Pain Relief

Disclosure: I make it a point to recommend products that I know work. To be totally transparent, you should know that some links in this article are affiliate links, meaning — at no additional cost to you — I will earn a bit of pocket change if you click through and make a purchase.

Did you know that 72% of people wish they were more flexible?

Okay, I totally made that up. But if my experience talking with clients is any indication, there are a lot of folks who would like to be a bit more bendy.

Flexible muscles don’t just make your body feel better; stretching is good for the mind, too. Releasing tension in your body relieves mental stress by calming your nervous system and deepening your breath.

A lack of flexibility is more noticeable as you age and your tissue quality changes. Tendons lose their elasticity, cartilage thins and the fluids that lubricate joints decrease over time. However, this doesn’t mean you just have to live with a stiff, immobile body.

Regular flexibility and mobility practices can keep joints and muscles healthy for the duration of your life, and while yoga is great, these ten tips will help you get the most out of any stretching routine — yoga-based or otherwise.

10 Tips to Increase Flexibility

No. 1  Make it dynamic

Dynamic stretching is the latest and greatest technology for increasing flexibility safely, although it has actually been used for thousands of years in practices such as tai chi and chi gong.

Basically, to make any stretch dynamic, you add movement, taking your joints through a full range of motion. If you typically drop into a stretch and hold the static pose for a prolonged period of time before moving on to the next one, you’re missing out on the great benefits of dynamic stretching.

Dynamic stretches engage more muscle fibers instead of just a single line of tissue, as happens in static stretching. They activate your central nervous system and force muscles that are clenched too tightly to relax in a non-threatening way.

(Attacking muscles that are in mild spasm head on is like trying to push a brick wall out of the way – an exercise in frustration.)

Dynamic stretches also lubricate your joints, increase balance and get your blood flowing. They’re great to use pre-workout because they prepare your body for exercise without increasing the risk of injury. There’s significant evidence that static stretching prior to exercise makes you more likely to damage a muscle or joint.

No. 2  Reduce inflammation

There are two aspects to flexibility. The first is structural — basically, how stiff or flexible your physical muscles are.

The second relates to your body’s internal physiology. Westernized lifestyles are pro-inflammatory, meaning they increase the level of inflammation circulating throughout your body.

Inflammation is your body’s natural and healthy response to injury.  If you twist an ankle, your body uses inflammation to make blood vessels more permeable, allowing plasma and leukocytes to do their healing work, which is good. But inflammation becomes a problem when it’s chronic, ongoing and systemic.

Chronic, systemic inflammation causes your body to create excessive fibrin, a type of tissue that forms a mesh and impedes blood flow. Too much fibrin actually increases the risk of cardiac arrest and stroke, but the first signs you might have too much fibrin include chronic fatigue, slow healing times, and pain.

If you tend to get very sore after even light bouts of exercise, for example, or if you wake up stiff and achy in the morning, you might have systemic inflammation.

Processed foods including white flour, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and an over-abundance of omega-6 oils increase inflammation, as do stress, lack of movement, and poor sleep quality. Fortunately, there are simple things you can do to decrease your systemic inflammation.

The most obvious is to cut out processed foods that are pro-inflammatory and start eating more green vegetables and lean, organic, pastured meats (grass fed beef, free range chickens, basically animals kept the way nature intended and not loaded with hormones and antibiotics).

Second, you can add the natural anti-inflammatory spices ginger and turmeric to your diet.  Turmeric, used in Indian curry, is bright orange in color and contains the active ingredient curcumin that reduces inflammation. Ginger also packs an anti-inflammatory kick as a result of a compound called gingerols.

Third, you can supplement with proteolytic (protein eating) enzymes. Your body produces enzymes naturally and they’re required for virtually every metabolic function, but enzyme production drops off as you grow older.

Proteolytic enzyme supplements are enteric coated to survive the acidic environment in your stomach, so they are absorbed through your intestines into your bloodstream. They then go about “cleaning up” all the garbage floating around in your blood – viruses, fungus, and anything that can cause inflammation, including excess fibrin (which is a boon for cardiovascular health).

Enzymes are considered safe even in high does, except for people who are taking blood thinning medications as enzymes thin the blood even further.

No. 3  Trick your nervous system

While excessive fibrin can cause pain and inflammation that make you physically stiff, the majority of flexibility issues come not from your muscles but from your brain.

When you stretch, you’ll get to a point where the muscle feels tight and painful. This isn’t actually the physical end of your muscle. You’ve activated something in your nervous system called the stretch reflex.

