Get to Know Your Muscles
Filed under: Essays — arlene @ 10:39 pm
The cause of all excess tension lies in restricted muscles. It is impossible to be emotionally tense or anxious if your muscles are completely relaxed. Learning to release tension through slow, sustained stretching makes true freedom of movement possible. Muscles are elastic things, able both to contract and to stretch up to one and a half times their relaxed length. A healthy muscle can be in one of three different states:
1. It can be contracted, which means it is in the act of causing movement in the skeleton.
2. It can be in tone, which is in the normal state of an awake muscle where its power is latent but the muscle is ready instantly to contract or stretch as soon as a nerve impulse to do so reaches it.
3. It can be relaxed, which should only happen when you are asleep.
In a truly fit and alive body the muscles are capable of moving from any one of these states to either of the others quickly and without strain. In most of us they are not, simply because we do not use them fully so they have become neglected.
When a muscle goes unused or is only partially used it either becomes chronically tense (in which case it feels rigid to the touch) or it goes flaccid.
Muscles work in antagonistic pairs and groups. As one set of muscle fibers contracts, its opposite set relaxes and stretches. Not a single muscle in your body works alone. The ratio of strength between opposing muscles and groups is finely balanced. But inactivity and stress destroy the balance. Then as one muscle becomes chronically tense its opposite becomes overstretched or flaccid and vice versa.
When you have imbalances in groups of opposing muscles your body is more liable to damage, particularly in the flaccid areas where fibers and tendons are weaker. This can also affect the strength and health of your internal organs which, like your bones, are held in place by the body’s musculature. A combination of tension and flaccidness in opposing muscle groups is why, in an unconditioned or out of shape body, you find simultaneously a state of flabbiness in some areas (thighs, stomach, and bottom, for instance) and rigidness in others (shoulder blades, calves, and sacrum, for example) which leads to the distortions in body shape that women find so disheartening and so difficult to change—the expanding midriff, the bulging thighs, the “dowager’s hump” at the base of the neck.
In the areas where muscles are weak, fat forms around them for they do no work to help disperse fatty deposits. The muscles sag and the skin covering sags with them. At the same time their opposing muscles, which are chronically tense or contracted, remain in a near static state. They are hard and bulging and their movement is restricted. This stasis impedes natural circulation of lymph and blood to the area, which means that vital nutrients and oxygen are in short supply to the cells. It also interferes with your body’s ability to carry out tissue repair when needed and restricts the elimination of cellular wastes.
There is also a possible fourth state for muscles. It is one that does not usually occur in everyday life. It is called the state of full stretch. You experience it through slow isotonic movements that will reshape your body to its natural form from the inside out.
Tense or slack muscles are like ill-fitting clothes either too tight or too loose. This accounts for the rigid, even brittle, appearance and angular movements of tense bodies, and the blurred pendulous contours of bodies that lack good muscle tone. With tensions released and natural resilience restored, muscles fit the body properly. Tense muscles become pliable and slack muscles shorten and wrap more closely round their supporting frame. Like a well-fitting girdle, they take up slack flesh and redistribute it in firmer and smoother contours.”
The elasticity of a muscle is the real measure of good muscle tone, not the size as many people think. Many overtense muscles in thighs and calves, for instance, appear to be overdeveloped. A woman who had them might hesitate to do any form of exercise lest they get even bigger. But excessive size is not a sign of good muscle development at all. It is, instead, a sign of chronic muscle tension. Just as stretching exercises will build up soft flabby areas, they can also reduce areas that are too big because slow isotonic stretching has the ability to normalize—to help restore true form to each area of your body.
