Bill Hartman 15:01–17:48
There's a pretty hot blonde in that video if I recall correctly. Yes. Okay. So let me make a statement and then it'll become very, very clear. Eccentrically oriented muscle has no tension on it. Concentrically oriented muscle does, okay? If I have a compressive strategy that is a concentrically oriented muscle, okay? So if I was to try to stretch an eccentrically oriented muscle, I wouldn't feel anything until I got to the very end and then the connected tissues would kick in, but I would be demonstrating a full excursion of what would be traditional joint range of motion. So if I have limited joint range of motion and I am trying to apply pressure to a muscle to make it longer, good luck with that. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. You can't. And here's what we know. And this is in the literature is there's no change in the stiffness of a muscle after you perform a static stretch. Okay. And so what you're getting is you're getting a connective tissue based yielding action in the connective tissues, which is temporary, which is why if you stretch once and you make any measurable gains which good luck with that you're not going to make much. Okay. You make a measurable gain, it doesn't stick. You have to do it again. You have to do it again. It's the people that come in and say, I always have to stretch my hip flexors. I always have to stretch my pecs. The reason that you have to stretch them is because they're concentrically oriented and they're not changing. You're creating a yielding action. But this also describes why you see the power decrement that's associated with static stretching because you're creating a yielding action in the connective tissues, which is what I need to store and release energy. But if I get a yielding action, so I hold that long enough where I get the elongation of connective tissues, I don't get the overcoming action that follows, which is actually the release of energy. So you see the power decrement. Now, what happens after a period of time or after a dynamic warmup? You regain the power element of it because you just recaptured the connective tissue behavior that you used with the static stretching the first place. Now, does that mean that static stretching is useless? Absolutely not. It just means that what you think it's for, it's not for. Okay, so static stretching is specifically to improve the yielding capabilities of connective tissues and to increase your pain tolerance. What you may gain from that is what's called a flexibility reserve. So if I was to take you and I was to yank you into a stretched position, you may have a flexibility reserve that can protect you because you have captured the yielding capabilities of those connective tissues. Okay.
muscle orientationstatic stretchingconnective tissueflexibility reservepower decrement