Ballistic Stretching

Stretching is important. As a bodyworker, I consider it a dereliction of purpose if I don’t do my best to encourage my clients to stretch more. That said there are many different ways to stretch each with their own benefits, so it's not just a matter of stretching more but stretching smarter. This week I want to unpack some of my thoughts on, what to me is an unfairly slander stretching modality. Ballistic stretching.

Ballistic stretching involves using the momentum of our bodies to stretch a muscle or a muscle meridian. Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge that ballistic stretching has some dangers. I would not recommend it to anyone who does not have some form of stretch practice. Many people in the medical field are taught to eschew this stretch, and not without reason. If we are not cautious we can easily hurt ourselves doing this. Many people under stretch so I'm cautious in promoting a stretch that if done incorrectly can hurt us. But I also will say I been incorporating more ballistic in my own practice. It's been happening organically. I never made a point to do this. Its something my body just started to do more and more frequently. I also started to notice the benefits from this so I wanted to share what I been doing so if others feel inclined they can safely incorporate this practice into their workout. I will also say to pay attention to your body. You are in charge of keeping yourself safe and healthy. If something doesn’t feel right, Stop.

So let's start with some caveats. I think the biggest issue with ballistic stretching is people trying to use their momentum to push the endpoint of their stretch too far. Apparently, some athletes do this to get an edge but since I do not do this I can’t speak about this. I myself caution against doing this as it is easy to pull a tendon doing such a thing. We also should make sure we are properly warmed up before we start this form of stretching. Whatever we need to do to increase the heartbeat a bit for a few minutes will help limber up the body enough to keep it safe.

So now that we have the red flags outs, it's time for me to explain how I've been exploring this stretch. The first step for me to find my natural endpoint of any stretch. I want to find where my muscles start to feel a stretch. If we hold a stretch for a while we can often go deeper into it, but for the purposes of this stretch, I rather focus on the beginning of my endpoints rather than trying to push myself too far. I rather slowly but consistently improve my flexibility than risk injuring myself.

When I know where my endpoints are ( and it's worth noting that bodies are dynamic, so these change every time). I slowly trace out the motions of the stretch I am doing. This establishes an efferent (motor nerve) pathway or muscle memory of my action. I do this a few time as slow as I can for 2 reasons. !st by engaging this muscle memory my body will naturally enact this same movement pattern when I am moving faster. This helps ensure that I don’t get carried away with my momentum, overstretching myself. The 2nd reason is this slow-motion step allows me to notice any warbles in my movement, allowing me the chance to smooth them out. Once I feel warmed up, after a few slow-motion version of my stretch I increase my speed. I try to find a rhythm to my motion as it better allows our body to know what is happening. I feel finding a rhythm helps our bodies relax which is always good no matter how we choose to stretch.

Since doing this I noticed that while the endpoints of my stretch haven’t expanded too much, but I feel more comfortable in these endpoints. I feel I have more muscle control while in a stretched position, which is good because these are the position where we are most apt to hurt ourselves in. On a psychological, I feel a bit more adventurous level in what I can do because of this increased muscle control. This in turns allows me greater movement options, creating a positive feedback loop.

As I previously stated I never set out to do this. I just noticed what my body was doing naturally and allowed it to happen. I really don’t feel stretching should be the domain of health care tactician. If we could understand the language of cats I'm sure they could teach us more about how to stretch than any medical doctor or health guru. And their source of all their wisdom is their instinct and their bodies which of course is available for us to tap into.

Anthony Bruni