Get Flexible: Benefits

Exercise your right to be limber

Stretching doesn't usually come to mind when most people think about fitness. It should. Being flexible improves your performance, protects against injury and helps you to do everyday tasks with the greatest of ease. PHYS has a head-to-toe glossary of stretches that will maximize your flexibility, as well as a guide to activities that will keep you supple.

Flexible Benefits

How stretching can improve your health and flexibility

When I was 10, I understood the value of being flexible. I was a fan of the comic-book hero Elastic Man. Here was a guy who could stretch his arm out the living-room window, through the back door of the downstairs neighbors, across their kitchen, and into the freshly filled cookie jar. Flexibility served a useful and vital function. The rewards were clear.

Now that I'm an adult, and know that no amount of stretching will endow me with Elastic Man's capabilities, the rewards I could gain from stretching aren't so clear. My question is this: Is flexibility useful and vital enough that I should set aside time every day for stretching? I know that it feels good, and it is useful to have a generally wide range of motion. But how far does one need to go? How many times in the days ahead am I going to find myself thinking, Gee, if only I could put my forehead to the floor with my legs spread-eagled? And, in the end, does stretching have any positive effects on your health?

I posed this last question to Jim Wharton, who patented his Active-Isolated stretching program. Stretching, Wharton said, "flushes out the tensions of the day." It gets the blood circulating and "prepares your body for work." Yes, but couldn't the same be said for a swim or a spin on the Lifecycle?

I tracked down John Cianca, M.D., an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who has a practice in sports medicine. Cianca agreed to explain, in biomechanical terms, why it is good for muscles to be regularly stretched.

"Muscles act like springs," he said. "If the muscle is short and tight, then there's no place for it to go when you contract it. Without that spring, it can't generate as much power."

Stretching should also, Cianca maintains, help prevent injuries — not only to the muscles themselves, which are more likely to tear or pull if they're tight, but to joints. A tight muscle doesn't have much ability to absorb shock. The less shock a muscle can absorb, the more strain there is on the joints. In short, muscles that aren't sufficiently stretched can limit their owners' performance and put them at greater risk of injury.

Some experts maintain that when it comes to preventing injury, warming up is as critical as stretching. One of those people, oddly, is the president of Stretching Inc., Bob Anderson: "Probably the most important thing in injury prevention is a good eight-to-12-minute warm-up." In essence, warming up and stretching accomplish the same thing. Using muscles gets blood flowing through them; the blood makes them warmer. Muscles react to warmth in the manner of taffy or gum, stretching farther and more easily without tearing.

A common argument in favor of regular stretching is that it helps you maintain your full range of motion. "Over time your tissues tend to become a little less pliant," says Jenny Stone, an athletic trainer for the U.S. Olympic Committee's Division of Sports Medicine. "The idea of stretching to maintain your range of motion throughout your life makes a certain degree of sense. It takes much less effort to maintain anything than it does to regain it."

Why do muscles lose their range of motion? Cianca explains that muscles are encased in a thin, slick layer of tissue called the fascial covering. The fascia act as a lubricating layer, allowing muscles to slide back and forth. If you stop moving, either because of an injury or because, as Cianca puts it, "you got close with your couch," the fascia coverings start sticking and stiffen up. "Your body is a machine," Cianca says. "If you leave it out in the field, it'll rust."

Bob Anderson has a metaphor of his own. "I call it muscular rigor mortis. If you want to touch your toes when you're 70, the only way is if you spend a little time at that point every few days."

What if I don't want to touch my toes when I'm 70?

Stone could see my point. "There are an awful lot of people, athletes included, who at various joints in their body do not have what is considered a normal range of motion. A stretching program could help them regain it. But will it help their health and athletic performance? I don't know. I guess you need to talk to someone who's 70 who can still touch his toes."

Swami Krishna is 73. Not only can he touch his toes, I am told, he can bring them up to his chest and thread them through his armpits and around to the back of his head, where they serve as a sort of headrest. The swami is one of dozens of monks and yogis who live in the holy city of Rishikesh, India, a.k.a. Yoga Capital of the World (and, yes, the place where the Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi). On a recent visit to India, I made a quick pilgrimage to Rishikesh.

I went to see Swami Krishna at the Sivananda Ashram, on the outskirts of town. I waited for him in a courtyard where a monk with a shaved head was chanting and offering marigolds to a deity with six arms, all outstretched and waving, as though demonstrating proper range of motion. I could read the ashram motto on the fountain — be good, do good — only someone had rubbed off the final ds, so it read, be goo, do goo.

The yogi stepped from his room — a wizened, wiry, stubble-chinned man in swaddling orange. He held a plate of porridge and bread and a three-foot stick, which he shook at the monkeys that would climb down from the trees and attempt to make off with his bread.

"Tell me," I began, "what is the benefit of lifetime flexibility?" The yogi disappeared into his room and returned bearing the Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. He pointed to the book. "You can read."

I explained that I had come a long way to hear his wisdom. He ate some porridge. "Benefit. Mmm." He looked at me, raised his forefinger, and said, "Spinal column. Bone will become soft. And more wind. Bone can get more wind. We are throwing out the dirty wind."

I had no idea what he was talking about. "Anything else?"


"Yes. Make yoga, many years. You can become yogi. Yogi can do what he wants, isn't it? People bring gifts, money. Benefit. Mmmm." Wise guy.

At two o'clock, yoga students began arriving. Swami Krishna excused himself, stripped down to a pair of red Speedos, and proceeded to enact a potent testimony to the benefits of flexibility. Here was a 73-year-old man who could cross his legs while standing on his head and do back bends from a standing position. His limbs weren't soft, they were rubber. They were putty. And putty does as putty is. Be Goo, Do Goo. When my grandmother was 73, she couldn't get her arms through her coat sleeves without help. Frailty, thy name is woman who never stretched. Pardon me while I go touch my toes.