What do tense muscles look like

Wrapping your head around the difference is good human body user manual stuff. In other words, stiffness is a symptom. They are stretching and contorting themselves in hot yoga classes. They are trying to correct their posture. Concern about tightness is at the heart of the fascia fad. Symptoms have many causes, and people often place the blame for stiffness on the wrong ones. Thinking of stiffness as a form of minor pain is quite a useful perspective.

Stiffness is an unpleasant sensation — it feels like something is wrong. No one ever feels comfortably stiff. There are many plausible causes. Diagnosing stiffness is at least as hard as diagnosing full-blown pain, which is often very hard indeed. I am an extremely stiff person; I have significant troubles with chronic pain, 3 and I usually feel like I cannot move nearly as well as I would like to move.

And yet I can move just fine. If I test myself, my range of motion ROM is perfectly normal. In fact, abnormal hyper -mobility is a common cause of stiffness! At the other end of the spectrum, people with measurably lousy range of motion can actually feel perfectly fine, no stiffness at all. Why such variety? Probably because stiffness, just like pain, is an extremely unpredictable sensation overprotectively imposed on us by our brains for reasons we are often oblivious to.

But stiffness is a misleading symptom, and most people who feel tight assume that they are literally tight, that they have a measurably limited ROM. Few are correct. A short but healthy range of motion is probably never in itself the cause of any wrong-feeling stiffness.

Range of motion is the only clear objective measure of flexibility. You can measure it with a protractor. Which is how far, exactly? Human averages are almost meaningless, because the range of natural variation is quite large. Abnormal is normal. There is an extraordinary amount of non-pathological anatomical variation in humans. There are many interesting examples.

Doing the splits is not exactly a useful skill. Flexibility and stretching as a fix is generally over-rated. Many people have much less natural ROM than many others, especially men in their hamstrings. The most memorable martial artist I ever worked with — a formidable, grizzled old practitioner of Aikido — was also one of the least flexible.

Subjective sensations of stiffness are amazingly unrelated to objective measures of flexibility. There are some instructively familiar circumstances where we get stiff: the early stages of cold or flu, and the soreness that follows a relatively big bout of exercise delayed onset muscle soreness , or the complaints of joints and tendons that have succumbed to overuse injuries like patellofemoral syndrome or plantar fasciitis.

Infections clearly involve inflammation and immune system activity, and many infections cause stiffness. All of these problems usually involve actual pain as well as stiffness.

We can infer from this that some stiffness must have something to do with mild tissue irritation. But lots of people are stiff without an obvious cause like this. So what else could be going on? There are much subtler causes of stiffness. If you get on top of it quickly, chances are you can resolve the issue in a matter of weeks and get back on track towards your goals. Stress can take on many forms, and can definitely contribute to why muscles get tight.

We can get stressed due to poor nutrition, lack of sleep, or our daily interactions with certain individuals may be stressful. Much of the time, the stress can be felt in a particular area of the body, depending on the individual. Avoid caffeine past 2 pm to help allow you to sleep better, or consider taking melatonin before bed. Speaking with a nutritionist may lead to some valuable insight to your nutrition habits. Getting frequent exercise can also help move the stress out of these areas, as stress is often the feeling associated with a chemical reaction in your body.

Moving, sweating, and getting your body to circulate your blood can help reduce those feelings of stress. To tie it all together, you may have tight muscles due to any of the above causes. The ones we deal with on a daily basis are associated with movement pattern faults or injury.

Give us a call at The Doctors of Physical Therapy. We specialize in treating athletes from all backgrounds: golf, baseball, weightlifters, runners, CrossFitters — and would be thrilled to help get you back to your sport without pain. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.

Previous Next. Overuse Overuse typically occurs with faulty movement patterns. Dehydration Dehydration, especially here in Arizona is a very common problem. Injury Muscles tighten protectively when they feel that something in the body is at danger of being injured. Stress Stress can take on many forms, and can definitely contribute to why muscles get tight. Related Posts. Instead the mechanism for flexibility increases from stretching often is through an increase in stretch tolerance, a mechanism of the central nervous system.

What changed was that your nervous system no longer perceived that range to be problematic and allowed you to go there. It also leads us to the false conclusion that strength-training results in shorter, less flexible muscles. So then why are we stretching? If you are interested in a yoga class with an updated approach to stretching and strengthening, check out my upcoming Events to find one that works for you!

None of the above bullet points are accurate. If this is your experience you might want to get professional support from a PT or other health professional to help you find ways to desensitize your nervous system more blogs on this to come! Strength-training will not make your muscles tighter and strengthening is not the opposite of stretching.