Does a  small child's flexibility remind you of what you might be missing?  Most of us get tighter and less flexible as we age.  Lack of flexibility can affect our health and our ability to perform athletically.

There are many types of flexibility exercises:  Static stretching, ballistic stretching, functional stretching, passive stretching, active stretching, PNF, Assisted Stretching, (Active Isolated promoted by Aaron Mattes) Resistive Stretching, Meridian Stretching, and Yoga.

Improper stretching can harm your health or retard your performance. In fact, injuries are common from over stretching. A good example would be to attempt to over stretch hamstrings muscles when a severe lumbar lordosis is evident. (hamstrings are likely already overstretched.)  Even though the hamstring feels taunt and ROM is limited it is a mistake to try to over stretch it until the cause of the tightness is corrected. 

Another example would be to statically stretch for long periods of time prior to an athletic event. Research has conclusively proven that this retards performance where as active range of motion type of warm up has been shown to improve performance.  Stretching after an event is a wonderful way to help with recovery. Just remember that the muscle can easily be hurt by overstretching after an event. 

We teach and use The Aaron Mattes Method Active Isolated Stretching as well as Resistive Stretching and the Relax/contract method of PNF. (Travis was a full time paid employee of Aaron Mattes  for most of 1993 at Aaron's clinic in Sarasota where he worked with many professional athletes.) There are many advantages to using the Mattes Method: wonderful gains in flexibility; low probability of injury;  low cost, and you can do the work yourself without paying a therapist.  (A 10 foot soft rope purchased at Home Depot is less than $4.00.)  

We also have adapted the contract-relax method of PNF to help with muscle spasms or limited ROM at our clinic. Our method begins with a passive stretch the client's muscle just short of causing the muscle spindle to fire. The patient is then instructed to meet the resistance of the therapist by doing an isometric contraction of the muscle that was just before being stretched. (There should not be a contest to see who is the strongest)  The isometric contraction is held for 6 seconds.  The patient is then immediately instructed to relax.  We wait until the therapist feels that occur. When the relaxation occurs we again passively stretch the muscle and repeat the sequence as described before. We continue as long as there are gains in ROM.  We hold the last stretch for 20 seconds unless the muscle spindle fires as evidenced by a muscle contraction.  When this occurs we stop the stretch immediately to protect against injury. 

We are also having good results with Bob Cooley's method of Meridian Stretching.   You can read more in his book, "The Genius of Flexibility"  One famous athlete using this method is Dara Torres who has had much success in swimming.  She currently has a video that is is for sale and may be  purchased from Innovative Body Solutions.

 Brad Appleton has some useful information about stretching on his web site for another point of view.