Up dog on bridge

How does stretching make you more flexible?

How does stretching make you more flexible? Intuitively, it seems that it must have something to do with your muscles—that they must lengthen or that the tissue must become more pliable over time. Yet, as we’ve seen, the evidence doesn’t bear that out. Stretching makes muscle tissue more pliable in the short term, but those…

What happens when you stretch a muscle? (Part 2)

In the previous post in this series, I described how stretching temporarily affects muscle tissue. This segment begins a discussion of long-term changes in flexibility. Ultimately, lasting gains in flexibility have more to do with your nervous system than with your muscles. More on that in the next post, but first, let’s look at an alternative hypothesis, namely…

Hanumanasana

What happens when you stretch a muscle? (part 1)

  “What happens when a muscle stretches?” This frequently asked question — a perennial query during anatomy trainings — deserves a few blog posts, especially as the mechanism is often misunderstood. Stretching targets muscles in two ways. First, it directly affects muscle and connective tissue itself. As you’ll see in this post, those effects are temporary and short-lived.  Stretching…