Do you feel like no matter how much stretching you do, your hamstring flexibility never increases?

Tight hamstrings continue to be one of the most common complaints that I hear about, and there’s a reason why focusing solely on hamstrings will quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.

Nothing in the body functions in isolation.  To lengthen the back line of your legs, other systems (i.e. muscles and fascia) have to accommodate movement of the hip joint, pelvis and spine.

That’s what we’ll look at in today’s Weekly Reboot, plus I’ll show you two exercises you can use to mobilize these “secret” muscles that affect hamstring flexibility so you can get more stretch out of your efforts.

What Other Muscles Are Making Your Hamstrings Tight?

How Do Tight Hamstrings Affect Your Body?

Restricted hamstring mobility, or, more accurately, restricted movement in forward flexion (meaning when you bend down to touch your toes), can be a big problem.  It hints at deeper mobility issues in the hips and pelvis that, as you age, can turn into real problems that prevent you from doing simple things like putting on your socks or picking up lint from the floor (because lint collection is very important, you know).

Also, tension in the myofascial network around the hip joint puts strain on the lumbar spine, over-burdening the deep psoas muscle of your core and causing digestive issues, lower back pain and even feelings of fear and anxiety.  A healthy, functioning psoas is juicy, fluid and soft, massaging your internal organs with every movement, and its inherent connection to your body’s innate fear response makes this muscle a very useful gauge for gut feelings and intuition.

 

But when the psoas has the additional burden of supporting your pelvis, functioning almost like a strut for your spine (which is – or should be – much more like a springy slinky than a Roman column), you’re likely to experience dissociation from your body, ongoing low-grade anxiety or fear, limited range of motion and flexibility, and a whole host of other symptoms that typically aren’t linked to postural imbalance until symptoms become so burdensome that the body sets off its red alert system – pain.

How Can You Augment Your Hamstring Flexibility?

To get more mileage out of your hamstring stretches, you have to look at other muscles that affect hip mobility, especially the adductors.  When we look at the anatomy of the hip, we can see plainly that the adductor group attaches along the long, straight bone at the base of the pelvis, the same bone to which the the hamstrings attach at the back.

 

When you bend forward, this bone sweeps back and up as the top of your pelvis rotates forward and down.  If your adductor muscles, some of which are very large and all of which are quite strong, aren’t used to lengthening, they won’t be able to allow this kind of movement of your pelvis.  So, no matter how much you stretch those hamstrings, if your adductors are tight, you’re not going to gain much flexibility.

Two Exercises to Open Your Adductors

1.  Dynamic Deep Lunge

The deep lunge will lengthen your hamstrings and your quads when you hold it in a static position, but when you move dynamically from side to side, you open up the entire fan of muscles around the hip joint, including your adductors.  Adding in dynamic movement also engages your nervous system, which is helpful for stretching adductors because they tend to be super strong and not overly responsive to static stretches, unless you’re very patient.

From your hands and knees, step your right foot up next to your right hand.  Push off your left knee and stretch your left foot behind you, toes curled under.  Sink hips as low as possible.  Walk yourself around so that your left leg is in front, right foot extended behind you, sinking into the stretch for a moment.  Return to the start and repeat as many times as you like.

2.  Ballet Squat

This movement teaches your body to engage the glutes and lengthen the adductors while supporting your weight.  Again, the dynamic movement helps you to develop new neural pathways with long adductors instead of keeping them short and tight.

Stand with your feet about two to three feet apart, depending on your height.  Turn your feet out to the side 45 degrees, or more if you have the flexibility.  Pressing your knees firmly out, sink down into a squat as far as you can go.  Place your hands on the outsides of your knees for proprioceptive feedback to help you engage your glutes and turn your knees out.

Once you’ve worked to open up your adductors, return to hamstring stretches and notice your increased mobility.  I find it also helps when folding into a forward bend to imagine those adductors lengthening as much as I focus my attention on the hamstrings extending.  Attention is key.

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Let’s face it, office posture matters.  From slumped shoulders and aching backs to diminished confidence and creativity, poor posture can have a profoundly negative effect on your physical health, happiness and productivity.

But aside from trading in your desk job for life as a yoga instructor where you can stretch eight hours every day, what can you do?

Fortunately, posture is a result of how we do what we do, not so much what we do and with a few small tweaks to your daily habits, you too can be standing taller and reaping the rewards of better office posture in less time than it takes you to check your email each day.

Why Office Posture Matters

The research is clear: good posture matters.  According to the Institute for Medicine, workplace muskuloskeletal injuries result in more than $45 billion lost every year.  And, if performance is your primary concern, Amy Cuddy’s now famous TED Talk demonstrates that your posture is how you’re perceived, both by your own brain and by people around you.

