Tight Muscles That You Just Can't Relax

Why are your muscles feeling tight? Does it mean that they're short? Can't they relax? And what do you do about that?

Here are some of my views on why and what to do about muscles that feel tight.

Tightness, not just a mechanical state, is a sensation

"If you say that in a specific area you feel" strong, "that might mean many different things:

Bad motion range.

Or perhaps the range of motion is perfect, but movement to the end range feels sluggish or requires unnecessary effort.

Or maybe the issue isn't really with movement, but it just feels comfortable that the region never reels.

Or maybe the region feels essentially comfortable, but has some vague sense of discomfort-a sensation that is uncomfortable but too mild to be considered pain.

This uncertainty suggests that it is only the sensation of tightness that is not the same thing as the physical or mechanical property of excess stress, or stiffness, or shortness. Without the other, you should have one.

I have several customers, for instance, tell me that their hamstrings feel tight, but they can easily place their palms in a forward bend to the floor. I have clients, too, whose hamstrings don't feel tight at all, and their hands can hardly get past their knees. So the sense of tightness is not an exact measurement of motion range.

Nor is it an accurate representation of a muscle's actual stress or hardness, or the presence of 'knots.' When I palpate a region that feels tight to a customer (let's say the upper traps), they always inquire - can you feel how tight that is?!

There's something I always say like:

Ummmmmmm ...... Oh, no. It sounds much like the tissues that surround it.

But I fully understand that in this place, it FEELS tight and you do not like it.

I still don't like the feeling of tightness, so I want to help you get rid of that feeling. But the feeling of being tight is not the same as actually being physically tight in that place. Got a sense?

To most people, this really makes sense, and they find it slightly fascinating. I want people to know this because it may help them rethink a misconceived strategy that they might have already established to cure their tightness, such as extreme stretching, shattering of fascia, or breaking of adhesion. So they are now able to consider a strategy that is a little more subtle than pushing halfway through their ribcage with a lacrosse ball.

Why do muscles feel tight if, in truth, they are not tight?

So why would a muscle, even if physically loose, feel tight?

As an example, I think we should use pain. Even in the absence of tissue injury, pain may occur because pain stems from threat perception, and perception does not always match reality. In essence, pain is an alarm, and often alarms go off even though there is no real threat.

In the feeling of tightness, maybe a similar logic is involved. The feeling occurs when we unconsciously perceive (rightly or wrongly) that there is a dangerous condition in the muscles that needs to be corrected for movement.

So what is the threatening situation in which a sense of tightness is trying to alert us? Muscles are built to build tension and we sometimes feel tightness in the muscles even though they are almost completely relaxed. It is definitely not just the presence of tension.

Tension is not, therefore, a danger, but the lack of proper rest or blood flow is a danger that could induce metabolic stress and activate chemical nociceptors. The problem to be warned about by a feeling of tightness is not the presence of stress, but the frequency of stress or lack of blood flow (especially to nerves that are very thirsty for blood.)

I think of the sensation of tightness as a variety of pain with this in mind, even a pain too mild to warrant being called pain. But it is certainly distracting. And it has a certain taste or character that motivates an interest in shifting or moving around or extending the resting posture. Which is different from some pains that often make you want to stay quiet. Perhaps we might say that pain tells us not to move around a certain area, while tightness alerts us to move.

How Do You Cure Tightness of the Muscle?

I think that by modifying one of the many 'inputs' that cause the nervous system to perceive danger in the body, such as nociception, feelings , emotions, memories, etc., we can possibly treat the sensation of tightness in the same way we treat pain.

Quite clearly, certain pains are related to movement or postural patterns. We can understand this if someone says something like, "It hurts when I do this, and when I do more of this, it hurts even more, and when I do less of this, it hurts less." In this situation, it is likely to help to adjust movement or posture because it will decrease the main pain engine, movement-induced mechanical nociception.

On the other hand, there are many other cases of pain that are more complex, particularly chronic pain. The pain does not correlate as well with certain movements or postures, but instead with other variables such as time of day, length of sleep, emotional state, level of stress, diet, general exercise, or any unknown random variables. In this case, movement-induced mechanical nociception is unlikely to be the primary driver of pain, and peripheral or central sensitization is more likely to play a role.

I think we should take the same look at the feeling of tightness.

The cause is evident in most simple cases of feeling tight-we have been trapped for too long in the same pose or motion pattern, and our muscles need a rest or change of position to decrease the ischemia or metabolic stress that causes nociception in some areas. For instance, we will naturally feel compelled to stretch and shift if we spend hours in a car, or an aeroplane, or behind a computer, and this will typically relieve any feelings of rigidity or yuckiness.

Of course, this basic technique has already been tried and failed by most consumers who complain of chronic tightness. For hours and days at a time, the sensation of stiffness persists, comes and goes as it pleases, and is less connected to posture and movement.

In https://www.londonmobilemassage.ca/services/deep-tissue/ these situations, the nervous system may have something to do with the driver of the pain being sensitised either peripherally or centrally to the need for something blood flow in some areas. This might occur through local inflammation, adrenosensitivity, increased dorsal horn sensitivity, or maybe even learned relationships between certain environments (say computers) and certain sensations (such as feeling like crap).

How do we decrease this sensitivity, then?

There is no simple solution to this issue, since it would fix the problem of chronic pain if it existed, and no one is yet sure how to do that. But if I'm right that feeling tight is a mild type of pain, it should be easier to cope with it, at least.

Below is a list of many strategies commonly used by individuals to resolve a persistent feeling of tightness, along with some thoughts from the above viewpoint regarding each technique. You will find that some of the suggestions are precisely the opposite of what individuals frequently do.