ABSTRACT: Flexibility is urgently important and unnecessarily frustrating. The older athlete needs to understand the redundant nature of muscle tissue composition. Based on this model of our muscles, resembling the Warhol Soup Cans ,The Ranks trains this effective method of flexibility acquisition: Stretch Small-Stretch Big- Stretch Small
There is much to say on the subject of flexibility so look for more flexibility on The RANKSPower Wire!
The clock is ticking –The OLDEST Baby Boomer turns 64 in January – not even official retirement age yet!
We do not have a health care crisis in this country so much as a DEMOGRAPHIC crisis. As retirement numbers increase the number of collectors of social security & Medicare increase – all while our national tax base decreases - YIKES!
But the sky is not going to fall. The Ranks is here to turn these tables by stretching the idea of what being 65 in this country is all about...
To wit, today we broach the surface a huge subject urgently impacting our Muscular Youth – Flexibility….Who doesn’t wish they were more flexible? Losing our flexibility hurts – and can be quite dangerous.
(In a preview of coming attractions, I will explain that flexibility is actually a refined form of strength AND a major component of BALANCE – more on that later…)
We older athletes need to get more flexible! The problem is changes in flexibility are quite elusive – unless we count going from bad to worse…
The reason conventional attempts to improve flexibility don’t yield many gains it is that we lack a SUFFICIENT MODEL explaining how muscles operate – and thus how flexibility is trained.
What is misunderstood about our muscles is that they are actually composed of MANY (as in millions) of Redundant Component Parts called “motor units”.
If we took an up close look at muscle composition we would see something resembling a protein version of Andy Warhol’s iconic soup cans!
Why the redundancy??
Survival – If we bang our leg into the coffee table, our thigh muscle doesn’t shatter – Parts of our leg are immobilized, but enough working units around the trauma allow us to still LIMP away…
Versatility – Lots of semi-independent moving parts give us a huge spectrum of possible movement as well as loads of capacity for shock absorption (another reason to stay flexible!)
Each part – or repeating mini-muscle soup can - is actually capable of a bit of independent movement – Each soup can has a dedicated nerve supply allowing it to either act in concert with the rest of the muscle around it OR act on its own.
Based on this Andy Warhol model of muscle function, we can see what erodes our flexibility over time and how to get that flexibility back!
- Over time, chance injuries, work life habits, and compensations to both create loads of micro-traumas in our musculature – Handfuls of “soup-cans” get disordered (usually to stop micro-internal bleeding)
- Collectively we feel lots of upended "soup cans" around our musculature as a loss of flexibility. This lost flexibility s associated with– but not a direct result of – aging.
This is why, in The Ranks, to get flexible, we do not just stretch in the traditional sense of the word – we focus on first getting our chronically jumbled motor units smoothly opening and closing again with strategically applied deep tissue work. (Where you apply your deep tissue work is identified on your Ranks Pain Map – more on that later as well…)
THEN, we insinuate the small muscular recoveries into larger yoga stretches and poses.
The flexibility mantra of The Ranks is thusly called: Stretch Small (Strategic Soup Can Fixing)– Stretch Big (yoga poses) - Stretch Small (re-order the soup cans again just to be safe)