Your brain has a set point for every muscle in your body, telling it how long and how short to be.  When you reach the end of a muscle’s programmed length, the brain initiates a contraction to keep you from going any further.

If you were under anesthesia, the medical staff would have to be careful moving you so as not to dislocate a joint because your muscles would be so loose we could probably tuck your feet behind your head. But as soon as you woke up, you’d be just as tight as you were before. This is because your brain and its neural set-points (like brakes to your flexibility) came back online.

The stretch reflex has a purpose, though. It keeps you from going into a range of motion where your muscle is too weak and there is risk of injury. So, for example, if you bend over to touch your toes and hit the stretch reflex before you get all the way down, your brain is afraid that if you go any further, your muscle may be too weak to support your weight, or it might not be able to bring you back up, thereby resulting in damage to your hamstrings, or possibly your spine.

You can (safely and incrementally) trick your nervous system into letting go in greater and greater range, though. As a result, you’ll develop better strength and flexibility along the entire length of the muscle.

No. 4  Breathe Deeply

Your body needs oxygen more than any other nutrient. You can survive for weeks without food and days without water, but you’ll die in a few minutes without oxygen.

Oxygen is necessary for cells to absorb nutrients and flush out waste products. Chronic stress causes the muscles in your chest and shoulders to contract, restricting your breathing. Additionally, shallow breathing promotes a fight or flight response in your brain, sending the signal that it’s time for action, not relaxation.

Researchers at Harvard have found that body position and posture profoundly influence brain chemistry So, if you’re constantly taking shallow breaths, you’re promoting stiffness in your muscles due to a “stressed out” brain and poor nutrient uptake in your cells.

Take five to ten minutes a day to practice deep breathing.

No. 5 Keep Hydrated

After oxygen, water is the most needed nutrient for your body. A lack of sufficient hydration causes tissues to dry up and blood to become thick and clotted. There isn’t enough fluid to wash away metabolic waste products — your body’s version of car exhaust.

Dehydration leads to stiff, tight muscles. Just imagine the difference between a nice, juicy steak and beef jerky. Dehydrated tissue starts to look and feel like beef jerky as it loses its elasticity and “bouncy” quality.

Since you lose water through respiration, sweat and urination, you’ve got to constantly replenish in order to meet your body’s needs. How much you need to drink depends on your height, weight and activity levels. Beverages like coffee, tea and alcohol increase dehydration, so if you consume these regularly, you’ll need to drink additional fluids to compensate.

No. 6  Stretch Your Psoas

You’ve probably never heard of a psoas before, much less know how to stretch it. The psoas is a deep abdominal and hip muscle that originates just below your diaphragm on the front of your spine, runs behind your internal organs, around the front of your hip and attaches to the inside of your femur, or thigh bone.

It has two actions: the psoas flexes the hip, or, if the hip is fixed, pulls the lumbar spine forward creating a “sway-backed” appearance. The psoas is primarily indicated in cases of lower back pain because of its deep action on the spine and the predominance of sitting (which tightens the psoas) in western cultures where back pain is an epidemic, but a tight psoas has far reaching effects.

Tension in the psoas often shortens the trunk, or core, pulling the rib cage down and ultimately restricting shoulder flexibility (if you can’t raise your arms straight overhead and get your elbows behind your ears, you likely have a tight psoas, among other problems).

A tight psoas also creates a walking pattern that inhibits glute and hamstring function while simultaneously tightening those pesky hip flexors. Getting flexibility in your psoas will translate to more flexible hips and shoulders.

While your psoas is quite a deep muscle — in more ways than one since it’s also linked to survival emotions such as fear — it’s relatively easy to give it a good stretch.

No. 7 Use Far Infrared Heat to Deeply Warm Muscles

The warmer your tissue is, the more flexible it will be. Heat increases circulation. Increased blood flow also brings more nutrients into the tissue while simultaneously flushing out waste products.

Heating pads are nice, but they only warm the surface of the skin. In order to get deeper heat with a heating pad, the surface temperature would be so hot that it would burn your skin before it reached deeper layers of your muscles.

Far infrared heat penetrates the muscles and tissue, warming up to three inches deep. Far infrared is a solar spectrum that comes from the earth’s sun. It’s not harmful to your skin like ultraviolet light. Rather, it’s the spectrum that makes you feel the sun’s warmth even on a cold day.

Have you ever been outside on a brisk fall day and felt warm in the sun but cold when a cloud covers its light? That’s far infrared heat in action. The cloud can’t instantly decrease the ambient temperature, but it blocks the far infrared heat, making you shiver.

