Check out my blog "Sitting is Hurting You" for psoas exercises related to this episode.
https://www.nicolehollar.com/blog/psoasexercises
[Intro] Welcome to the OWN It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar, where we're gonna talk
about stuff to help you get out of your way, take charge of your life and, well, other stuff, too.
[00:00:00] I just finished working with somebody and we were discussing mobility and I
wanted to jump on and do a podcast talking about it because I also received a really great
topic to discuss, which was about Types of stretching and when to do them.
So I thought, what a great opportunity to combine the two because. Mobility is not about
flexibility. It is about being strong and flexible simultaneously so that your body can move
through all of its planes of motion. Now, if you're an. older person and you've never really
felt mobile. Well, your muscles have become very tight.
Your joint has a certain shape. There are certain limitations that you might have developed
over time as well, but everybody B can become more mobile, more flexible and stronger.
And I can tell you from my own experience as somebody who's always been very flexible.
And I always thought pretty strong. I also am not immune
[00:01:00] to issues. A couple of years ago. I was at a spin class and I felt my hip like circuit
really tight and I was like, Ooh, I stretched it and I knew well enough that it wasn't an acute
injury that I suddenly had. But what I didn't realize was the real source of the problem
because like, Probably many of you. I, you know, sort of powered through things most of my
life.
I've been pretty strong, but I knew that I had some small muscle imbalances, meaning the tiny
muscles, the stabilizing muscles. And sometimes it is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
It isn't a specific, aggressive, acute injury. You know, we often joke that the worst of injuries
aren't very good.
They are, you know, I slept wrong with my pillow or I stepped off of a curb. Or, well, I had
an injury once to my neck because somebody called my name and I turned my head too
quickly while washing dishes. They can be silly.
[00:02:00] But when it comes to joint mobility, we're often talking about shoulders, hips,
knees and feet.
I think that that is mostly the experiences that I've had with people, low back, you know, the
major ones. Well, I want to tell you that all of these things have the ability to be remedied,
meaning You have the chance and the ability to become more flexible and stronger, but it's
important to understand the relationship between strength and flexibility of a joint in order to
be strong, you have to lift weights, but you also want to have flexible muscles, even if they're
strong.
Now, if you don't have a lot of muscle, you might think, well, then I must be really flexible,
and that's not really the case. In
[00:03:00] fact, that means you probably have muscle laxity, or I should say, joint laxity. And
what that means is that your joints are just weak and unstable. So, most often people stretch
when they feel pain.
Well, pain might be coming from actually the pain experienced by a muscle that is being
overstretched anyway, Or you might be experiencing pain from a muscle, which is actually
tense and tight. Well, joint laxity, your muscles are tense and tight. And in fact, that was the
case with me. Like my muscles were so tense and tight in order to protect my hip joints,
because this hip flexor was working really hard.
And the other muscles were like, no, we don't want that. So they were. They were tightening
in order to fight back. I mean, it was bad enough for me that when I would lay on my right
side to sleep, and my, it was, the problem was on my left, my left side would hurt. And if I
laid on my left side, it hurt to lay on my
[00:04:00] left side. So if you're somebody who has hip pain from laying down and it's not so
bad, specific to the joint or the bone. It may be from overstretching of those muscles
surrounding the hip joints around the knee. I would sit at a dinner and I would just rub the
palm down my leg because, because it hurts so much.
And finally, I got some dry needling done to help really get in to the joint space where I
couldn't. Really get with massage or trigger point balls or other means and I did acupuncture
as well, which is very similar But, of course, different. So, another way that we might
experience pain, other than the joint laxity and that over stretching of the muscle, is because
the muscle is actually tight.
But why is the muscle tight? Is it spasming back in order to combat a muscle imbalance?
because that's something that happens a lot as well. In fact, I had a client once, she had some
pretty good muscle imbalances
[00:05:00] through her inner thighs and her glutes and the external muscles of the hip. She
walked kind of duck footed.
She used to sit with her legs cross legged even at work. And she said she did that because her
inner thighs hurt all the time. And I said, well, knowing you, I don't think that it's, it's, that
they're tight. I think it's that they're weak and they're being overstretched because your legs
want to constantly bow outward.
