. Whenever we do brief sudden interventions that make the brain relax around movement and we get more range of motion, that does not automatically mean that that system is now fixed. If I have issues with my vestibular system, a 30 second drill done once is unlikely to create a long term change, just like anything else.
So number one, you have to identify the problematic systems and you have to begin training them. If you find that doing some basic vestibular work massively improves your mobility, you already know what you need to be working on. About five to 10 minutes a day, you need to add vestibular drills to your current regimen.
But the other thing that we have to do is convince the brain that it is now safe to be in that new position, because this is another part of the evaluative process that your brain goes through.
It says, okay, cool. I know my balance is better right now because I’ve gotten some vestibular stimulation. I’ll take the brakes off. I’ll allow you that range of motion.
But now we need to convince the brain that this range of motion is just as safe as this range of motion, right? So this is just as safe as this.
And how do we do that? Adding tension. Once you achieve a new range of motion, I tell people you need to strengthen in that range of motion because your brain, again, will maybe allow you to go there. But then when you begin adding speed or load or complexity to it, it will start to go, hey, I’m not so sure about this.
So what we typically will do with most of our clients is once they’ve achieved a new range of motion, let’s say they started here, we’ve done some work and now they’re here. What do we do? We’re going to add isometrics into the mix now.
How am I going to do that? Well, I’m thinking about this whole range of motion. All right. So if I’m down in this position, cool, I can just take my hands and I can push into my shins, right? So I’m kind of using my entire anterior chain, if you want to call it that, of my body to create pressure.
But once again, the problem that we see is that your brain wants to ensure that it can create tension in this newfound position in any direction. So just simply coming here and pushing my fingers further into my toes, then pushing into my shin is insufficient.
I also need to begin doing stuff with the rest of my body. So I may be here holding this position. And at the same time, I’m now pulling. ‘m imagining pulling my heels backwards. I’m moving them to the back while I’m holding this position. And then I may need to add rotation to it. All right. Or I may use a band. I put the band around my waist. And so I’m here. And now as I’m here, I’m actively resisting a band pulling in this direction, pulling in this direction.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that you have to get to the newfound range of motion and you need to create tension in 360 degrees of motion, not just in one.
I see this mistake made all the time. People are like, oh, you can stretch and then you have to strengthen.
Yep, but strengthen how? You have to strengthen globally. You have to make sure that the brain is comfortable creating tension in all ranges in all directions in that newfound position. Otherwise, the brain will say that area is not cleanly mapped. I don’t trust it. And it will begin reducing that range of motion all over again.
So if you are struggling with this or you have clients that constantly struggle with this whole idea of mobility gets better and then it goes away. Flexibility gets better then it goes away. This is how you approach it from a brain-based perspective.
You look at all the systems, the eyes, the inner ear, respiration, proprioception, tactile sensation. You find the issues that are problematic. You begin solving those. That will give you newfound range of motion. And once you have that newfound range of motion, you add tension to it, not just in one direction, but in all directions.
It takes work, but once you do that, you can take a person that has struggled with flexibility their entire life and change it in a matter of days. All right? It will start changing in a matter of seconds.
And then as you begin acquiring more repetition, you begin acquiring more strength, and that kind of 360 degree perspective, all of a sudden, like I said, years of struggle can disappear in days.
So if you are a movement coach of any kind, doctor, therapist, whatever, go to the pinned comment. If you want to talk to us about this stuff, click on the link there to email us or set up a call. We love working with elite professionals who are interested in building a bridge between their biomechanical competencies and what we now know from kind of modern neuroscience.
So if that’s you, you’re interested in seeing if we would be a good fit, set up a call, otherwise get started with this. And I hope that you find it incredibly effective for yourself.
