Reciprocal Inhibition

So this week I want to talk about reciprocal inhibition, a simple body hack can increase our flexibility

One under-noticed aspect of how our bodies function that we often overlooked is the concept of reciprocal inhibition. Reciprocal inhibition refers to the idea that as we engage certain muscles, muscles on the opposing side of that same joint will naturally relax. One example of this would be if we flex our quadriceps on the front of our leg the hamstrings on the back of our legs will relax. This makes sense since other than consciously doing an isometric exercise why would our bodies ever have to engage both our quadriceps and hamstring at the same time. One action would extend our knee while the other would flex it. These are contradictory actions. If we choose to engage our quadriceps and extend our knee, any activation of our hamstring would only make that action that much less kinetically efficient.

So how can we use this information to facilitate our health? I find for myself some of the deepest releases I experience come when I am holding posed that require quite a lot of muscular energy. The muscles that are not engaged naturally relax to a deeper degree that would happen if I was overall all in a state of relaxation. This is not to diminish the experience of a more holistic tension release, but to say it's of a different quality that has its own unique benefits.

Often our lives demand that we over perform the same actions, which limits which muscles we use. How many actions do we perform that require us to use our arms behind our back? Probably not many if any. Comparably let's think of all the things we do where our arms are in front of us. This means we tend to overuse our pectoralis muscles causing them to shorten over time if we don’t do something to intermediate this process. By engaging our rhomboids, we can pull our scapula back on our ribs which naturally expands the pectoral area of our thorax, thus preventing our pecs from over contracting.

If we look at the history of how people had to moved to perform the basic duties of sustaining life throughout our long evolution we would find more varied movements than we perform today in the post-industrial age. I suspect we would find more balance between working with different muscles groups. Reciprocal inhibition would, I presume, naturally, occur within the scope of our day to day life. Today is different. Our diversity of movement is just one more form of diversity that the modern world tends to restrict.

So if some part of our body feels stuck or not moving we can employ a simple reciprocal inhibition technique to see if we can get some flow back into our bodies.

Anthony Bruni