April 4th, 2024- April 4th (Qingming Festival holiday).
Guy Donahaye, author of the book “Inheritance” by Senior A Tang -5-day workshop.
Recent Ashtanga Yoga training opportunities recommended by other official account editors can be found here.
Many of us yoga practitioners regard yoga practice as a stretching exercise, believing that stretching is crucial for completing a position, and even the position movement itself is stretching; But in fact, frequent and excessive stretching cannot improve the overall range of motion of the body, nor can it help with functional exercise. If regular stretching can improve a wide range of unrelated activities, then very flexible people, such as ballet dancers, should be good at all sports activities, but that’s not the case. On the contrary, we observe that birds learn to fly by optimizing their flight through more flight practice, which is called specific task practice or functional training, and they do not do wing compression and stretching. Practicing yoga is the same, without warming up, without exerting force during movements, just practice every day..
Stretching forcefully and frequently can also disrupt the balance of the body; One of the risks is a soft tissue marathon, where tissues such as joint capsules, tendons, and ligaments are cushions and cushions around bones and muscles that should have restricted body movement; If not stretched properly, it can cause serious local instability of the body. For example, ligaments do not have much elasticity, stretching 4% is enough to reach the limit of tearing, and it is advisable to avoid being stretched as much as possible; Tendons, like adhesive tape, attach bones and muscles together, and stretching can be very violent for them. Imagine you didn’t have a knife or scissors to forcefully open a shipping box This could be your stretching, do you really want to treat your body this way?.
In fact, only the middle “belly” segment of the muscles and peripheral nerve fibers can withstand tensile force and be stretched; But in a yoga class where you can “open” here and there, pulling and opening hard may not necessarily make your body parts more flexible..
In theory, although muscles can be stretched a little bit by force, allowing for a larger range of joint movement, in reality, when we stretch or “open” the muscles, we never stretch them alone, but simultaneously stretch all the soft tissues related to the muscles; And the results of sports research have shown that when a muscle is kept in a stretched state for a while, the length of muscle fibers does increase – an additional small contraction unit called sarcomere; However, the increase in flexibility is not only due to an increase in the length of muscle fibers, but also requires an equal degree of length increase in the soft tissues surrounding the muscle fibers and the surrounding soft tissues, including changes in the overall state of the relevant fascia; This will not happen in a few stretching classes, but requires repeated practice for a long period of time (some people are months, some people are years). This continuous practice allows soft tissues to gradually keep up with the muscle’s stretching ability, and flexibility will be improved..
In addition, peripheral nerve fibers can be elongated, but they are actually very fragile and cannot cause any obstruction to stretching; If the peripheral nerve fibers were not wrapped in various soft tissues, they would be easily pulled apart, but this protection is not absolute; have.