3 Reasons Why Stretching Doesn’t Help Your Tight Muscles

One common complaint I hear from my yoga students and others is that even when they stretch a lot, their muscles go back to being “tight.”

Of course they do.

There’s a few reasons for this.

(1) This Is By Design

First, muscles are elastic. When you stretch them they will inevitably go back to their old form. That’s by design.

Think about a rubber band. You can stretch it out, but it will go back to its old form. At least you hope it will. If it doesn’t snap back into place, the rubber band becomes useless — it won’t hold whatever you want it to hold.

Muscles attach to bones. They help hold our bones in alignment so we can move. If your muscles are too loose, you’ll lack stability and balance.

I get a lot of students in my yoga classes who have this problem. They have the type of flexibility that the “tight” students envy: they can often contort themselves into all sorts of shapes. But they can’t hold their positions. They lack stability.

In balance poses, these very flexible students often fall over. They need more structure and boundaries.

(2) The Tight Feeling is Fascia, Not Muscle

Second, the tight sensation you feel is often not the muscle itself, but the fascia. The fascia is a coating that weaves throughout the body and surrounds the muscles and organs. In the early study of anatomy, fascia wasn’t even studied. They discarded it when they cut bodies open, believing it was irrelevant.

We now know that the fascia contains important nerve receptors that send pain signals, and that it’s often the fascia that is responsible for the tight feeling.

In addition, fascia is the reason why your “tight” shoulder may actually be stemming from your opposite side hip. Fascia weaves in spirals through the body linking the different parts together.

Fasica is more like a “plastic” material that takes more time to relax and unstick. It finds “give” through repetitive movements and compression rather than traditional stretching. This is the aim of a yin yoga practice.

(3) Your Tight Muscles are Weak

The third reason your tight muscles might not respond to stretching is that they might already be overstretched.

Muscles can feel tight because they are overused or because they are weak. In many cases where muscles don’t respond to stretching, it’s because the muscle is weak, not overused.

This is very common with tight hip flexors and glutes, which are often underused because we sit so much.

In this case, no amount of stretching will help. You need to strengthen the tight muscles in their intended functions.