Stretching isn't always the answer for pain and muscle tension

For years, conventional wisdom in fitness culture has promoted the belief that stretching to become more flexible leads to better movement and injury prevention.

For years, conventional wisdom in fitness culture has promoted the belief that stretching to become more flexible leads to better movement and injury prevention.

But what if I told you that the road to improved mobility isn’t always paved with stretching?

As a mobility coach in professional sports, I’ve learned that the key to healthy movement encompasses a variety of factors determined by your body’s specific needs. And those don’t always include more flexibility.

Flexibility is valuable, but it’s not the only consideration for optimizing joint function. Our joints set the foundation for movement by creating the capacity for your range of motion, and your muscles support joint action. Because functional joints require a combination of both mobility and stability, muscles need to be both flexible and strong to support joints properly.

Driven by a pervading assumption that flexibility is the ultimate measure of joint health — and because stretching tends to feel good and takes relatively little effort — people frequently focus much more on stretching than strengthening.

Unfortunately, this imbalanced approach can lead to joint instability, chronic pain and increased risk of injury. And since stretching is often touted as a cure-all for pain, I have seen too many individuals get caught in an unhealthy, painful cycle in which they stretch even more to relieve the tension and pain that they are unwittingly increasing with their continued stretching.

In cases in which the joints are unstable due to issues such as laxity, injury, hypermobility or misalignment, the body will generally compensate by tightening surrounding muscles to provide additional stability. This compensatory mechanism, known as protective tension, acts to protect you from going into a range of motion that your joint can’t support.