Fortunately, you don’t have to have the sun to use far infrared heat to increase your flexibility. There are far infrared heating mats available for home use. As a bonus, I find that I’m much warmer overall when using my far infrared heating pad in the winter, and I’m able to keep my home cooler while still being comfortable.

The only caveat with far infrared heat is to be careful not to overstretch your muscles.  They’re very warm and pliable, and you don’t want to injure yourself, so don’t be too aggressive in your stretching or you could tear something.

No. 8 Pick Just One Goal

People who want to gain flexibility often have a vague notion of what that means. “I want to be more flexible” isn’t specific enough to get you results, and trying to stretch every muscle in your body is counterproductive.

That’s like saying you want to be a marathon runner and a professional weight lifter and a flamenco dancer all at the same time. Yes, you can do it, but you have to start with one and get really good at it before you move on to something else.

If you want to increase your flexibility, choose one area of your body that you want to work on.  Usually it’s the hips or the shoulders. You can get more specific with “hamstring muscles” or “pectorals,” but I much prefer to choose a range of motion you’d like to achieve.

If you want to get your arms over your head with elbows straight and behind your ears, focus on that.  If you want to be able to drop into the splits without effort, work every day to accomplish your goal. Increasing flexibility in one area of your body, like increasing strength in one area, often translates to increased flexibility in other areas.

No. 9  Engage Two-Way Lengthening

Perhaps the most helpful thing I can teach you is how to use two-way-lengthening to increase flexibility. It’s a little bit difficult to conceptualize until you physically experience it, but it will vastly increase your results once you do.

What is two-way-lengthening? It’s what gives dancers their grace. Two-way-lengthening is the process of stretching in two directions at once. It requires a great sense of your body to accomplish, but once you do your friends will ask you if you started taking dance classes (people ask if I take ballet all the time…I don’t and haven’t since I was in the first grade).

In Kung Fu martial arts, they refer to this as heaven and earth and incorporate it into many of their exercises.

Try It Out

Start by simply standing. Feel your feet on the floor. Gently press your feet downward with the whole surface of the sole of your foot. If it helps, imagine you’re melting them into hot wax.  Notice how the downward pressure immediately lengthens your body upward as well.

Then, maintaining that sense of downward pressure, shift your attention to the top of your head.  Lengthen it upwards toward the ceiling, as though someone had a hook in the sky that was holding your head up.

Feel how this sensation elongates your body? You can use this all over the place:

When you’re stretching your hamstrings, lift your tailbone as you press your heels down into the ground. Now you’re stretching in both directions.

When you reach your arm out to the side, extend outward through your fingers while also pulling your shoulder back toward your body. Two way lengthening at work.

If you’re finding this hard to visualize or don’t really feel it in your body, think of a rubber band. Imagine the band is looped around something fixed, like a piece of furniture. You have a hold of the other side and you are pulling it away from the furniture. This is single lengthening as the band is only stretching in one direction: from the fixed point to your hand.

Now imagine you have the same rubber band in both hands (no furniture or fixed point) and you pull with equal force in each hand stretching the band. Now the band is lengthening in two directions away from the midline. This is what you are trying to accomplish with your muscles.

No. 10 Use Your Brain

Athletes use visualization to take their performance to the next level. They run through their sporting event in their mind, imagining themselves achieving their absolute best.

Researchers have found that muscles respond to visualization. Muscle activity was measurable in weight lifters who merely imagined exercising, and simply thinking about working out can increase muscle strength by around 13%.

Similarly, you can leverage your brain to increase flexibility. Remember, it’s the brain that controls the length of your muscle, so it makes sense to approach flexibility from a “software” perspective as well as a “hardware” approach (i.e. the actual exercise of stretching).

There are two ways to engage your brain to increase flexibility. The first is to envision the shape that you’d like to make, like dropping into the splits or touching your toes in a forward bend. Imagine how achieving that shape would feel in your body if you actually did it.

Then when you perform your stretches, try to get your body to a place where it matches what you imagined.

The second way to engage your brain is to use the power of suggestion. The human subconscious mind is very open to suggestion, so whatever you tell yourself on a regular basis becomes your reality.

Most people are telling themselves that they are getting older, weaker and less flexible with each passing year. Start telling yourself that you are getting more flexible all the time. When you’re actually stretching, focus your attention on the muscle that feels tight and tell yourself that you can feel it lengthening, getting more flexible, relaxing.

