Bill Daniels argues that tight muscles aren't the problem, your brain is. When your nervous system perceives danger, it locks muscles down to protect you. Instead of stretching, test your vision, balance, and sensory input, then retrain those systems with targeted drills.
If you've had tight hamstrings or stiff shoulders or even some tightness in your back, I'm willing to bet that you've tried to stretch it endlessly. You've probably even used the foam roller or maybe hit it with the massage gun. And yeah, it might help for a short period of time, but what happens 10, 15, 20 minutes later? You get up and, oh, you're right back to where you were. Why does it keep going back to that constant stiffness? We need to reshape the way we think about our body. I want you to take a minute and imagine yourself. You are at a frame, a skeleton. That skeleton moves when the muscles contract because the muscles are attached to that skeleton. So when a muscle contracts and the other muscle relaxes, a joint moves. But the muscles don't decide when they want to move. The muscles get signals from the nerves and the nerves get their signals from the brain. So ultimately, your brain and your central nervous system are in charge of all of our movement. So if you have tight muscles, if your hamstrings just won't seem to let go, or your shoulder just won't let you reach a little higher, it's not because the muscles are tight. It's because your central nervous system is on high alert. In previous videos, you may have heard me talk about the spectrum where we have one side is your brain always trying to protect you and the other side allowing movement, and you can't do both at the same time. So there's always a movement along that scale. A lot of times that output is pain, but that output may also be weakness. It may also be tightness. There's a lot of different responses, but they're all negative. Let me give you a real-life example. Imagine if you're driving down the freeway and it's really, really foggy. You can't see more than 10 feet in front of you. Maybe your windshield is cracked and it's dark, and as you're driving, you're going to be really tense and stiff and going really slow. You're going to be limiting yourself as to how far and how fast you can go because you're protecting yourself because you can't see what's happening down the road. Another real-life example that you may have experienced is if you were in a hotel room. During the day or when the lights are on, you might be sitting on the bed and go, you know what? I have to go to the bathroom. You get up, you walk around the corner, you go into the bathroom. You come out of the bathroom, you walk back, you get back into bed. But now you go to sleep, you wake up in the middle of the night, you have to go to the bathroom again. Well, now it's pitch black and somebody else is sleeping in the room with you. You don't want to turn the lights on to wake them up, so now it's dark. You don't walk to the bathroom with the same speed or the same carefree attitude. You might be feeling around for the bed. You might be shuffling your feet so you stay in contact with the ground. All of these are slowing you down and keeping you safe. It's important that we take that into consideration when we think about how tight are our muscles. And what ends up happening is we have the world around us. It's constantly giving our nervous system inputs. It's the things that we see, the things that we hear. It's where our vestibular system is telling us which way gravity is pulling us. It's what you feel, and even to some extent, what you smell in the air. Because again, if you smell smoke, that's danger and you're going to try to go away from it. Now, those inputs come into the nervous system, the brain processes them and decides, okay, what does that mean? And if it gets an interpretation of that means danger, Then you're going to get an output. And that output again could be pain, it could be stiffness, it could be weakness. If the input translates into something that's safe, you're going to get more mobility, you're going to get better strength, you're going to move better overall, you're going to have less pain. These are all positive outputs that you'll get from the brain. So with that in mind, instead of stretching, we need to think about what is the nervous system telling us? And we can test all of these things. We can test your visual acuity. How clearly do you see things? How far do you see? How much of your peripheral vision do you see? How about your vestibular system? Is it calibrated correctly? Is it telling you specifically which way gravity is pulling you, or is it off a little bit? Maybe that needs to be recalibrated, because if gravity is actually pulling you this way, but your vestibular system says it's pulling you that way, you're going to end up with this unbalanced spine and muscular tension, and it's going to be a mess. So those are just a couple of examples of what can happen. We can do exercises specifically for vision, vestibular system. We can even do sensory rehabilitation in the skin or in the tissues by doing certain types of massage. There are all kinds of different things we can do to improve upon what's happening there, and that in turn can actually improve what is happening with your flexibility. And if you want more information about that, I've written this book called Rewiring Pain. And in this book, I dive deep into all of this stuff we were just talking about. There's hundreds of different drills and approaches and explains to you exactly why you may want to be doing specific ones of these. And if you're not sure where to start because it is a long book, there is a questionnaire in the back that tells you exactly where to start. So I'll leave the link to this book in the bio below, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. And until next time, live healthy.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