So the homework I gave her was I gave her this playground ball. And with that playground
ball, I said, I want you to hold it between your knees for five to 10 minutes, three times a day.
And of course, do some glute stretching so that she could help to relax those muscles. They
weren't constantly pulling outward.
And she's like, wow, this is This, this really helped and she wasn't really in the pain she had
even the next day. So that talks about the muscle imbalances. So again, we have joint laxity
and we have muscular imbalances and creating that fight in that pool. Now exercise that can
help you when it comes to
[00:06:00] joint laxity are things like vinyasa yoga.
Vinyasa is the kind of yoga that you might do with standing balance poses, anything that's
unilateral, meaning you're working one side and then the other side, because if you do things
together, they can, they feed off of each other and create a stability together. So you want
your body to do that stability on its own.
So Vinyasa yoga, you might use things like balanced discs, balanced balls. Another thing I
did with a client earlier was I put a band around the lower part of the right knee and I attached
it to something on the right side of the body and said, let's do some squats. So you're doing a
regular squat, but because of that slight external force, you have to pull your knee inward to
maintain the normal knee to toe position.
So those external forces can also help to create more strength in the joint. In the case of joint
laxity, The reality though, everybody is that everybody should be doing
[00:07:00] some type of mobility training when it comes to strengthening in that way. So if
you're not currently doing it in your fitness routine, go for it.
If that means you're standing on one leg doing lighter weight, bicep curls, do it. But you want
to make sure that you're stable. And you aren't just fighting it the whole time. If you need to
use some other tools in order to help you stabilize, that is okay. What's most important is we
want to gain control over the joint, not just fight through it.
The other thing is muscle imbalance. And like I already mentioned, the client who had the,
the leg issue. One of the biggest muscular imbalances that I see comes from people who sit at
a desk all day. You have tight chest, your back's hurt, and that's a muscular imbalance
because your back is not strong enough to help hold you up.
I told a client many years ago, I said, the hardest exercise I could ever have you do is getting
you to sit up straight with your shoulders back. all day long. I said, if you do that, you will
feel like
[00:08:00] you had the hardest workout you've ever done. She came back to me two days
later and said, my back is so sore from sitting up straight all day.
And I said, yep, I know. So that's an example of a muscular imbalance. The really tight
pectoral or chest muscles are pulling you forward. Meanwhile, the back muscles, which aren't
so tight, they're overstretched or sore. And so you want to Stretch them. I've heard plenty of
times because it feels good. Now, some people actually do stretch the stretch muscle by
maybe interlocking their finger leaning forward, or sometimes I've seen people say, well, I'm
stretching my back.
And what they do is they lift their arms up like field goal posts and open their chest. I'm like,
well, you're actually stretching your chest and flexing your back, but it feels good to squeeze
your back. And you might even be doing that right now that I'm telling you that because
you're like, oh. That does feel good because what's happening is that your back muscles are
firing in a normal and natural way rather than in
[00:09:00] the spasmatic case of trying to help keep your body from falling forward onto
your desk.
So those are things to consider. It's that dance between strength and flexibility. And now I
want to address that really great question of what types of stretches. and when to do them.
And so this, for the purpose of simplifying it, I'm going to break it down into what I'm going
to call warmup stretches, daily life stretches.
So that's one category, warmup daily life stretches. And the other category is elongation and
flexibility stretches. The warmup stretches are the ones we've always done every day. You
know, before you want to work out, you grab your foot, reach for your toe, stretch your arm
out. Cross your arm over your body.
You probably did it 30 seconds to a minute. I've seen people do it as little as Seconds long
three seconds, which is really doing very little for you These are the kinds of stretches that
are great to
[00:10:00] help loosen up a jaw Loosen up the muscle belly of of the muscle so that you can,
you know, get some movement and maybe you're in the middle of a run and your quadricep
hurts your calf.
So you stop to do the stretch, which, by the way, if you're ever doing a fitness activity and
you're Experiencing some type of stabbing, jabbing, and shooting, please don't power through
it. Stop, stretch. It's worth the time. I promise you of this. These are the kinds of stretches that
you might do in the middle of your workday when you are sore and tired and stiff.