So, if you want an instant jolt of confidence, mental clarity and energy, all you have to do is shift your posture.

Here are three tiny tweaks that have a big impact

#1  Change how you’re sitting.

You want the seat of your office chair to be two to four inches higher than your knees so that your hips are sitting above the level of your knee.  You can have it higher if you want, but sitting with your hips lower than your knees puts pressure on your lumbar spine (lower back) and forces your shoulders into a slumped position.

It’s no good trying to sit up straight if you’re starting from this position.  You’re just battling physics.

Notice my chair in the video…it’s super un-fancy.  I didn’t spend a lot of money on it, and you don’t have to, either.  But, let me go into why I like this particular chair.

First, it has a hard seat.  Soft seats tend to rock your tailbone under and curve your spine into an unfortunate c-shape that promotes the hunched over computer programmer posture that is so unhealthy.  Second, it rocks.  A chair that rocks allows me to pour my weight into my feet, taking strain off of my back and core.  It’s a simple measure of efficiency.

For great back relief at work, sit with one foot in front of the other, both flat on the floor.  This is called the rocker stance and it will save your neck…literally.

And, yes, this chair is WAY too low for my over six foot frame.  I’ve padded with blankets to raise up the seat.  This is the constant battle of tall people.  If you are shorter, count yourself lucky because it will be much easier to find a chair that fits.  Taller people, seek out creative solutions or just buy a chair that’s adjustable height.

#2 Turn your body toward your work.

Your body influences your brain just as much as your brain influences your body.  If you’re not facing your work, you’re sending mixed messages to your brain.  It basically means that you’re both coming and going at the same time.

If you struggle with focus or fall victim to procrastination, this one is key.  But, you might also have to take a long hard look at your job.  If your body is on its way out, maybe it’s time for your brain to follow.  Only you know if that’s true.

#3  Make new movements.

Your body gets really good at doing whatever it is that you do repeatedly.  This is a good thing and a bad thing.  On the one hand, you develop incredible efficiency of skill, but on the other, you can get stuck in a self-limiting posture.

The famous computer slump is one of them.  To combat this, spend a lot of time taking your shoulders in the opposite direction that the computer does, i.e. backward.

Hang in a doorway, stretch using the corner of the wall or grab a broom and try this shoulder stretch.  Whatever you do, do it often.  That way, your body won’t freeze in de-evolution.

The Posture Mistake You Must Avoid (cue dramatic sound effects)

When you think of good posture, the first things that pop into your head are almost definitely, “shoulders back and stomach in!”  But yanking on your shoulders to wrestle them back behind your chest won’t last too long.

As soon as you have a different thought, your body will revert to its old ways.  Not to mention, trying to “do” posture is a losing battle.  You’re just adding layers of tension over tension.  Increased levels of tension in your muscles will zap your energy and send a signal to your brain that you’re stressed out, which in turn makes you feel stressed even if there’s nothing to be stressed over.

Soon you’ll be looking for reasons to be stressed.  This makes people unhappy.  I don’t recommend it.

Also, someone walking around with tight, rigid shoulders makes other people uncomfortable.  You look stiff and uptight.  And like you’re hiding something.  Even if we don’t think it consciously, we’re wondering what deep-seated insecurity you’re covering up.

So please, stay relaxed.  You’ll get much more mileage out of improving your posture if you just take a (really) deep breath and release all your tension.

Once you make these small changes to your office posture, you’ll notice a world of difference in your performance, confidence and happiness.

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Conventional wisdom says that if you have bad posture, you should work on it. Make it better. Improve it.

In short, it’s time to go to the mechanic and have your body “fixed.”

But what if fixing your bad posture is just making the problem worse?

What if strengthening those back muscles to pull your rounded shoulders back into place is making your body want to hunch them even more?

What if stretching your quads to correct your lower cross syndrome and silence your grouchy (and highly vocal) back is just increasing the strain on your spine?

That would seem odd. I mean, if the body isn’t lining out, stacking up and working properly, we should take steps toward correcting it, making it better and improving function, right?

I’m all about optimization. I fully believe that life is about making yourself better – not to beat other people, win accolades or rack up a list of impressive achievements, but to learn what you’re really made of.

It’s at our edges that we find out who we are. Not who we pretend to be, but the core you – the unchangeable, limitless person behind all the costumes and charades.

Pitting yourself against a worthy foe develops deep inner character. It’s the classic hero’s journey.

Sometimes (hint: always) that foe is your self – your physical, mental and spiritual beliefs and conditioning, which, when combined, comprise your personal limits.

