Welcome back to Fit Body Happy Joins. My name is Shannon and I have Dr. Payton with me today. We are going to be talking about stretching and our opinions on stretching from kind of like what her and I have

learned separately from clinical standpoint we both have different

trainings outside a physical therapy school that allow us to kind of have a unique position on this.

So we want to get really nerdy with this conversation and talk about kind of like what stretching is and isn't doing for your body.

Are there places for stretching?

Can stretching be dangerous?

And hopefully give you some really good applications and some reasoning for why to why to or why not to stretch. So welcome,

Payton. Thank you, so excited to be back.

Yay. Okay, so let's dive right in and talk about what is tightness because a lot of people want to stretch because they feel tight.

So, Payton, tell us what tightness is and why we feel tight.

Yeah, so tightness is a very subjective thing.

It's not something that is measurable with a device. So when people say they feel

tight, it's truly that it's a feeling. It's a sensation in their body and it can come from many different things but a lot of times it's been and the mechanism of it is our brain or our nervous system doesn't feel safe or maybe it feels vulnerable in a certain position

and it creates at this tightness, quote unquote tightness within the muscle to protect you from moving through certain ranges of motion.

So ultimately it's a really subjective sensation that people tend to complain about pretty often.

I like to compare tightness to pain.

They're kind of similar.

Like pain is totally subjective, you cannot measure it

and everyone's experience of pain will feel different and just like pain

tightness is a warning sign it's just your body going hey like we're not stable in this range of motion, back off, just like pain.

Like if you, if you like step wrong on your lay or if you step on a thumb tack and you feel

that pain, we got to take action, we got to lift our foot, get away from that pain stimulus.

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