So you get up, you move your neck side to side, you reach for your toes, you do some torso
twists, some basic hip circle calisthenic type activities, morning stretches. Another great time
to do these brief stretches. Sometimes you might add a slight gentle bounce and make it a
little bit more ballistic.
These shorter, big muscle group stretches are great any time of day, definitely for a warmup,
[00:11:00] a midday energizer, or a waking up in the morning to get your blood moving and
your body going. The other kind of stretches for elongation. If you really want to increase the
length of your muscle are stretches that you're going to have to hold for two to five minutes.
This is. Something that is a commitment to your flexibility, whatever it is you are trying to
achieve. If you want to lose weight, if you want to gain more muscle, if you want to become
more flexible, it will require you to be consistent with whatever it is you are doing. It doesn't
matter. It's so important to remind you of that.
And much like so many other things like weight loss. Well, I ate well, and now I lost weight,
and so I'm going to go back to not eating well. Exercise and I got more fit. And so now I'm
not exercising anymore. People often do that with stretching too. I don't hurt anymore. So
now I'm going to stop stretching as I highly recommend that we
[00:12:00] just incorporate flexibility training into our day and into our lives, no matter what
it is, as little as you can do, or as much as you can do is fantastic.
In the case of these elongation stretches, though, you do need to hold them for two to five
minutes. The second thing is that they are a passive stretch, meaning you want to allow your
body to relax into it. Your neurology is going to fight you back. We've all done a stretch and
you're like, Oh, I've been in a yoga class where I'm like, my body just doesn't do that.
So you need to do a modification of it. And that's okay because as you continuously do these
modifications, you'll be able to do more and more and more. And that's the benefit of blocks,
straps, chairs, bolsters, whatever it is that you need to do. Doing a hamstring stretch where
you push your butt up against the wall and your feet are up on the wall, it's legs up the wall,
it's called in many yoga poses.
That's a passive stretch. Letting your body hang toward the ground like
[00:13:00] a ragdoll, another passive stretch. So finding passive type relaxation stretches, the
best time of day to do those would be maybe before bed to allow yourself to ease into the
night. In order to really be effective in these stretches, you also need to have Good quality
breathing.
You want to inhale and exhale and with each exhale, allow your body to just relax a little bit
deeper into that stretch. You'll find yin yoga and restorative yoga. If you're looking for a
practice to follow, that is going to be more in alignment with this type of flexibility training.
So two to five minutes, passive stretching, use your breath to allow yourself to ease into the
position.
It doesn't mean you're going to get an extra inch. It means you might get a couple extra
millimeters each time. And each time you want to try to progress. just a little bit more. You're
not trying to win overnight. You're trying to just make small
[00:14:00] progressions. So, when it comes to stretching, you've got your warm up style
stretching, and you've got your stretching for long term flexibility.
Your muscle will naturally want to shorten to its shortest length, and this is the kind of
stretching that we need to do that you'll see martial arts people doing. in order to continue to
allow their flexibility and movement in their practice. I can tell you, I was a martial artist. I
have a secondary degree black belt.
I used to be able to drop into a middle split. And now I'm like, Oh no, if I dropped into a
middle split right now, I assure you, it'd be the last time. one I did for a very long time. And
as I talk about doing this, I'm inspired even to get back into really focusing on mobility and
flexibility training.
Because the reality is when it comes to fitness, nobody is ever going to have a straight line
and do everything great all at once in a synergetic fast fashion. You've got to decide what
[00:15:00] your goal is. And then set it accordingly and have a structured plan in order to
reach that. So if your goal is to become more mobile, strengthen your joints.
and really focus on your flexibility. If you want to have more flexibility because you want to
improve your past, your posture, get rid of shoulder, back, chest, hamstring pain, then really
decide that you are going to incorporate a flexibility training program into your life. You can
absolutely do it. It's just about making time for yourself.
And this is your time. Thank you guys for being here at this podcast. If you liked it, go ahead
and give it five stars and of course, follow it. So you can continue to get updates of when I
post again, you can follow me on most social media platforms @NicoleHollarCoaching. And
of course, check out my website, NicoleHollar.com
com. You can submit a request for another topic guests, learn more about my coaching books
I'm writing as well as book me for speaking.
[00:16:00] Thanks guys.
