Okay, that was a long break.  Very indulgent of me to take all that time off from my blogging duties, but the fact is that Internet access was spotty where I was and I was swamped with writing projects and family obligations, and also figured that the last thing people wanted to hear about over Thanksgiving was about Spartan exercise and diet habits.

I'm back on the blog-beat in earnest tomorrow, but I wanted to float this concept with everyone before this Tuesday got entirely away from me. 

Last week I interviewed a guy named Bob Cooley, who invented something he calls Resistance Flexibility and Strength Training.  He runs a studio in Boston.  The interview was for an article I'm writing on this fitness modality, so as usual I'm not going to spill all the bean here, but here's one particularly interesting gem that ties in with some of the Feldenkrais work I've been doing lately.

Like a lot of people reading this, I have a mild case of "deskitis":  the usual tightness in my chest, a forward-head tendency, a thoracic spine that wants to round forward.  I stretch the bejesus out of my hammies and hip flexors, but if I didn't, they'd surely be tight too.  Essentially, as much time as I spend on my feet with clients and doing my own workouts, my body has adapted to the seated posture, darn it all. 

Last Feldenkrais session I did, we performed a whole bunch of movements that involved forward flexion.  They're sort of hard to describe, but in essence, I felt like the stretches--if I can even call them that--were rounding me more and more forward.  We probably spent 45 minutes on this one series of drills, and I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm going to have to undo all this with a lot of extension work, because this is just reinforcing my bad habits."

The funny thing was, when we finished, I was way more relaxed.  It was actually easier to stand straight.  The forward movement had exactly the opposite effect from what I was expecting.  Instead of making me worse, it made me better--more able to extend.

Cooley made a similar point when we spoke:  that the flexion-dominant posture associated with sitting doesn't necessarily derive maximal benefit from extension:  lots of chest-opening and the like.  Rather, intense stretching of the posterior chain, according to Cooley, helps break up fascial tissue that grows in and around muscles that are chronically overstretched.  So the answer to excessive flexion is sometimes--a form of more and exaggerated flexion.

Cooley's method--which involves a very deep and intense stretch, often requiring one or more partners trained in the RFST system--consists in part of an extremely intense, full-range eccentric contraction of the muscle.  The force generated by the muscle (at least twice what the person could lift concentrically) is often sufficient to break up scar and fascial tissue which inhibits the full expression of strength in the muscle.

Weird, huh?  But again, my experience with Feldenkrais--though coming at it from a much softer angle--bears this out. 

Bottom line:  solving or balancing the relationship between flexion and extension in a joint is not always simply a matter of "stretch what's short, stregthen what's weak', as a traditional, physical-therapy based model would suggest.  If you do it right, sometimes judicious stretching in the direction that the joint seems to "want" to go has surprising benefits. 

More on this to come.  Welcome back to MPF...