Sunday, March 2, 2008

All Body Parts are Related

One of the more frequent questions I get is, "how do I stretch the .......... muscle" fill in the blank.
Sometimes I am at a loss to tell folks what to work on. Let's take the groin muscles, commonly tight in most people. Usually from sitting too much, the back muscles tighten, and to take the load off the lumbar spine, the groin can and will tighten to take some pressure off. (for example, the psoas muscle, which attaches to either side of the lumbar spine, and goes through the pelvis inside the medial aspect of your femur, or thigh bone. When it tightens while you are seated, it takes weight off of the low back.)

When I say tighten, I do not mean "spasm". A spasm is a complete and utterly painful contracture of a muscle. A tightening of the muscle is a low grade tension, maybe barely noticable, that over time shortens the muscle. So when you finally try to stretch, you don't know what you did that made you so tight!!

Do several different stretches, and you may find that your tight groin can be released by doing the cobra!
The above is just an example. Next weekend we are filming the second howtostretch workout DVD, where all these ideas are demonstrated, with workarounds and tips!! It will be posted in the blog. This week, the first DVD goes to the printer, more on that later!

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