I’m sure you’ve realized by now that I’m fanatical about the power of the body to change and influence the mind. So, why would I recommend you **not** try to change your less than optimal posture?

To understand my reasoning requires a fundamental shift in philosophy.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the body has been likened to a machine. It’s the most practical model we had for the human structure.

But the body is not a machine, and in today’s shift toward a less mechanical and more conceptual era, the mechanical model is highly outdated.

We’re not machines. We’re systems. And systems are whole, integrated, synergistic and interdependent.

That means that we can’t make a shift on one level of your system without cascading effects happening throughout the whole system.

Additionally, systems have inherent movements that are biologically imperative. That basically means that those movements are just the things that the system does regardless of programming, cultural conditioning or other overlays.

If a fly tickles a horse’s shoulder, the horse will twitch the skin to shake off the fly. It’s not a conscious movement; it’s a reflex inherent to all horses regardless of how they’re bred, where they’re raised, whether they’re wild or domesticated.

Humans have reflexes, too. If you’re frightened, for example, your body will shorten its front line, effectively curling you into a ball to protect the vulnerable soft organs in your belly.

Your chin will tuck and slide forward, guarding your jugular. Your breath shortens and quickens, cuing an adrenaline release to keep you on your toes to flee, or fight if you have to.

But what happens when that reflex gets interrupted? Or stuck halfway?

Your system never completes its expression. It gets frozen mid-way, like that infuriating spinning optical disk that shows up when your computer can’t handle everything you’re asking it to do.

What this means for you is that you’re chronically stuck in fight or flight mode. Your body is trying to curl forward to protect you and you’re fighting it all the way.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade of working with bodies, it’s that fighting the nervous system’s innate response is futile.

No matter how hard you work to get your body where you want it, the nervous system is going to yank you back toward its incomplete expression.

Sometimes you have to go into that expression for your body to be willing to come back out of it. That means that if your shoulders are hunched and your upper back rounded, you might need to go **more** into that position and wait for your body to come back out on its own, coming to neutral without all the struggle and strife.

Instead of yanking those shoulders back, working your back muscles and combating lower cross syndrome with strength training, try something a lot more simple: give your body the slack it needs to release the spasm it’s in.

Whatever pattern you are trying to correct, try feeding into it, pause for several minutes, wait, and feel how your body responds.

This takes patience. It requires awareness. It’s not conventional. But your nervous system will love you for it. It’s trying to help you. It would be so grateful if you would stop declaring war on its efforts.

I’m seeing massive results with this “backwards” approach, but I want to hear about your experience. Try it and tell me what happens in the comments below!

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I didn’t think I was much for video games, until some cruel individual introduced me to Civilization 5. Said individual shall remain unnamed.

Basically, Civ 5 is about world domination. You play a great historical leader from any number of random countries around the world, and you start out at the beginning in 3000 B.C. with a single settler and one warrior <== read: guy with a rock tied to a stick.

Over the next several thousand years, you build your civilization, creating wonders of the world, developing new technology and eventually coming into the modern era with airplanes and, yes, nuclear bombs.

One technology got me thinking – replaceable parts.

We didn’t really have these until the Industrial Revolution, which was all about efficiency. It turned the world from a giant, natural organism into a mechanized system.

And it changed how we saw ourselves.

Before the Industrial Revolution, bodies were largely a mystery. Some rogues had done a few dissections in the name of medical study, so we had names and classifications for our muscles and bones and organs, but the animating forces behind them remained in the realm of mysticism.

While no one has definitive answers about consciousness, we’ve now turned from seeing ourselves as biological wonders to some sort of soft machine with parts that can be taken out, interchanged, replaced and maybe even, in the near future, upgraded.

So when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror or see a photo from a recent family event, your belly pooched out, shoulders slumped and chin jutting forward like the bow of the Titanic, it’s only natural to think, “I’ve really gotta fix my posture.”

But, there’s a difference between fixing your posture and changing it. Subtle? Maybe. But it’s really important if you actually want results.

When we talk about “fixing” posture, we’re referring to an outside-in approach. We’re talking about strengthening muscles that might be weak, stretching muscles that might be tight, and using tension to hold your body into a rigidly defined ideal shape.

In short, we’re treating our body like a machine to be mastered and, ultimately, subjugated.

You will conform!

But conform to what? Our concept of what constitutes “ideal posture” is subject to question. Ideal for which purpose?

Changing your posture is a much more subtle art. Change happens at a much deeper level. It’s a shift from using extrinsic muscles to hold ourselves into a culturally defined ideal shape to allowing our bodies to use the most efficient movement for the task at hand.

