Stretching is often considered the best method to regain physical flexibility. People also feel that stretching can alleviate muscle conditions and help them get rid of pain and muscle discomfort. However, the science behind stretching has a different perspective.
Stretching deals with passive potential that can either temporarily offer comfort to the body or aggravate any muscular discomfort or pain. Functional Patterns, currently considered a leader in the fitness industry, explains the concept behind it to help people understand whether their muscles need to be stretched or not.
Functional Patterns is a health and fitness company that started a whole new approach to addressing imbalances in the human body and correcting the way people move. Founded over 12 years ago, the company has been transforming lives through its Functional Patterns methodology. It focuses on creating a sustainable body by making biomechanical adaptations that relate to the way humans evolved to move in space. Through this methodology, people can better prepare their bodies to respond more appropriately to stressors they face in the environment. Functional Patterns also helps in correcting posture and muscle imbalances.
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To date, the company has trained and educated thousands of health professionals in Functional Patterns around the world. At present, they have 20 licensed gyms spread across different continents. Through a more scientific approach to stretching, Functional Patterns has proved to rival physiotherapy, chiropractic, and other such treatments. The company has assisted the famous Johnny Eblen through FP to become Bellator’s #1 middleweight contender. Kyle Dake, the renowned freestyle wrestler from Cornell University, has benefited from following this methodology that helped him win 3 world championships and an Olympic bronze medal after he was set to retire dealing with career-ending injuries.
Functional Patterns explains that stretching can ruin the function of your muscles by completely shutting them off. It can also lead to chronic pain or deteriorate an existing muscle condition. For instance, consider a rubber band. When it is overstretched, the rubber band loses its elasticity. Similarly, muscles in the human body respond to stretching by contractions or, as science describes it, reciprocal inhibition.
Let’s use a bicep curl as an example. The length you create on the triceps when the bicep contracts, is what then enables the triceps to contract after it has been lengthened. This is what happens in movement with muscles all over the body. Although as is traditionally done, stretching is a passive process, which doesn’t promote reciprocal inhibition in the body. Over time your muscles will lose their ability to contract, causing instability and tightness in your joints.
If you have muscles that don’t function correctly, this can lead to increased strain on your ligaments and tendons when you move, which can aggravate existing conditions. We also have to consider that muscles don’t function in isolation. There are chains of muscles in the body that must function together for you to move efficiently. This is where stretching can have an adverse impact on the body because it is based on passive motion, and not active motion. Moving correctly is ultimately what’s going to promote the right types of stretches in the body.
Functional Patterns has a completely different approach to healing pain and other muscular conditions. The method focuses on correcting physical imbalances in the body by teaching you how to move better. Functional Patterns focuses on 4 primary functions, which are called the FP First Four: standing, walking, running, and throwing. They use the most basic forms of human movement to help to measure functionality, and physical imbalances causing discomfort, and tightness in the body. The FP First Four provides a code to dictate a way of programming flexibility that respects the human biological blueprint.
So far, Functional Patterns has helped many people with chronic pain function better. The list includes double amputees, people with neurological conditions, people with disc herniations, and many more. This is a proven method that is challenging the dominant concepts in the fitness industry worldwide. With a fail-safe approach and lifelong results, it is only a matter of time before Functional Patterns becomes the household name in the training and healthcare sectors.