Muscles

Ok, this is a long one… Grab your coffee and let us go back to first principles. What is a muscle?

What exactly is a muscle?
In the most basic terms, muscles are stretchy fibres that pull on bones - this is what allows us move. As muscles contract, the fibres shorten and pull two bones closer together.

What is a ligament?
A fibrous connective tissue that attaches bone to bone - used mainly for stability at the joint level.

What is a tendon?
The fibrous connective tissue that attaches muscle to bone - mainly used to move the bone or structure.

What is fascia?
ah, fascia. This is the newest buzz word in the movement sphere, but with good reason. Fascia is the spider-y connective tissue that encases all tissue and wraps it up and links everything together. [we’ll chat fascia in another blog post].

What do muscles do?

Muscles are so cool. They also do a lot more then what we are consciously aware of - but their main role in the body is contractibility, meaning they are responsible for movement.

Some other functions are Stability, Posture & Control, Temperature Regulation, Organ Protection, Internal Processes (urination, digestion, respiration, etc). Within the classification of muscles, they can be further broken down into their specific role and their location, the type of tissue they are, and whether or not they are voluntary or involuntary [for today, this is not important, just something fun to know].

There are three different types of muscles:
1. Skeletal (this is what we mean when we talk about “muscles”)
2. Smooth (this is whats inside the body - blood vessels, organs, stomach)
3. Cardiac(the heart)

Why does any of this matter?

The body is so complicated, and there are so many moving parts, but we know that all structures in the body work together even though they have different roles.

Skeletal muscles tend to get the most amount of beating when it comes to tightness and soreness, since this is what we can feel and touch, but they are just one piece of the global body puzzle. Thankfully, we often don’t think about the muscles that line our digestive tract, or think about whether or not our hearts are beating - these are involuntary and they mostly, just always work. The main controller for all structures is the brain - we are constantly receiving information and sending out commands to bring the body back into equilibrium. We exist better in balance. Recently, I’ve become more interested in using the neurological system to affect long term change, so this is something we will explore later! Basics first.

What about posture and stability?

Going back to skeletal muscles, to some degree, most structures (muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia) have a some role in maintaining joint stability because the brain is always seeking equilibrium - that fine balance between moving well, but not too much (hyermobility) and not too little (hypomobility). I will argue though that there is not one perfect posture. Every body is different, and everyone puts different pressures on their unique body, so our posture needs to be dynamic and adaptable. Being stuck in any one position, is just as bad being stuck in “poor posture”. Our goal should be to have movement variety, which I look at as the ability move between postures safely, dynastically and without pain. For many of us, the first step is to increase the stability & balance, and then add strength.

Sitting isn’t bad in itself, but sitting all day for too long is, and standing isn’t better if we stand all day and don’t take breaks to add in extra movement variety.

What about injuries? Stretching? Recovery?

As a general statement, most soft tissue injuries happen in the eccentric phase of movements, which causes muscles to ‘lock down’ and get ‘stuck’ in their contraction phase in order to protect and stabilize the joint. It tends to be the ‘stretch’ that causes injuries, and not so much the ‘contract’ - why? too much flexibility creates a level of instability.

Example- During an injury (lets say a fall), a ligament becomes over stretched (hypermobile) and the muscles surrounding the ligament need to lock down in order to protect the area. Chronically, this often shows up as “tight” muscles - I think of “tightness” as muscles that are overworked, and in a habit of over-contracting. Basically, they get “stuck” in their contraction phase of movement and can no longer “relax”. In terms of short term adaptation this is great, you don’t want to dislocate anything. For long term recovery this shows up as pain, weakness and chronic feeling of tightness which can affect range of motion and strength.

The contraction (concentric) phase of the muscle is when the two ends of the muscle are pulling together.

The lengthening (eccentric) phase of the muscle is when the two ends of the muscle are pulling apart. This is the stretch.

Having strength in both phases is important to reduce injuries. We see that more injuries happen in the eccentric phase because the muscle lacks strength as it is stretches. It is always about balance, so our goal should be to create muscles that dynamically work together and have the ability to both contract and relax fully. This is functional movement and mobility in a nutshell. This is one of the reasons why I love Pilates because so much of what we do, is taking muscles into their eccentric (“stretched”) position and challenge strength.

The take away?

Moving well is the cornerstone of functional movement patterns and living well. How can we live well if we’re in a body that aches? Our solution to overcompensation, under use and misuse is to discover where our compensation patterns are and do our best to correct them. This can be a hard habit to break, but with proper exercise, manual therapy and a little knowledge on how the body functions, anything is possible.

Next month we will dive in deeper to fascial connections and how / why everything in the body is connected.

See you on your mat,

M. Johnston.