In short, changing your posture happens at the subconscious level. It’s much deeper than a fix, which requires tension and focus to hold it in place. When you’re fixing your posture, it’s only good when you’re thinking about it. As soon as you forget to suck in your belly or pull your shoulders back, you’re slouching again.

Change is like installing a whole new operating system that runs in the background. When it senses discomfort, it runs an optimization scan to see where your body could be more efficient.

It’s about accomplishing more with less effort.

But before you can implement the Change Operating System in your body, you have to run a virus scan and see what’s not working.

This is a pretty simple procedure. It involves paying attention to your current felt sensations and identifying them.

Most people, when asked how they feel physically, will say, “Fine.” Unless they’re in pain. Then they say, “It hurts here,” while pointing to what hurts.

If you ask someone how something feels that doesn’t hurt, you’ll usually hear, “It’s fine, it doesn’t hurt.”

That’s how it doesn’t feel. But what does it feel like?

There are myriad sensations your body can feel (please note that “fine” is not one of them). A joint can feel stiff, sticky, filled with peanut butter. Or it can feel loose, oiled, fluid and open. A muscle can feel stringy, tight, short, tense, restricted or thick. It can also feel light, loose, limber, open, stretchy, bouncy and free.

If you want to start changing your posture, tap into the sensory information your body is sending to your brain in every waking moment. Change – real change, the kind that makes fundamental shifts in who and how you are – starts with awareness, not with doing.

Being precedes doing, every time.

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There are some things you just take for granted, until you no longer have them.  Like being able to turn your head and look over your shoulder before you back your car into that concrete pillar that someone clearly installed while you ran into Target to stock up on toilet paper.

Having a stiff neck really throws a wrench in your day.  You don’t realize how much you turn your head until it hurts every time you try.

But a hundred neck massages won’t fix the problem, which is why your stiff neck keeps coming back.  Because the pain in your neck?  Has nothing to do with your neck.

Rarely is the site of the symptom the site of the problem.  To get to the root of your neck issues, you have to chase the problem, not the pain.

Let’s back up a bit and take a look at where the neck actually begins and ends.  Anatomically speaking, your neck extends from the first cervical vertebra just beneath your skull to the 7th cervical vertebra.  But when you turn your head, these aren’t the only moving parts.

Your cervical spine connects very directly to your thoracic spine (mid-back), which in turn links to your lumbar spine in your lower back.  Your lumbar spine is hooked up to your sacrum – the large triangular shaped bone that wedges into your pelvis.

Drawing lines between different body parts is as artificial as our political borders.  They don’t exist, except as constructs of our minds.

If you keep stretching your neck and the pain keeps returning, it’s because something else is out of balance and it’s contributing to the tightness further up the chain.

My advice?  Look at your hips.  In our modern culture, all of us – ALL of us – sit way more than we should.  We sit to work, sit to drive, sit to eat, even sit to relax.  Some of us even sit to exercise!

Sitting puts our hips into flexion, bringing the knees closer to the chest and contracting the front line of the body.  This isn’t a problem for short durations, but getting stuck in flexion, as so many modern people are, causes dysfunctional spinal movement and, ultimately, neck and shoulder pain.

Now it’s all starting to come together, right?  The body is a system where each piece and part is dependent on every other piece for function and balance.  So, how can you address the restrictions in your hips?

Hips are complicated.  There are myriad muscles crossing over joints and attaching at different points, some deep inside the pelvis.  But the most important thing you can do to restore proper hip function is to treat your flexion addiction.

Hip flexors are the muscles that – you guessed it – flex the hip.  The largest of these are the quadriceps, four large muscles that make up the front of your thigh.

A much deeper and also much more difficult to stretch hip flexor is your psoas, which runs from the front of your spine just behind your solar plexus down to the inside of your leg.  This guy is deep, in more ways that one.

The psoas tends to store a lot of negative emotion, namely fear and anxiety.  When you feel threatened in any way, the tendency is to “go fetal,” or fold yourself up into your belly to protect your sensitive organs.

Even if you don’t get fully into the fetal position, chronic stress and insecurity can create a shortening of the psoas in an approximation of the fetal position.

The psoas is also deeply linked with breathing because the place where it connects to your spine is just below your diaphragm.  So, a tight, restricted psoas will keep your breath shallow, which in turn raises stress levels and increases overall physical tension.

Opening up the front of the hips gives length to your spine, takes pressure off of your neck, allows you to breathe more deeply and ultimately reduces overall tension in your body.  That’s a lot of bang for your stretching buck!

Try this simple dynamic hip flexor stretch to release your quads and psoas, and then leave me a comment and let me know how it goes for you!

Pain Free At Any Age

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