Static passive muscle stretching or eccentric loading to increase muscle length?
So what are we talking about here? This isn’t about stretching post exercise to reduce DOMs (delayed onset muscle soreness) we will cover this in a future blog. This is about increasing muscle length, such as hamstring length allowing you to touch your toes.
Why do we want to increase our muscle length?
This could be for comfort, if we have had a injury that has caused us to develop a shortening of muscle length it can lead to discomfort completing just normal daily activities. For our general joint range of motion, this is especially important as we age as this can help us to maintain healthy joints and can reduce arthritic changes. It could be for a sporting purpose, look at gymnasts who are required to achieve the splits for some of their routines.
Static passive muscle stretching, this is stretching muscles with a force, such as pulling your heal towards your bum. Other examples are getting someone to push your toes down to stretch your calf muscles or putting your heal on a step to stretch your hamstrings out. The risk with only completing stretches like this is that you stretch the muscles beyond their contractive range.
Eccentric loading is making the muscles work as you are forcing them to lengthen. Such as a heel drop off the edge of a step, or a straight leg deadlift. The benefit to working your muscles in this way is that the fibres that help to shorten the muscles are working throughout the movement therefore the increased muscle length maintains the muscle strength towards the end of the stretch ensuring your muscles activate throughout the full movement of a joint. Eccentric loading has added benefits because it can also increase the muscle strength as you increase muscle length.
In simpler terms lets take an elastic band it holds 5 pencils nice and tight together, you force 5 more pencils in, it doesn’t hold all 10 pencils as tight and now when you take 5 out it struggles to hold the original 5. This is an example of passive stretching. Unfortunately muscles and elastic are not identical and so you cannot eccentrically load an elastic band, however if you could once you had built up to it holding 10 pencils it would hold them as tight as it held the original 5, not only that but when you take 5 away the tension remains the same.
Does everyone need to work on muscle length?
This depends on your individual goal, however if you follow the principles that have been mentioned they will help you to improve muscle length without increasing your risk of injury. There are some people who are known to have more freedom of movement without necessarily training, these are people with hyper mobility. There is a specific score out of 9 for your level of hyper mobility, from 0 to 9. It is actually important for people who score high on this scale to look into doing regular eccentric exercises to improve muscle control. Because as you will have already read muscle length without the control can increase the risk of injury and this is a common risk in people with hypermobility. If you are not sure what eccentric exercises or how to complete them its best to speak to someone who does know. Some personal trainers will have detailed knowledge however if you are not sure you can always see a chartered physiotherapist who will be able to give you good quality exercises to improve your muscle control.
Key points to remember
Strengthen to lengthen- eccentrically load your muscles to increase their length.
If you have hypermobility Eccentric loading can help increase your muscle control reducing your injury risk.
If you are not sure what to do speak to someone with appropriate experience, a good quality Personal trainer or a Chartered Physiotherapist.
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