Inhale deeply and when you release your breath, consciously relax the muscle you’re stretching a little bit more. If you’re too uncomfortable to relax, back out of the stretch a bit and make it easier on yourself.  The nervous system doesn’t like to be attacked. You’ll get more mileage if you keep stretching within your comfort level.

Put It Into Action

These flexibility principles will augment any stretching or mobility practice you already have in place. You can implement them in yoga, Pilates, or during your pre-gym warm up and cool down routines.

If you’d like more detailed instruction on putting these into practice, you can find specific exercises that actively use these flexibility principles in the Posture Rehab video course. There are 31 videos with complete, step-by-step exercises designed to reset your nervous system, increase flexibility and mobilize your joints.

Tight neck muscles and a lack of neck flexibility are common complaints. Many people find that their neck gets stiff after hours spent peering at spreadsheets on a laptop, traveling in airplanes, or even just sleeping.

If you wake up with a stiff neck, find it difficult to look over your shoulder without twisting your entire body, or if you suffer from frequent tension headaches, you may want to address your tight neck muscles.

Of course, before we dive into the nuts and bolts of loosening your neck and shoulder muscles, let’s take a quick look at anatomy. I find it incredibly helpful to be able to picture what I’m working with when I’m stretching my own body, and many of my clients report that it’s useful for them as well.

Anatomy of Your Neck

Your neck as anatomically described is comprised of seven vertebra that link your skull to your thoracic spine, or middle back. Of course, these vertebra don’t just hang out on their own, completely isolated from the rest of your spine.

When you turn your head, your neck twists, sure. But that movement should travel down into your thoracic spine, too. If your mid-back is stuck and rigid, your neck will experience limited range of motion and impaired flexibility.

The muscles of your neck largely connect the vertebra upward to your cranium and downward to your ribs and shoulder girdle. It’s not necessary to memorize these muscles, but it’s useful to understand that they don’t exist solely within the structure of your neck but rather as links to the rest of your body.

Stiffness in your neck is related to shoulder and back tension as well. Often, radiating pain in your the arms and hands can be traced to restriction in and around your neck and shoulders that clamps down on a nerve, limiting its ability to glide and irritating the fibers.

One such place that this happens is within the brachial plexus, a large nerve bundle that exits the spine in your neck, crosses over your first rib and extends into your armpit area. Any tension or restriction in your neck or shoulder muscles can cause impingement to these nerves. Sometimes lying on your side can exacerbate tightness, resulting in numbness or tingling in your hands or arms.

The Connection Between Stress and Neck Tension

Ask anyone where they store their stress and I’d put money down that nine out of ten times, the answer will be in the shoulders. It’s a universal truth that stress makes our backs and shoulders clench in defense.

As you can see from our discussion of neck anatomy, tight shoulder muscles are also tight neck muscles. They’re really not separate. They’re not even different muscles. Neck muscles are shoulder muscles. Shoulder muscles are neck muscles. It’s the same structure.

(Which begs the question, really: what exactly is a neck? Where does it truly start and where does it end? All division within the body is artificial and contrived, an artifact of an anatomist’s scalpel.)

There are other effects of stress which contribute to tight neck muscles as well. Stress and trauma results in a biological flexion response from the nervous system designed to protect your vulnerable organs and genitals. In short, it’s an innate response for humans to curl into the fetal position, even mildly, when placed in a stressful situation.

Years ago, someone sent me a fantastic study that looked at photographs of people under varying degrees of stress, including images of political prisoners who had been undergoing interrogation. It’s been probably a decade and I can’t find the dang images, but I wish, wish, wish I’d saved them.

It was fascinating to look at how in every scenario, even if the person was standing upright, there was contraction through the core, shortening the psoas — a deep core muscle stretching from the base of the diaphragm across the front of the hip and inserting on the upper thigh bone.

Stress, Stretching, and Flexibility

There is a physical tug on a neck that exists in a stressed out body with a tight core. Shortening in the psoas and associated tissue (remember: one muscle never tightens in isolation but only as part of a larger complex) constricts the spine, inhibits the function of the diaphragm — your primary breathing muscle — and draws the chest downward.

When your sternum — or breastbone — sinks in and down, your entire rib cage then effectively hangs like a giant anchor slung from the delicate muscles and vertebra of your neck. These structures aren’t designed for such heavy lifting. No, in fact, your neck is intended for movement. It is, in effect, your antenna, the branch of your body that moves the sensory organs of your face around, taking in information from the world around you — seeking food, watching for threats, connecting to other humans, relating.

