Never Stretch When You’re Cold

Another general rule is to never stretch an area that’s cold. Before stretching, you need to warm up and get your blood flowing. The body contains miles of tiny arteries, most of which stay closed unless you have moved enough to open them up and fill them with blood. After just a few minutes of movement, these baby blood vessels will open. The muscles they bring blood to grow warm and loosen up, allowing all that water you’re drinking to get into the fascia. That’s why the best time to stretch is after a workout, when all these arteries are open. Be sure to warm up the specific part of the body you plan to stretch.

If you don’t do regular workouts, just do some very simple movements:

> Windmill your arms.

> Rotate your torso.

> Do neck rolls.

> Touch your toes (bending forward as far as you can comfortably).

> Make circles with your knees.

> Jog slowly in place for thirty seconds. (If you can’t jog, hold on to a chair and march in place.)

> Do calf raises. (Holding onto a chair, come up onto the balls of your feet and then lower your heels slowly to the floor.)

All you need are 10 to 15 rhythmic repetitions on each side, just to loosen yourself up—a total of two minutes of nonstop movement. The key is that you must sweat slightly. If you don’t break a sweat, you’re not warmed up enough, and you need to repeat a couple of the warm-up movements for

an extra minute or so.

Timing the Stretches

You don’t need to hold fascial stretches for an uninterrupted sixty-secondperiod. For most people, this would be quite difficult. So you break each fascial stretch into two sections, with a rest in between. After the rest, in the second part of the stretch, you can go farther. Here’s the basic timing for all but two of the stretches:

> Hold for twenty seconds.

> Rest for ten seconds.

> Hold for thirty seconds.

The first twenty seconds is essentially a warm-up for the following thirty-second hold. Most people need five to ten seconds just to get into position, so don’t worry if the first hold doesn’t seem to be doing much. On the second hold, you’ll get into position much faster, and—here’s the key—you should make a greater effort. The thirty-second hold does the majority of the work. During this part, strive for an additional 5 percent of stretch beyond what you got in the first part. This requires a mental focus on expecting and working toward that small extra increment of movement. Even after you’ve stretched as much as you can, you can always go another 1 percent—so strive for that as well. If you don’t challenge yourself to your end point, you won’t get the full benefit. Keep asking, is it still releasing? Just remember you are listening to your body, not trying to force it. When it says no, that’s where you must stop.

At the beginning, put a clock with a second hand in front of you to time your stretch-rest-stretch intervals. After a while, you won’t need it because you’ll know how long twenty seconds is. Besides, with the fascial stretches, these time periods are basically just guidelines. The actual time you need depends on how well hydrated you are and the amount of injury and scarring in the part of the body you’re stretching. If your fascia is unhealthy, you need a longer hold to stretch it enough to get a good release. As you come to understand how the stretches work, you might decide to add a few extra seconds to your hold time, but always remember to be gentle and not force your tissue beyond that sense of slight discomfort. As your fascia gets healthier, your hold times can be shorter. You’ll be able to get into position immediately, so you can hold a few seconds less.

As you hold, there will be a moment when you suddenly feel the muscle fibers separating as the muscle opens and releases. When this happens, hold right there as long as you still feel this opening—being gentle yet firm at the same time. When the sensation of opening stops, let go. The optimal timing is slightly different for everyone. Once again, you must listen to your body—it will tell you. You might hold for thirty seconds, twenty-eight, or forty. What’s important is to consciously use the second hold period for the main therapeutic work.

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Timing the Stretches

Hold all the spinal stretches for a full sixty seconds. This is done for two reasons: First, you need to hold the fascia in tension for a certain length of time to reshape it. Second, the spinal stretches actually create suction that draws water into the fascia and the spinal disk, and this takes the full sixty seconds to occur. If you can’t hold for an entire minute at the beginning, start at forty-five seconds, thirty, or even fifteen, and work up to sixty gradually.

The sixty-second total includes the time it takes you to settle into position, so start counting as soon as you begin getting into the stretch. Beginners need twenty to thirty seconds to do this, but don’t worry—it’s been factored in. As you gain experience, you lock into position within five to ten seconds, so the amount of actual therapeutic time increases.

There are a number of ways to keep time. I stretch next to a clock with a second hand and check it periodically. You can use a timer, or count inside your head. One patient told me that she counts her breaths.

“Flashing In and Out”

You’ll find that some spinal stretches are easy, and you can hold them for sixty seconds after only two or three sessions. Other stretches are difficult and take longer to master. The general principle is that the spinal stretches you find the hardest are the ones you need to work on the most. In fact, this is how you diagnose your own problem. Since each stretch releases a particular region of the spine that’s related to a specific part of the body, the difficulty of each stretch tells you whether there’s a problem in the general area it relates to. Then you can use the fascial stretches to find out which specific muscles in that part of the body are affected.

Most people can’t hold the spinal stretches for sixty seconds when they first try them—in fact, thirty seconds is a long time to hold at the beginning. I’ve discovered that dancers, women, and thin people in general can do the stretches more easily than older people, overweight people, those with a lot of injuries, and men. Men are generally less flexible than women and usually have a body type—especially a stocky or muscular build—that makes it harder to hold a stretch. When I started out, I couldn’t do the Low Back Stretch for more than twenty seconds, and it’s still challenging for me. For people who are not very flexible or have difficulty getting down on the floor, I’ve included easier versions of most of the stretches, which can be done on a chair or cushion until you develop the ability to do the regular versions.

Another important point: even once a stretch has become easy for you, do not expect yourself to hold it perfectly for the full sixty seconds. Your goal is to maintain each piece of the position throughout that minute, but the truth is that no one, other than a professional dancer, can really do this. Instead, once you’re in position, run your tape loop in your mind, continually scanning your body and adjusting each part in turn, maintaining the position to the maximum of your ability. I call this “flashing in and out.” Say your right foot relaxes instead of staying flexed. When it comes up on your tape loop, you notice this and flex that foot again. Expect to lose pieces of the stretch even as you strive to maintain as much of it as you can. Just keep scanning and recorrecting yourself. Time for making these changes is built into the sixty seconds.

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