Transcription
This is why I stretch every single day. Here are the benefits that I found personally with myself. It helps my sleep. It helps reduce pain and decrease inflammation. And it takes me out of what's called the fight-or-flight mode. And I also stretch to counter all of the injuries that I've had over the years.
Most people have this confusion that the problem is the muscle. The muscle's too tight, so I need to stretch. That's actually not true. What really becomes tight is something that we're going to talk about called the fascia. If you think of a wet suit that surrounds the entire body, that would be fascia. And the thing about fascia, it's totally connected.
There's a very interesting short clip I want to share with you on the dynamics of how living or how alive your fascia is. Check this out. Alani Lajivan of the National Institutes of Health, however, made a bizarre discovery while learning acupuncture. She noticed that as the needle was inserted into the skin, something seemed to be grabbing and pulling at it. When Lajivan took these results to the lab, an MRI revealed that the collagen fibers of the fascia were actually winding themselves around the needle like spaghetti on a fork. And what's more, the fibroblast sent out chemical signals to the surrounding tissue, allowing it to expand and then relax. The fibroblasts that are inside the tissues up to several centimeters away, not just only at the needle, they expand. They respond. It relaxes the tissue. So, the research is showing that the best thing for fascia is for it to move, to stretch, and not be stagnant.
But what happens if you don't really move at all? If you're super sedentary, you haven't tried to touch your toes in a very long time, and you have body parts that haven't been through their full range of motion in a long, long while. When you injure your fascia, you develop scar tissue. So, what happens? The fascial layers can no longer glide. They get stuck together like glue. Healthy fascia is supposed to be dynamic, movable, flexible, and it even has electrical properties. And unhealthy fascia, especially if you've been injured, develop some disorganized pattern of connective tissue. And you might think, "Oh, I just have stiff muscles." No, you have stiff fascia. And I'm going to teach you really amazing stretches that I do every single night to undo all the bad effects of this accumulated stress that we have in our bodies.
Probably the worst-case scenario fascial problem is when someone has contractures. You see people with bad posture that are literally stuck forward, and they can't get out of this posture. So it's very unfortunate where this connective tissue literally keeps you in a frozen state, and now it's grown in that way and it's stuck, and it's very difficult, if not impossible, to undo that. If you start to find your body in a certain position, you want to actively and aggressively undo that position so you can keep things erect and keep your motion in your body. I mean, very similar to when I broke my leg. And in just 3 weeks, I had a cast down there. Well, when I took that cast off, literally my whole leg and the ankle was just kind of frozen. I had to undo it. And yes, there was atrophy of the muscle, but the fascia actually grew in a certain position. Why? Because there was no motion. I didn't move it, and I had to break up those adhesions and get it back to where it should be. If I just left it like that, it would just literally, over time, just fuse in that position.
And so there's a right way to stretch fascia, and there's a wrong way. The more that you can elongate that tissue, the better versus just a two-dimensional thing where maybe you're just touching your toes. I mean, that might help stretch your lower back, but I'm going to go through a lot deeper stretches. What you're going to be doing in this first stretch is you're going to be holding this uh band behind your back. Stretching all the stuff in the front upper chest and shoulder area. This is where we hold a lot of tension and where gravity starts pulling it down. So, we're going to reverse that. Basically, leverage using uh the band behind your back while you are looking in a certain direction and creating as much uh length as possible in that area. So, I might do this for like 30 seconds and then I relax. This will take care of the tension in your back and the neck and the shoulders.
Now, we're going to stretch the side of your back and underneath your arm and the shoulder all at once where we're doing a lateral bending exercise. And this really loosens up your shoulders by stretching in a position that you don't normally stretch in. So, we're going to do one side, and then we'll do the opposite side as well.
Number three is a very important area because it stretches out a muscle called the psoas. Psoas is a muscle in your core that attaches the upper body to the lower legs. And this muscle is the flexor of the hips. This gets tight when we sit all day or we drive long distances. So we're going to do this with one leg first. And you're just going to mimic what I'm showing you right now. So we're stretching one psoas muscle at a time. Then the next stretch, we're going to stretch both psoas muscles at the same time where you're kneeling and you're bending backwards and you're taking all that fascial tension through the core. This is like taking your spine and kind of like a, and ringing it out. Okay, as we stabilize the lower part of the body with one side and then we'll reverse it and do the opposite side.
All right, this last one kind of combines a couple things. It is we're going to be using the band to get all the upper chest and your shoulders relaxed. So, we're going to be kneeling and bending backwards with this band. Boy, this will take a lot of tension out of the entire body.
So, sometimes people will tell you that the fascia holds trauma. But when we get into emotions and severe stress and especially injury or even the most severe type of stress, which is uh major losses, I personally recommend the technique they use in Dianetics. And the word Dianetics means what the mind is doing to the body. So let's say, for example, you're 5 years old and you're climbing a tree and the tree is in the front part of your yard and your friend's next to you and as you hit the ground your friend is laughing at you, and at the same time, it's raining and then your mother in the distance is saying, "Come in and eat. It's time to eat." Of course, we have the impact, uh the dust, uh around your sinuses and then the emotions that you might have of fear, the fear of falling. And on top of everything, maybe you went slightly unconscious. When that happens, things in that moment can act as triggers 20 years down the road or even longer. So, let's say 20 years down the road, it's raining and you feel achiness in your lower back and you're not sure why. Or someone's laughing at you, and you instead of having like a kind of a mild reaction, you have a really big reaction to that. All of those triggers in that moment of unconsciousness and pain can act like triggers later in life. And this really explains those things that are hard to figure out, especially with like phobias and weird body problems that just come out of nowhere. So yes, when you injure yourself, I think that the fascia and the muscles can go in this protect mode. But what really is underneath that is the those mental pictures of that time where you had an earlier injury.
In summary, if we all end up really stiff when we get older, you want to actively and aggressively prevent that from happening. Stretching on a daily basis is the ultimate answer for that. The type of stretching that you do is very important. I hope you now have some deeper insights on fascia and how you should stretch that. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next