Stretching is one of the easier things to buy in Austin. There are assisted-stretch franchises in strip centers all over the south side and recovery lounges that bundle a stretch with compression boots, and that’s before you count the yoga studios. The demand makes sense. This is a city full of people who sit at a desk all day, then ride the Veloway or climb after work, and most of them feel tight in a way they’d like someone to fix.
What gets sold under the word stretching is mostly one experience. Someone moves your limb toward the end of its range, holds it there for a while, and you leave feeling looser. That feeling is real. What I care about is what changed underneath it, and how long the change lasts once you stand up and walk back to the car.
What a passive stretch changes
Most of the range people gain from a stretch session comes from the nervous system. Weppler and Magnusson reviewed the stretching literature and concluded that the range people pick up from short-term stretching programs comes mainly from a change in sensation (1). The muscle tolerates more stretch before you feel the pull and want to stop; the tissue itself lengthens far less than most people assume. That’s a legitimate adaptation, and it explains why an assisted session feels good. Someone relaxed you into a position, your nervous system decided the position was safe for the moment, and it let you have more.
The trouble shows up when you ask what that range is for. When someone else is holding you at the end of a joint, nothing in the session asks your own muscles to produce force there. The nervous system walks away with no evidence that you can control that angle, and since it sets your limits based on what it trusts you to handle, it puts the old limit back. From what I’ve seen, that happens by the next morning for most people.
The gap between passive and active range
The number I care about most in an assessment is the distance between two measurements of the same joint. Passive range is how far a joint travels when an outside force moves it; take the outside force away, ask the person to get there under their own power, and you find their active range. In most people the first number is a good deal bigger than the second. The space between them is range the body has on paper and can’t defend under speed or load.
That space is where I start to worry about someone who plays a sport. Stretching it wider without building any control inside it gives the joint more room to end up somewhere it can’t hold.
So we measure both. The Motive Movement and Mobility Assessment uses the same joint testing the Functional Range Assessment is built on, and the training plan comes out of the gap between those two numbers at each joint.
What we do with a stretch
We still stretch people, and we hold positions longer than almost anyone holds a stretch on their own. A long hold is how you set the ceiling. The part that changes the outcome is what the muscle does while it’s in that position and right after.
Inside the hold, the stretched muscle contracts against the floor or a block, building tension at the length you just reached. Then the opposing muscles contract to pull the joint deeper into the range with no outside help. Those two steps are PAILs and RAILs. You come out of the position having produced force at the end of your range, and that’s the signal the nervous system needs before it lets you keep the range.
The research lines up with this. A meta-analysis from Afonso and colleagues found no meaningful difference in range of motion gains between strength training and stretching protocols (2). Loading a muscle through its full length improves range about as well as holding it there, and you build strength in the same work. Treating a stretch as a training stimulus with its own intensity and progression is the whole premise behind stretching as training.
Where stretch studios fit
I’ll give assisted stretching its due. For someone who never stretches and spends ten hours a day in a chair, a weekly appointment that gets them lying down and breathing into a position has value. Plenty of people feel calmer and move a bit easier for the rest of the afternoon, and I have no interest in talking anyone out of that.
My problem is with the promise attached to the model. A posture scan at intake tells you little about what a joint can do under its own power, and a session built around assisted holds gives the client nothing to train once they leave. The range gets produced on the table, it fades over the next day or two, and the next appointment gets booked. That loop works well for the business. I went through the franchise model in more detail in Should You Use StretchLab, so I won’t rehash it here.
Stretching for the way Austin moves
The people who come through our studio on Shelby Lane tend to sit for work and then ask a lot of their bodies on evenings and weekends, on pickleball courts and bikes and the trails along the Greenbelt. That kind of play happens fast and loaded, and it happens near the ends of joints. A lunge for a short ball at the kitchen line or a hip rotating through a golf swing needs range you can produce force in at speed, which is the exact range a passive session hands you without the control to go with it.
Week to week, most of our people do this work in group KINSTRETCH classes. Each class opens with joint rotations and then works through long holds with contractions built into them, so the stretch and the strength happen in the same position on the same day.
If you’ve been paying for stretches for a while and the tightness keeps returning on schedule, the stretching has been doing what it can do. The range is there. What’s missing is your ability to own it, and that part is trainable. Finding out where your own gap sits is the place to start, and you can book a time with us here.
References
- Weppler CH, Magnusson SP. Increasing muscle extensibility: a matter of increasing length or modifying sensation? Phys Ther. 2010;90(3):438-449.
- Afonso J, Ramirez-Campillo R, Moscão J, et al. Strength training versus stretching for improving range of motion: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Healthcare (Basel). 2021;9(4):427.
Written by
Brian Murray, FRA, FRSC
Founder of Motive Training
Motive Training is a coaching studio in South Austin built around assessment, joint health, and strength you can use. Train with us in the studio, come to a KINSTRETCH class, or work through the progressions in KINSTRETCH Online.