And so, when your neck is put upon to do the job of holding up your rib cage, the result is tight muscles and a lack of mobility.

Of course, in addition to this physical burden on your neck, stress creates a physiological effect as well. Stress in any form — even in its beneficial state — activates the sympathetic branch of your nervous system. You may be more familiar with this as your fight or flight response.

This is a good thing. You need sympathetic neural activation. Without it, you’d never do anything. It’s your motivation. It drives you to eat, connect, to stay alive.

But chronic activation without discharge is very damaging, indeed. Long term, low-grade stress has this exact effect on your nervous system.

Not only does the physical flexion of your core and psoas muscle impinge your diaphragm, creating a shallow breathing pattern that perpetuates stress activation in your body, the ongoing stress causes a body-wide threat response, elevating cortisol, accelerating your heart rate, raising blood pressure, and triggering muscle tension.

Therefore, while moving the muscles (i.e. stretching) is helpful to dissolve tension, the state that your body is in also plays a significant role. Calming this stress response not only decreases muscle tension in and of itself, it also makes your body more receptive to stretching and movement practices.

How to Calm Your Stress Response

There are a million ways to reduce stress. Most of them deal with the mind — controlling your thoughts, focusing on gratitude, avoiding negative thinking loops, meditating, etc.

These are excellent practices and can be useful for handling stressful moments. But the ultimate metric of a stress management technique is: does it calm your sympathetic nervous system activation and stimulate the opposing response in your parasympathetic (rest, relax, restore) branch?

Many of these practices do, in fact, have that effect. However, these are all brain-based, meaning you have to work to control something that’s a bit ethereal and hard to get your hands on: thoughts.

We’re such a mind-focused society, believing that all our power lies between our ears. And yeah, the brain is pretty cool and can definitely have an effect on the body. But your body can — and does — also affect the brain.

Therefore, a more tangible strategy to discharge stored stress can be to focus on decreasing muscle tension. One symptom of stress that greatly contributes to tight neck muscles is a clenched jaw. Many of my clients who experience neck pain and stiffness also report teeth grinding and TMJ issues.

First Relax Your Jaw

The first thing I recommend when dealing with neck tension is to focus on softening your jaw muscles. You can do this right now, wherever you are. It takes no special skills or equipment.

Simply bring your attention to the tension in your chin and jaw area. Inhale deeply and slowly, and then as you exhale, soften the muscles holding your jaw in place. It won’t fall off, I promise.

Relax your lips, soften your eyes. Allow your vision to blur slightly, to grow diffuse. Release tension from the muscles around your eyes and cheeks.

Let your jaw drop and mouth open slightly. Imagine your entire mandible sinking lower, opening from the back first (your jaw doesn’t, in fact, open like a hinge, but rather glides downward in the back to lower the entire bone).

Gently wiggle your jaw back and forth, right and left. Jut your chin a bit forward and back, sliding your jaw in and out. Move slowwwwwly! The more slowly you move, the more opportunity you give your nervous system to feel the sensory stimulus being generated, which calms your body.

Focus your attention on your ears. Can you relax the muscles around them? It’s totally okay if you can’t wiggle your earlobes or anything, just think about softening the tissue that’s around them. If it helps, place your fingers on the areas just in front and just behind your ears to help you feel them better.

Notice your breathing. Do you feel it deepen and slow as you release tension in your jaw, cheeks, eyes and ears?

Stay with this practice for as long as you feel progress happening. If you have quite a lot of stored stress and/or you’ve been stressed for a very long time, you may find that it takes ten minutes or more to feel a full relaxation response. In some cases, it make take half an hour, forty minutes, or even longer.

You don’t have to spend that much time, of course, but be cognizant of the fact that your biology isn’t on any schedule. It’s operating on primordial time, where it has the space of millennia to change.

Then Release Tight Neck Muscles

Only after you’ve completed the above should you move on to the video practice below. This video will walk you through some movements to restore flexibility to the muscles in your neck while also lubricating the small joints between your vertebra.

You will get far more out of this practice if you enter into it in a relaxed state, first making use of the techniques above. Relaxation calms the nervous system, making your muscles more receptive to stretching and mobilization techniques.

Otherwise, you’re merely stuck in a tug of war with your own nervous system, and that’s just exhausting.

For more great tips on how to calm your nervous system in order to decrease tension and increase flexibility, check out my ebook Perfect Posture for Life. It encompasses my more than thirteen years of experience helping hundreds of clients to improve posture and movement. You can order it by clicking here and start alleviating the pain caused by tight muscles immediately.